Frozen Churros
Yes, it's -1 Celsius right now in Barcelona. Let's heat up with some interesting stuff while my laptop still works…
1 Product Management
First share this week on Product Management is about trade offs, or, as Ryan Singer (Basecamp) frameworks it, positioning your product. He makes an interesting argument on how not knowing where your product stays in a certain competitive space causes bad prioritisation decisions, typically adding features to either compete with another product that is not really in your same space, or adding features driven by fear to failure.
Also, seen in Mind The Product's newsletter and by Dennis Mortensen, an article I didn't find too interesting but that had a good summary on what is generally called the 'Lean' approach to making business:
- Get an MVP (minimum viable product) up and out the door as fast as possible (usually within weeks)
- Get people (any people) to use it
- Iterate with your learnings, get to v1.1
- Start amassing customers, learn and iterate from there.
- At this point, you might raise a few hundred thousand dollars and hire someone who’s not building product.
- Do some growth hacking (hipster word for marketing) and watch that growth curve go up.
- Monetize, typically identifying and building the additional features customers might pay for.
Another one, also seen in Mind The Product's site, about user testing, and how it is sometimes not enough.
Finally, a really interesting one about crafting the first mile of a product, by Scott Belsky, an entrepreneur and founder of Behance . Introducing the importance of the first mile concept, and the importance of not neglecting this first mile, making it consistently better for the new users of today but also consistently changing it to adapt for the new users of tomorrow. Supporting his argumentation in the assumption that users are lazy, vain and selfish in their first 15 seconds in a product (the author explores this in another post), he discusses how to get to 'the Zone', that area where users get on-boarded and primed to the point where they know three things: (1) why they’re there, (2) what they can accomplish, (3) and what to do next. The core of the article is a description of tactics and approaches to fullfill this goal in what I honestly believe is one of the best hands-on approaches to product creation I've seen.
2 Failure
Here goes a short but great video (less than 2 minutes) about Failure, and how it is inevitable when moving into an uncertain space. Rita McGrath’s advice on how to fail intelligently quickly covers the following takeaways:
- Failure is only such if you can differentiate it of success — so make sure you measure what success is
- Focus in converting assumptions (or hypothesis) to knowledge. It doesn't matter if you are right or not, really.
- Limit uncertainty.
- Codify & share what is learnt (after action review process).
3 Content Marketing
An interesting one about Content Amplification by Steve Rayson, of Buzzsumo. He emphasizes in this long but comprehensive article the need of having a well defined amplification strategy before start creating content if a positive ROI is your final goal. Publishing is not enough, and getting social media shares or likes is only one part of the equation, not bringing value enough just by itself.
As per the latest Buzzsumo research, there are 5 types of content formats that bring together social shares and linking, with its corresponding SEO benefits:
- Authoritative content that answers popular questions, such as “what is?”
- Strong opinion posts and political posts
- Content that provides original research and insights
- Content that leverages a trending topic but also provides practical insights
- Authoritative news content on new products or developments
He also provides specific examples of all these — altogether, a good read if your core reason for producing traffic is users acquisition.
Also, an interesting post from Neil Patel, a growth hacker (and fabulous teaser) on how to create video content that shares well. With video becoming an even more relevant channel, and Facebook opening the door to its monetisation, Neil suggests a set of tactics that facilitate becoming viral.
4 Public speaking
About 3 years ago we started in Softonic our own toastmasters group, and I have to say that it is an experience that I dearly recommend to anybody who needs to speak in public. Here you can read about the latest public speaking world champion — Darren Tay-, and also about some tips and guidance around how to make a good speech look great. In any case, if you are interested in the topic, I encourage you to look for a public toastmasters group or club close to your location and join for a session or two. The learning curve in terms of improving your speaking skills tends to be quite impressive, in my past experience.
5 Reads, reads, reads…
If you read my posts either you are a good friend and want to boost my ego increasing the medium stats, or, more likely, you are interested on what’s going on in the industry. If you are particularly in the startup space, maybe you want to have a look at Venture Reads — a curated selection of resources such as articles, newsletters, useful side projects, podcasts, and videos from Venture Capitalists, VC Firms, and Angels. Nikhil only started it recently, but the sheer amount of content selection provides a good passtime.
