Push, Pivot and don't give up!

Deciding on which piece of content to feature from Steph Smith was a job in itself. She’s a prolific writer and maker whilst also working full-time at The Hustle. But how on earth does she do it all? In this detailed post, Steph shares her personal process and mental models to prioritise her work-life balance with her side projects, passions, and a full-time job. (14 min read)

Peep Laja recently shared a fantastic account of his first year building his new startup Wynter. His approach to building lightweight versions of functionality to rapidly validate the product or new features is fascinating as well as his ruthless ability to quickly pivot. You can check out one of my favourite excerpt here. (16 min read)

What does the future of the creator economy look like? David Sherry, the founder of Death to Stock and host of the Caffeine Conversations Podcast shares his thesis for what he calls micro-coaching. The basic idea is that individuals will be empowered with tools and tech that would allow them to build their own niche audiences around their work and interests and moving towards creating subscription-based models and scaling their products and services to a wider audience. (5 min read)

Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, coined the term “Do things that don’t scale”. (Something I’ve written about in the past here and here). This fascinating collection of curated crowdsourced unscalable startup hacks provides real examples from some of the biggest tech companies. Some of my favourite examples are Slack, Airbnb, Zappos and Doordash.

I’m slightly late to the party with this one but it’s worth checking out. Hey.com - the email client from Basecamp launched a fantastic marketing campaign last year. The experiment started with a question; can email be a conduit for catharsis? If you could type out an email, press send, and see it being consumed in an actual dumpster fire, would it help soothe a painful year? Who knows, but it’s pretty neat watching it in action. They got almost a million impressions to the site and it only took 6 weeks to build.

Check out their latest experiment here called ‘Giiggle’.

I’ve recently been seeing Jane Manchun Wong pop-up everywhere this year. She’s an oracle for predicting new features in popular social platforms. How? Well, she’s a developer who reverse engineers apps to discover what large tech companies are building behind a cloak of code. Jane found hidden features in apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify before they release the information to the public. She then publishes the findings on her blog. Devs are now leaving her messages in the code in anticipation.

Firstly, I need to warn you, this is a super addictive site. I just spent the best part of an hour playing around with emoji domain variations. Yat allows you to create domains with emojis. Think 🍿 📺 ❄️ (Netflix & Chill) or 🔫🍸⌚️ (if your James Bond). The platform shows you how much each variation will cost in real-time and you can even buy with #Bitcoin. I’m personally thinking 📟 👾 🕹 for the CreatorClub - any suggestions?

Hootsuite founder Ryan Holmes just launched a new platform that allows you to share, browse, upvote, and comment on business ideas as well as socialise with fellow creators and entrepreneurs. I’ve personally been using it for a couple of weeks now and loving the community vibe and feedback people have received for their ideas. If you’re like me and have a long list of business ideas it’s certainly worth getting some feedback and validation from others (not your mum). You can read more about it on IndieHackers.

Flowrite turns words into ready-to-send emails, messages, and posts in your personal style. Instruct with a few words, click, and witness the text write itself. It’s designed to supercharge your productivity. It’s also built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 (read how they got access to it here). You can view a quick demo video here.

How would you feel about being able to pay to control multiple aspects of another person’s life? now you don’t get asked that question a lot, do you? NewNew is a human stock market where you buy shares in the lives of real people, in order to control their decisions and watch the outcome. It is aimed at what it calls “creators” - writers, painters, musicians, fashion designers, bloggers etc. It is designed as a way for them to connect more closely with their fans or followers than on other social media.