Initiator Creator - Issue #138

​By Saurabh Y. // 17 March 2024

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Entrepreneur

​Don’t Be Scared to Take on a Monopoly - Every

monopolies have already done the hard work of validation for you. And for that reason, they have de-risked the upside of taking them on.

​From Flagship Back to Fledgling: Lessons on Going Multi-Product From an Early Stripe PM - First Round

Tara Seshan shares nine lessons from her playbooks for going multi-product, drawing on examples from both Stripe and Watershed.

​Product Innovation: Stop Inventing Cool Sh*t Your Customers Don’t Want! - Product Compass

The ‘front end’ of innovation being where customer needs are researched and insights are distilled, solutions are ideated, prototyped and tested and business models are shaped. 

​The Rules of Good Pictch by Jean de La Rochebrochard - Substack

What is a good pitch? How do you conduct one as an investor? How should you address it as an entrepreneur? Jean Rochebrochard break it down into a few concrete elements

​Super Specific Feedback: How to give actionable feedback on work output - Wes Kao

Giving detailed feedback on work output takes time, and it’s time well spent. There are some things you simply can't outsource.

Marketer

​Welcome to the Distribution-First Era, Where Strategy Starts With Channels and Ends With ROI - Animalz

"If you build it, they will come" is a classic startup mistake. It's the belief that customers will find your great product without a distribution strategy. Sometimes they do. Often, they don't.

​Dissecting the Growth Strategy of ChatGPT - FishmanAF

It’s more than a novelty effect - a deeper dive on acquisition, retention and monetization.

​Should You Run a Survey? - NN/g

Even though surveys may be faster and cheaper than other research methods, they are not suited to all research goals.

​Great Marketing Machines Are Like Costco - Kellblog

Searching for Costco’s one thing is as fruitful as searching for El Dorado. There isn’t one. It doesn’t exist. Instead, there are 50 little things. That all work together.

​Onboarding email series strategy - Substack

Such onboarding series emails usually achieve a 40–60% open rate and lead to significant lifts in the number of customers getting to those coveted Aha! and Habit activation moments.

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Developer

​How Discord Moved Engineering to Cloud Development Environments - Discord

This blog post focuses on how discord transitioned all backend and infrastructure development to a Linux-based Cloud Development Environment

​Find edge case errors in your code base - Github

It’s more than a novelty effect - a deeper dive on acquisition, retention and monetization.

​How We Engineer Feedback at Figma with Eng Crits - Figma

Engineering crits encourage a diversity of perspectives and unblock teams to pursue new ideas. Here’s how we structure and run them at Figma.

​Learning Lessons from British Library Cyber-Attack - British Library

This paper aims to provide an overview of the cyber-attack on the British Library that took place in October 2023 and examines its implications for the Library’s operations, future infrastructure, risk assessment and lessons learned.

​How Google Blew Up Its Open Culture and Compromised Its Product - Big Technology

A seven-year Google veteran shares the inside story of how Google shut down its open culture, and the costs of its absence.

Designer

​‘If you’re creative, why can’t you create a solution?’ One artist’s imaginative activism - Aeon

Mapping the Unknown is centred on Project Row Houses – an initiative Lowe founded in 1993 to transform a series of small, dilapidated houses in Houston’s Third Ward neighbourhood into art galleries and housing for resident artists.

​Beautiful ugly websites - Product Identity

World-popular like Craigslist, Hacker News, 4chan, and niche-famous websites like Bear, Margnilia, and McMaster-Carr are all part of a fraction of the giant internet sphere, which resembles a tiny special corner of the internet.

​Card Sorting vs. Tree Testing - NN/g

Card sort studies help shape information architectures; tree-testing studies evaluate them.

​How To Build Habit Loops That Get Users Hooked - The Product Manager

Habit loops are a clever way to bake retention into your product strategy. Here's how to hook your users for the long haul using the power of psychology.

​A Web Designer’s Accessibility Advocacy Toolkit - Smashing Magazine

Digital designer Yichan Wang has put together this collection of strategies and selling points to help you encourage and advocate for accessibility in your place of work, including useful scripts you can use as starting points.

Interesting Read

​Everyone's a sellout now - Vox

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand.

​You're Only As Good As Your Worst Day - Fs

We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what happens on the worst day.

​The science-backed value of boredom at work - Atlassian

Why an “anti-power hour” just might lead to your team’s next breakthrough.

Community Submissions

If you like to share a project or article with the rest of the readers then please DM me at @ICforpreneurs or hit reply

​Gallery of 404 error page designs - 404s Not just another dead end or page rendered obsolete, but a place to design a pixelated treat—404 pages are where joy & errors meet.

Outro

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