A glimpse into how I create my monthly email newsletter. In this post, I discuss my discovery, automated review and curation process.
For the last 10 months, I have been publishing a monthly curated email newsletter ( Creator Club), consisting of almost 2.5k subscribers at the time of writing this. Over this time I have been trying to find ways to optimise my workflow to reduce the time each month I spend searching, organising and reviewing content.
Recently I have been asked by a few subscribers how I manage to sift through all the content and create the newsletter each month. So in this post, Iām going to do exactly that.
This isnāt my first newsletter. In 2016 I wrote a bi-weeklyā¦
I havenāt felt the urge to talk so much about a products landing page since Superhuman or Pitch, until now. I want to discuss a unique approach from new consumer-based mobile and desktop app called Clay.
Iāve already spoken at some length about the various approaches with landing pages and their early access strategies but this is a little different as I havenāt quite seen an approach like this before.
The product Iām about to discuss is called Clay ā in its essence, Clay is a:
private rolodex that helps you remember and be more thoughtful with the people in your life.
The product itself is interesting, but Iām not going to focus on that. What I am going to focus on is their landing page, design, user experience, copy and their early access user journey.
ā¦
Iāve searched high & low for the hottest beta access invites in tech to show you the dos/donāts with early access onboarding. Hereās what I found.
Firstly, let me get one thing straight, Iām a bit of an early adopter nerd when it comes to software products and secondly, Iām fascinated with their onboarding surveys and registration processes.
Who said you canāt make a personal website using Notion? Wellā¦ no-one actually, but Iāve recently been seeing some fantastic use cases for Notion including portfolio sites, resumes, landing pages to name just a few.
So I thought I would set myself a challenge to recreate a few pages of my own personal website using Notion.
Like a lot of folks, Iām guilty of taking far too much time creating a āquickā website ā pushing pixels around for sometimes months on end to get the perfect aesthetic look. However, trying to practise what I preach I thought I would put my favourite tool through its paces and try to recreate my personal site.
In all honesty, I thought I would just give the homepage a shot at first and leave it there. So I createdā¦
From a Whatsapp group prototype to $1.3 million pre-seed round ā this is how a founder validated his concept with off the shelf tools and ultimately lead to him creating Amie ā A unique habit-forming productivity platform.
In 2019 Dennis MĆ¼ller, a Product Manager at N26, a FinTech startup based in Germany had been personally experimenting with various behavioural change techniques. This fascination later lead him to research more about the various methods and frameworks that can help you achieve your goals.
Lean and Agile principles arenāt just adopted by software products and their teams ā in fact, they started life in manufacturing in the 1930s by Toyota. This new coffee brand is bringing it back.
I found a fascinating article in the latest courier magazine about a new coffee brand called āTaikaā which was developed by an ex-Facebook product designer.
Instead of developing the recipe and brand in a somewhat closed-loop, Michael brought some of his previous 8 years of experience in creating software at Facebook and applied lean and agile principles developing his recipe and brand.
āUntil now, weāve beenā¦
Dan Shipper was big productivity nerd. After his company Firefly was acquired he spent a couple of years angel investing before he began to think about creating something in the ever-expanding software productivity space.
However, he first needed to understand the space better. So in August 2019 Dan set out to speak to people who have a similar passion for productivity and learn more about how they approach productivity and how they created their own personal productivity systems.
Unlike most user interview strategies, Dan decided to publicly publish his interviews and insight. To do this Dan created a newsletter calledā¦
As Product Managers, how can we create new features and improvements to our products whilst also balancing the trade-offs of user experience and foster a community? In this post, Iām going to be discussing a new approach Iāve been watching closely.
As digital product creators we all know the importance of getting feedback from users throughout the lifecycle of our of product ā that goes without saying hopefully, however, when it comes to building mobile apps and getting early feedback throughout the lifecycle of your product there are a few approaches to consider at different phases:
- Pre-launch: low/high fidelity usability prototype testing (Maze.design, UsabilityHub etc.)
- Alpha/beta launch: Surveys, user interviews, feedback widgets, TestFlight
- Post-launch: Focus groups, surveys, community forums, user interviews, feedback widgets, TestFlight and ā¦..
In this post I will be discussing a new approach Iāve been watching closely theā¦
With the recent announcement at this years WWDC 2020 keynote, Apple unveiled the long-awaited iOS14 update. But are we overlooking something huge as product creators?
This year Apple unveiled a new take on their previous Today page widgets and moved them to the home screen.
This isnāt by any means any huge amount of innovation on Appleās part ā Android devices have had widgets for a while now. However, the reason Iām so interested in this improvement is due to the exposure these new widgets get to users home screens.
Apps have previously followed a uniform grid layout with very strict design parameters to adhere to. After a while they all look the same ā itās hard to make your app stand out from theā¦
Announcing our first Spark cohort of 2020
This year we quietly launched our first incubator programme at ucreate ā Spark.
Spark is a 6 week, rapid, early-stage launchpad for passionate startup founders looking to rapidly validate their startup idea and ultimately save time and money in the process.
We invited a small group of early-stage founders to embark on a 6-week programme to validate their business concepts through a series of rapid experiments helping them to clearly articulate the problem they are trying to solve and guiding them to validate their core assumptions prior to determining their MVP solution.
We have been blown away by the progressā¦
Sam Dickie šØš¼āš»
Lead Product Manager @ucreate_ & Founder @nocodetech (acquired) + BetaTesta ā www.samdickie.me
