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​Podcast, YouTube, Blog​

Dear founder,

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If you’re shopping for books this Black Friday, here are the 15 most impactful books I read before and during my SaaS founder journey. From entrepreneurship to marketing and customer interaction, you’ll have a lot to put on your Black Friday shopping list.

My own work is available for 50% off on Gumroad for a few days, too. Use the code BFF for Zero to Sold, The Embedded Entrepreneur, and Find your Following.

And now, let’s grow your library with the likes of Rob Walling, John Warrillow, Michele Hansen, and many more:

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This issue is sponsored by Ignite Digital.

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Signals

I ran into a few security-related blog posts this week. Developers are still really bad at not exposing secrets in the code they share. And it's surprisingly easy to get anyone's phone number by piecing together "masked versions" of 2FA reset screens that cloud services provide.

Phew. It's not easy to stay secure as a dev, or even as a founder. It sure feels like using phone numbers —literally the easiest thing to iterate— might not be a good way of identifying users securely. Or email addresses, for that matter. Should we be using burner phones? Super-long randomized per-account email addresses? Probably. But realistically, true security lies in preventing leaking this information in the first place. So when you build software, remember that you're part of a larger world that might, in aggregate, leak very sensitive data. And use something like git-secrets to prevent your own leaks.

Using graphs to visualize data in your business or work? Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs.​

This stuff is subtle, but powerful. If you present data visually, it needs to compute easily when people glance at it. I learned a few things about pie charts from this article that I never thought possible — or necessary 🤣.

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Thank you for reading this week’s essay edition of The Bootstrapped Founder. Did you enjoy it? If so, please spread the word and ​share this issue on Twitter.​

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