
Welcome to our first weekly roundup! Each week, our team is going to be compiling a handful of the best articles we stumbled across during the previous week to provide you with a little inspiration to start your week off with. Sometimes the articles featured may be directly related to development, and sometimes not, but either way, you can rest assured that they will be insightful!
Lenny Rachitsky is the author of Lenny’s Newsletter—a weekly newsletter that he uses to tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing them out at the office. You can send him your questions here, and in return, he’ll offer you some actionable, “real talk” advice.
Something we hear time and time again is that new app creators struggle with adoption. It’s one thing to know that you’re building something useful that others will want to use, and another thing entirely to know how to reach those people and convince them to give you app a try! Regardless of which market you’re breaking into, it’s important to have an acquisition strategy in place well in advance of launching your app.
In this article, Lenny digs into this topic further and shares the strategies that some of the biggest companies around today have used to secure their first 1,000 subscribers.
Bootstrapping a software company is the best way to work for yourself and build wealth. Having grown four software companies to over a million in revenue each (one of which is WP Engine with over $100 million in revenue!), Jason Cohen is an entrepreneur who knows quite a bit about bootstrapping and customer acquisition.
In this Twitter thread, Adam Keesling highlights Jason’s step-by-step plan for bootstrapping your next startup. This video is technically from 2013, but with the proliferation of small online businesses in the Creator Economy, there's never been a better time to bootstrap a software startup.
Not interested in going through the thread? No worries—check out the full video above!
Alex Krupp is the co-founder & CEO of FWD:Everyone, a platform for sharing and publishing email conversations. He intermittently takes on software consulting engagements and has spent several years developing software for Fortune 500 companies, pre-seed startups, high-growth venture-backed startups, and everything in between.
At some point, Alex noticed that most, if not all, of the software architecture guides he’d come across were written by (and for the benefit of) enterprise companies, dev shops, or hackathon participants.
When doing consulting, he found this to be problematic because he’d get folks following design patterns that aren’t really meant for startups in the first place, which can actually be pretty damaging and expensive to fix.
As a result, he wrote an ebook trying to document the most common things that cause development velocity to slow down at startups, and what to do instead to maximize velocity and minimize total cost of ownership. About a third of these issues are specific to Python/Django, but the rest of the advice applies regardless of your tech stack!
Showcase projects are arrangements in which a supplier’s dedicated, multi-capability team partners with a customer counterpart team to uncover new opportunities, deepen their relationship, and respond to emerging opportunities and risks. These projects provide opportunities to “learn by doing” on both sides of the joint team and develop an ongoing stream of joint innovations that benefit — and often transform — both companies. The authors present three key success factors for creating successful showcase projects and state that this process needs to be a permanent capability and a core ongoing company strategy in order to ensure your company’s long-run profit growth and strategic success.
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Originally published:
November 1, 2021