Plainflow Digested Week — 5th September
What’s this?
This post is a gentle recap of what we’ve already sent to the subscribers of the Plainflow Digested Week (now 1377 — +366 since last time).
Wait, what’s the Plainflow Digested Week?
The Plainflow Digested Week is a weekly Open Source Digest where we collect the best resources related to technology/SaaS product/analytics on the internet. The Plainflow Digested Week is brought to you by @leonardofed. You can collaborate to this project with a pull-request on Github.
Why sharing this on Medium?
We believe that Medium is the perfect platform to share the weekly selected articles we collect, not just with our email subscribers, but also with the rest of the world.
On SaaS Product
Early this week Hotjar released a well-written guide for early stage SaaS companies. This can be considered a great “give-back” to the community who helped and supported Hotjar becoming a world-class SaaS product. With this guide they put some order in the increasing plethora of books, podcasts, articles about SaaS.
Sadhana Balaji from Chargebee wrote an interesting write-up explaining why frictionless UX isn’t always a good thing. She recalled Kahneman S1 and S2 and the IKEA effect to explain where and why friction is actually a critical component in the process of getting the customer to first value delivered.
Clearbit published the 5th piece of their Data-Driven series. Ty Magnin explained here how companies like Canva Team (Xingyi Ho), AdRoll (Max Blaha), and CloudApp (Scott Smith) use data and experimentation to improve customer onboarding.
In this short piece, Paul J tells you why product engagement is the most powerful salesperson in SaaS. This makes perfect sense in a world where UX is a fundamental component of every product. I argued here the whole idea of usage as a valid proxy-metric might be not so relevant when software will deliver only value without requiring any sort of user interaction.
On Data and Analytics
Nowadays it’s very hard to find *useful* journalism about technology. Most of today’s information on technology is the result of a human information centipede.
Chris Stucchio and Lisa Mahapatra explain in this succinct essay why most journalists don’t know what ‘AI bias’ really is.
