Product Habits - How today's best software goes viral

How Today's Best Business Software Goes Viral

I love the way this article starts: "You wouldn't expect Usain Bolt to cross the finish line in shoes you could pick up at an outlet, or the London Symphony Orchestra to grab the cheapest violins at the local music store....experts use expert tools—rigorously tested, finely tuned, carefully built to perform at the highest levels." The same is becoming true of software. There is a new category emerging: software built for expert users, and often priced at a premium. Here's how that might impact the software industry as a whole—and how you do your day-to-day work.

The Hardest Part of Working at a Growth Startup

Here's the hardest part of working at a growth startup: Every year, you have to reinvent yourself and, even if not formally, re-interview for your job. If you join a company in its early stages, the role you fill now will undoubtedly change within the next year. One of the best ways to become indispensable is to be a "self-scaling machine." In other words, become a voracious learner and actively look for opportunities to practice the skills your company will need you to have in a year's time. Always be thinking about six months down the road, find great mentors, and ask a ton of questions. It'll pay off more than you know. 

How Substack Has Spawned a New Class of Newsletter Entrepreneurs

Substack was born in 2017 as a place for independent newsletter writing, helping content creators build a community and make money from subscriptions more easily. Now, as freelance writing jobs get cut, it's becoming an increasingly popular platform. This is an illuminating read that hints at how we might create and consume content differently in the future. 

The Evolution of HEY: From Humble Beginnings to a Multi-Platform Email Service

A few weeks ago, the Basecamp team released a new product, HEY, which is meant to be a redo, rethink, and reintroduction of email. It's gotten a ton of traction in just a few weeks, so the team decided to do a write up sharing the product's back story. They never intended to reinvent email, but the gradual product evolution eventually led them there. It was great to see the thinking behind the pre-launch product concept evolution. Do you think HEY will help people fall in love with email again? 

Using HEY's Launch Strategy to Promote a Book

This newsletter has a HEY theme to it—and this one is specifically about building a waiting list. Initially, the only way to join the waiting list for HEY was to write an email to "iwant@hey.com" with a brief story about your relationship with email. It sounds unscalable, but 150,000 people did it before the Basecamp team cleared the invite queue. Alex Hillman decided to use this same waiting list strategy to get people on a pre-order list for his book. Is this something you'd try? 

My Growth Experiments for the Last Week

I love this short and sweet write up because it shows how easy (and useful) it is to test small growth experiments every week. You don't need a lot of money, or even a lot of time, to start testing and iterating this way. This recap is a good example of how you can reflect on successful, failed, and unclear experiments to grow your email list and customer base over time. 

How Social Listening Can Help You Find New Markets for Your Business

If you're thinking about what new markets you should focus on to help expand your business, intentional social listening is a good way to find them. Here are a few ways you can do it: look for the platforms people are most talking about and sharing your product on them, leverage brand advocates, and consider investing your marketing and outreach efforts into international markets. .

The Question You Should Ask Every Potential PM Hire

I saw this Twitter thread about a very specific question you can ask when interviewing potential PMs, and thought it was brilliant. These are the kinds of questions that reveal a lot about a potential hire in a very brief period of time. What is an interview question you've found to be incredibly effective at helping to identify great talent?