Some Recent Discoveries — Anchor, New Podcast & the Editorial Side Of Mattermark
I just wanted to share a couple intriguing products I recently discovered.
The first discovery is a new multi-directional, voice-centric product called Anchor. It launched publicly on Product Hunt yesterday. I am impressed by their launch and the design choices they have made in their version one.
Twitter promises its users a microphone to voice their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Anchor does the same but quite literally. 😀🎧🎤
Playing around with the app for merely ten minutes will help you understand how thoughtfully everything has been designed from the brilliant on-boarding process to the way Mike Mignano, the cofounder, elaborated on what the product does and how ripe the voice space was for innovation via a Medium post.
I always admire the teams that place emphasis on being a consumer-centric company. I can tolerate a sub-par quality product but not a sub-par experience wherein I am not treated like an individual but like a numbered client in a sales funnel. I have written about this topic before.
I am very impressed by how the co-founders and Kristen Myers, the community manager, keep communicating with all the early adopters. Whenever I publish a new audio clip, or a wave as they call it, I get a notification that says Kristen has shared with me another wave or clip that ties in with the theme of my most recent wave. Now, doing so must have required listening to me clip, understanding it, finding another clip on a similar theme and sharing it with me. Now, I realize that this manual effort is not very scalable. The trouble that Kristen and the team at Anchor go through to help the users as much as possible is admirable. Unscalable, sure. But, thats the whole point. 👏🏽
I am excited to explore more and keep using Anchor on a daily basis.
My second discovery was via a tweet I came across yesterday. Semil Shah tweeted about a new podcast that he has started with Joel Andren —
There are so many podcasts done by VC firms and investors. My favorite is a16z podcast. But, this new podcast particularly got my attention because of these reasons-
I am very excited to see how this podcast grows and how I can learn from the hosts.
The third thing I want to talk about is not a discovery per se. But, a rather educational experience. We all know that the stock markets, especially for the tech companies, is not in a good shape right now. And this has sparked several discussions around the valuations of tech startups.
Here are some pieces that really helped me understand what is going on in a simplified fashion.
These are some of the pieces that helped me understand complex questions like —
- Why do the stock prices fall even when the public companies beat analysts’ expectations?
- What is revenue multiple based valuation?
- Should a private company do an IPO when it could raise more in the private markets?
- How do the performance of tech giants influence the expectations and models of smaller public companies and growing private companies?
A majority of the pieces above are from Mattermark’s blog. I have recently discovered that Mattermark’s blog is increasingly becoming a very value-driven source for understanding all things startups and venture capital in a simplified fashion with small doses of amusement here and there. Its incredible. Kudos to Danielle Morrill, the CEO of Mattermark, whom I have deeply admired for quite some time now. Her tweets reflect her honesty and knowledge coupled with light-hearted humor. I think thats exactly how I would describe the content on Mattermark’s blog as well. 🙌🏻🔑
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Here is another piece where I aggregate some of my other random learning experiences. ☺️
