The Best Tools On The Internet

It’s never been easier to knock up a quick landing page and start collecting email addresses in preparation for launch. However, that’s only a fraction of what you should be doing pre-launch. Last week I updated this previous post with a new product I found - TypeDream. I broke down their unique early access beta journey and found some fascinating strategies. If your looking to launch something and need some advice on pre-launch strategies then check this post out. (10min read)

Before they became co-founders, Enzo Avigo and Ferruccio Balestreri were co-workers at Intercom, where they noticed that the analytics tool that the company endorsed was difficult to navigate and hard to understand. They both set out to build the Airtable of analytics. In this post, they share how they got our first user, why you should understand your customer before you building a landing page, how to implement your user research findings, and how to launch on Product Hunt and Hacker News. (12min read)

As a bonus read check out this Product Playbook by Ferruccio.

Julian Shapiro breaks down a fascinating human behaviour called ‘signalling’. He mentions “Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signalling or status-seeking”. It’s believed that “well over 90%” of human behaviour can be explained by signalling. Julian explores specifically the connection between signalling and the monetization of software products and services. This post made me really think about how people signal with digital products. Like ‘Roam’ for example and its cult of intellectual productivity followers, Superhuman email client users leaving the “Sent with Superhuman” signature, skins/powerups on multiplayer computer games. Designers, marketers and PMs should all be aware of this intrinsic human behaviour. (14min read)

Jack Butcher, Bilal Zaidi & Trung Phan discuss what they’re finding on the edges of the internet + the latest in business, technology and dank memes. Jack is my go-to resource of info from the fringes of the Metaverse and he always delivers. Recently they created a Telegram group where the three of them discuss what they have found this week to prepare some talking points for the next episode. It’s a genius approach that brings fans like me closer to them without the headache of running a community. It’s basically like observing a Whatsapp group.

Prefer the podcast version - click here.

Firstly, if you haven’t watched HBO’s Silicon Valley TV series stop what you’re doing and find it online. You won’t be disappointed. If you have you will love this. Blake Ross, co-founder of Mozilla Firefox decided he couldn’t wait for season 3 to drop, so he wrote an episode where season 2 left off. It took him just 48h to write and published it online in September 2015.

I don’t usually share online publication posts but this one is fascinating. Sam Altman was previously the head of Y Combinator at the age of 32, now he’s the CEO of Open AI, creators of GPT-3 which he founded with Elon Musk. He’s a fascinating guy with huge ambitions and somewhat contrarian opinions. To make him even more interesting, the guy has a crazy amount of weird and wonderful collectibles, including an antique sword from the Bronze Age, and has been prepping for a global pandemic since the lab-grown bird flu virus in 2015 with an escape plan organised with a friend Peter Thiel (the billionaire venture capitalist), to Thiel’s bunker in New Zealand.

Just when I think I’ve seen every online resource directory I stumble onto a new one and discover a ton of great new tools and resources. Thomas Sanlis has clearly spent some time curating this list. He has added a bunch of handy filters to save you time searching the site. It’s also a great place to submit your product to get added to the list.

Last week I launched a new side project called Beta Directory. It was born out of frustration that I couldn’t find any online resources with an up-to-date directory of innovative new beta products to discover. Sure, Product Hunt and BetaList are great platforms but they tend to focus on launched products, I’m more interested in the Alpha, Beta, and waiting list phase. If you are an early adopter of software products and like to get access to them before they publically launch you’re going to love this 👀 So far I have 45 fascinating beta products listed looking for early adopters like you.

I’ve been looking for an alternative to LinkedIn for years. I’m still blown away that it has yet to be challenged. LinkedIn is not built for creatives who have just one job, also, your job shouldn’t define who you are! Polywork is a professional social network created by Peter Johnston that lets users create a free personal webpage, share what’s up to both personally and professionally, and send collaboration requests to others.

They have also kindly provided 25 exclusive beta invites, just add the VIP code ‘CREATORCLUB’ to get first access.