Initiator Creator - Initiator Creator - Issue 36

Initiator Creator - Issue #36

​By Saurabh Y. // 24 October 2020

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Hey 👋,

One quick update! As you are already aware of the newsletter's format, I share the article title with some description from the article itself. But now I'm thinking of making it more informative. And for this, I started writing a small overview para about the link's actual content, which may help you learn about the topic without leaving the newsletter. I've written the descriptive paras for the developer, designer, and entrepreneur sections for testing. And added the old default link description on the marketer and interesting reads section so that you can compare both and decide which would you prefer. You can vote here -​

These changes are part of the ongoing newsletter upgrade. Also, we have a sponsor now, you can know more about it at the bottom of this issue.

Thank you!

Developer

​Video processing with WebCodecs - Web.dev

Modern web tech provides ample ways to work with videos like media stream API, recording API, and WebRTC API that add up to a rich tool for video streams. While solving certain tasks these APIs don't let programmer work with individual components such as frames and unmuxed chunks of encoded video or audio. For this developers have been using WebAssembly to bring video and audio codecs into the browser which seems like a waste of human and computer resources. WebCodecs API eliminated this inefficiency by giving programmers a way to use the browser's media components.

​PHP 8: before and after - Stitcher

PHP 8 is around the corner and is expected to release next month. It is coming with so many good features like Throw expressions. Before PHP 8, you couldn't use throw in an expression and you'd have to do explicit checks. In this article, Brent shared about these features in detail and how it'll impact his real-life projects.

​MongoDB Clusters Can Now Be Run across Multiple Clouds - The New Stack

MongoDB introduced a new feature for Atlas users to deploy a single cluster across multi-cloud environments, removing a number of management constraints. Previously, data and applications remained siloed in their respective deployments on AWS, GCP, and Azure.

​Diagram maker by AWS - Github

Diagram Maker is a framework & data format agnostic library that is fully customizable in terms of look & feel as well as behavior. It also exposes a declarative interface to reduce the code required to integrate the library in any application and comes with many interactive features built-in.

​NPM v7.0.0 - Github

NPM announced the release of npm v7.0.0, which will be shipping with Node.js 15.0.0 next week. npm 7 comes with some long-awaited and requested features, including Workspaces which will provide support to managing multiple packages from which a singular top-level, root package, and Automatically installing peer dependencies.

Designer

​Photoshop Introduces 5 Long-Awaited AI Features - Desginest

At Adobe Max 2020 conference, Adobe releases the new version of photoshop for the desktop and iPad with five AI features like sky replacement which can be a huge timesaver for photographers. While some functions are already fully available, others, like Smart Portrait, are beta tools and may still need improvement.

​Readymag Daily Routines - Readymag

What makes for a good design? Beyond the designer's general skill, there are also hundreds of small, but crucial details that impact their personal and professional life. Readymag explored the lives and work habits of five designers, their daily routines, how they fight the fear of a blank page, and playlists that keep them going and stay productive.

​Adobe XD New Features- Adobe

On the third birthday of Adobe XD, new features have been released like 3D transforms through which you can rotate objects forwards, backward, and across planes to bring depth and perspective to your design. Adobe also released a much-awaited feature for smooth designers and developers collaboration and that is XD and visual studio code integration through extension.

​UXArchive - The World's Largest Library of Mobile User Flows - UXArchive

UXArchive is a project by Waldo. It is the leading destination to find mobile UX trends from the world’s top mobile apps like Airbnb, pinterest, and youtube music, etc.

​Word as Image, by Ji Lee- Logo design love

The wordplay idea isn’t new (see Tom Geismar and the late Ivan Chermayeff’s Watching Words Move from 1962), but it’s a light-hearted project that might inspire you to merge the appearance of other words with their definitions.

Entrepreneur

​First Start a Blog, Then Build A Business, Then An Empire - Sumo

If you are not sure about your idea or where to begin then first start with a blog and let your business ideas grow from there. In this article, Joel Runyon, a blogger, and founder of Impossible X shared his experience on how he incubated every business he has ever built through blogging.

​How to Create Cancellation Surveys That Get a Response - Baremetrics

When your user doesn't want to avail of your service and cancel then it is a golden opportunity for any company to find out what goes wrong and how you can make things better for other and future customers.

Unfortunately, a lot of SaaS and subscription companies either do nothing or send a generic "sorry to see you go" email. Only some send cancellation surveys but not all cancellation surveys are effective. This article will help you create and send effective cancellation surveys.

​Purchasing the project management SaaS MyClientSpot - Nathan stitt

Recently Argosity acquired MyClientSpot which is a project management SaaS tool built on Php. Nathan here sharing his experience and the process of acquisition of a SaaS. Nathan himself is a full-stack developer, but still, he purchased the company instead of building himself because of one reason, existing product loyal customer base which is hard to create.

​The Anatomy of a Startup Organisation - Dave Bailey

If you're a small team then positions are not that relevant as all team members work on multiple tasks. But as the company grows, so does the need for structure. This is an interesting breakdown of a typical tech company's organizational structure and how to handle hierarchy.

​Zapier, A Growing Profitable Remote-only Tech Company - First 1000

Zapier made their beta users pay. It is the time when they integrate all things manually, first zapier product wasn't automated at all. Zapier is and has always been a profitable fast-growing tech company, that is not something you see every day. This article is about how they acquired their first 1000 customers.

Marketer

​The Inside Story of How Trello's Marketing Team Evolved After the Atlassian Acquisition - OpenView

Imagine you’re a member of a small marketing team at a growing startup. You’re wearing a lot of different hats, hustling, and making things happen. And then your company gets acquired. Suddenly you go from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a much, much bigger (and more sophisticated) pond. How do things change? How do you adapt? How do you thrive?

​Meet Google Analytics 4: Google's vision for the future of analytics - SearchEngineLand

The new Analytics adds AI-powered insights, tracks users across devices and provides more granular data controls.

​The Animalz Content Marketing Benchmark Report 2020 - Animalz

you don’t know how your content marketing compares with other companies in your industry or the SaaS space as a whole. Are you growing alongside everyone else, outpacing them, or falling behind? The 2020 Animalz Benchmark Report will help you answer those questions.

​The rise of content, a path to sustainable growth - Whats new in publishing

Understanding your audience and communicating with them through valuable content is the way to survive and thrive as a brand in 2020 and beyond.

​How to Optimize Your Landing Page Using Qualitative User Research - Process.st

Using qualitative research to understand the reasons behind your visitors’ behavior so that you optimize your landing page and skyrocket your conversion rates.

Interesting Read

​Writing Is Thinking - A list apart

Writing is intimidating. There’s this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people. You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you’re pulling out your own intestines.

​Jumping to conclusions: the inference-observation confusion - Ness Labs​ - Ness Labs

Do you know someone who always seems to jump to conclusions? While this behavior may be more obvious in some people than in others, we are all prone to it.

Community Submissions

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

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​A practical guide on validating business ideas using Reddit

Ihor's team uses Reddit to validate ideas. They launched 5 projects, including a "cash cow" Email Verification Add-on and a micro-saas Silent Inbox. The guide describes the whole idea validation process.

Ihor providing IC readers a $5 discount. Use icreator code to avail this offer.

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Outro

🙏 Thank you for reading Initiator Creator issue #36

This issue is sponsored by Safetywing. Safetywing is global health insurance for remote workers and digital nomads.

If you value Initiator Creator, feel free to forward this copy to your friends. Suggestions or comments? Hit reply or DM me at @savydv​