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Bookmarks by Kevin

Here you can find useful links that I find over time. I will share mostly links that help me with my side projects and career. Feel free to discover many resources.

BootstrappingMarketingCopywriting

How the mind of a copywriter works

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Description

A tweet that shows a video on how a copywriter should think about their copy.
BootstrappingUser Experience

UX Audit Checklist Templates

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Bootstrapping

Google searches for B2B Propsecting

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Description

A simple blog post on how to use google searches to find leads for your B2B startup or companies hiring.
Documentation

The Documentation System

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Description

A good documentation about how to structure your documentation.
User Experience

Mobile menu design patterns

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Description

A video of different mobile menu design patterns
BootstrappingUser Experience

The best onboarding flows for SaaS

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Bootstrapping

Increasing your activation rate with personalized email campaigns

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Bootstrapping

Twitter content calendar

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Description

A calendar that tells you when specific events happen around the world. Target your marketing around these events.
Bootstrapping

Resources by Makerlog

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Bootstrapping

A cold email template that works

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Bootstrapping

A tweet showing on how to improve your pricing table

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Description

Grammarly and others are doing that, so listen: If you have a pricing table the information is condensed most of the time. For that you can implement tooltips that give you an opportunity to show more of the feature directly on the pricing page. Do not link to an external page so people do not forget to actually pay.
Bootstrapping

Which acquisition channels do make sense?

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Description

A thread regarding which acquisition channels make sense in the beginning. The consens is to use "spiky" channels like reddit, hackernews, facebook groups or LinkedIn because SEO which should be build at the same time will just take an affect 6 months after establishing the content.
BootstrappingStory Time

The story of Udemy from the view of an entrepreneur

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Description

This 3 part story covers how Udemy was created, how it grew and how it got VC investments. A quite interesting and unique story of struggling to grow a business.
BootstrappingUser ExperienceMarketing

A step-by-step guide on how to create landing pages that convert

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Description

Marketing examples is a great resource to grow your marketing skills. In this article Harry is covering how a landing page should be done to convert visitors to customers.
BootstrappingVideo

From Zero to $4M without quora, hackernews or anything

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Description

A talk on MicroConf 2014 regarding how to grow your business with social media and the like.
BootstrappingMarketing

The best time to post on Hacker News

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Description

Getting traction on Hacker News is difficult but posting at certain times will help you to actually receive upvotes. This article analyzed the data and summed it up in this blog article.
BootstrappingMarketingBlog

How to build backlinks on data

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Description

In this short post Brendan is covering on how you can build content based on existing data and create your own data sets that can be shared with the communities. With these data sets you will be able to create even more content and enhance your existing articles. It also gives a lot of backlinks because if you share the data, organically people will link to it more often.
BootstrappingGrowth

How to Grow Your Startup on a $0 Marketing Budget

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Description

A guide on how you can grow your startup or side project with a $0 budget. It is quite an amazing article and gives you multiple processes/frameworks on how to grow your marketing efforts with free tools and resources.
BootstrappingGrowth

Reframing discounts to increase yearly plans

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Description

A lot of SaaS are having monthly and yearly plans. The yearly plans are mostly more profitable and this guide will teach you how you can incentivize with discounts at the checkout how you can 'convince' people to signup for the yearly plan.
BootstrappingStory Time

A few lessons about building a side project

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Description

Jake from AlgoDaily gives a few lessons on what he learnt during building his side project: Engineering Quality Does Not Matter, you need people to support you, read less and do things.
Marketing

A twitter thread to grow your Twitter

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Description

These simple 13 steps will help you to grow your twitter audience. Really helpful insights that you can use as a framework to increase your follower count.
Software EngineeringPodcast

A podcast to grow your soft skills as Software Engineer

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Description

This podcast with weekly episodes is talking about your software career. Many useful tips that you can get you more far within your career.
Marketing

Canva templates for social graphics

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Description

A simple collection of social templates to share your content on social media and the likes.
CareerProduct Management

What makes a great product manager

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Description

A great article that discovers what are the qualities needed to be an amazing product manager.
MarketingGrowth

Marketing channels after launching your side project

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Description

After launching your side project in many communities you might experience slower growth than usual. A discussion on what are the next steps with actionable advice.
MarketingGrowthTools

A simple tool that sends you an email when something is mentioned

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Description

This tool is perfect whenever someone on reddit or hackernews is mentioning your side project or has the need for it. An incredible tool to help you to provide value to people and link them to your project.
ToolsNext.jsTypeScript

A SEO component for Next.js applications

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Description

Generating meta tags and so on is annoying, use this tool to improve your technical SEO score.
ToolsGrowth

Cold emailing templates

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Description

Struggling to come up with cold emails for Sales, Recruitment, SEO, follow-ups, Marketing or Networking? This directory of cold email templates will help you out.
BootstrappingGrowthSEOStory Time

A step-by-step guide to SEO

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Description

This is probably the best guide on how to drive highly qualified leads to your website. It is in-depth and received a lot of traction on reddit. The advice is just next level and really amazing.
BootstrappingGrowthSEO

The SaaS SEO MBA

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Description

A collection of useful links that can be used as a guide to improve the SEO score of your project.
BootstrappingMarketingGrowth

A guide on how to get press for your project

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Description

Getting into publications and letting people write about your project is mostly the most efficient way to grow the amount of clicks your product gets. This guide explains a simple framework to get to this point actually.
BootstrappingGrowth

A story about how storytelling is the REAL content

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Description

Ali describes in his blog how storytelling helped his clients to actually improve SEO because the stories actually caused an interest within blogs and similar.
BootstrappingGrowth

A framework for writing your next blog

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Description

Julian created this handbook on how he is writing articles. You can use this handbook for your own blogging technique if you like. It has a lot of great ideas I try to follow within my blogs.
MarketingGrowth

An analysis on post on hacker news

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Description

In this blog post hacker news post are analyzed when it comes to what type of post is upvoted, what category will give you the most exposure, when to post and many other things. Quite useful if you want to post something on there.
Software EngineeringCareer

A useful tip when joining a new team

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Description

In this blog article Anna presents a way on how she iss entering a new team from a real story at Financial Times. It focuses on meeting everyone and building a map of who knows what.
BootstrappingGrowth

A simple way to grow your traffic in SaaS

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Description

Using your own SaaS to create free tools will bring traffic to your website that will help you to get users. In this IndieHackers post Richard is shining some light on how he grew sheet2api.
Software EngineeringCareer

A guide to tune your LinkedIn profile

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Description

This guide with 15+ tips will guide you to improve your LinkedIn profile to get more connections, better job opportunities or be able to promote your products in a better way. A lot of useful tips for all periods in your career.
CopywritingMarketingGrowth

How to learn copywriting in 30 slides

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Description

Harry from marketingexamples is giving a small slideshow of 30 slides that will help you to improve your slides.
CareerSoftware EngineeringProduct Management

A guide on how to deal with people in a software project

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Description

This website will teach you how to deal with different type of people in a software project, with their weaknesses and how to improve them or when to move on from specific positions.
BootstrappingGrowth

The email guide by lemlist

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Description

In this blog article Ilya will present you how they grew lemlist with extensive cold emailing. It worked quite great for them and the tips about personalizing the email are super interesting.
MarketingGrowth

Marketing funnels

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Description

In this newsletter post the new generation marketing funnels will be explained. Traditional marketing these days like Ads and so on are competitive. This article will shine some lights on alternative marketing and sales channels.
BootstrappingMarketing

A list of places to post your project

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Description

When creating your project and initial growth is important, backlinks are golden. Gathering these backlinks is difficult. The notion page linked here will give you an opportunity to post your projects at different sides and collect backlinks.
SEOStory Time

Reaching the first page on google in 24 hours

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Description

A simple technique with an example on how Nicolas reached the first page in Google quite quickly.
BootstrappingGrowth

A guide to get your first 10 customers

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Description

A guide on the different sales processes for B2B SaaS that will help you to actually get customers.
BootstrappingGrowth

How to write good hacker news titles

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Description

This IndieHackers post is describing how you can push content to hackernews and how to structure your title to get more upvotes and more exposure.
Bootstrapping

8 principles for new user onboarding

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Description

A short guide on what to look out for when onboarding new users.
BootstrappingUser ExperienceCopywriting

7 tips to improve your landing page

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Description

In this post Sjors is presenting 7 tips on how to improve your landing page by improving your copy and the user experience.
GrowthMarketing

16 tips to write every day

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Description

Joe presents helpful on how to keep a routine about writing every day to create content to grow your side project.
GrowthMarketing

A simple technique to boost your sales email cycle

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Description

Instead of writing a cold email to ask for a big demo, do a sequence of small and easy asks and continue doing so turning bigger and bigger.
Bootstrapping

A simple website to name your project

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Description

A website that generates names for your project based on animals.
BootstrappingMarketing

The best 404 Page

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BootstrappingMarketing

A list to post your projects

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Description

This GitHub repository is giving you many opportunities to post your startup and get some marketing visibility.
Software Engineering

A book about building secure and reliable systems

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Description

Building good software engineering systems is difficult. This free ebook by Google will teach you on how to do this exactly. Google builds scalable systems for a long time, so get that experience as well.
MarketingGrowthStory Time

Getting 35k visitors in 36 hours

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Description

Patrick describes how he built a simple side project / info product and launched it. He got great success with it, because the project was needed and helpful. Quite inspiring story.
GrowthUser Experience

Duolingos awesome onboarding user experience

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Description

In this article it will be presented on how Duolingo has one of the best onboarding flows for users and why the app is so popular.
GrowthBootstrapping

Gamification in software projects

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Description

An article on how gamification is a tool to use within your side project to grow. It will help to keep users onboard if you reward them at the right time with the right methods. See how other companies are doing this.
Story TimeBootstrapping

30 lessons when bootstrapping solo

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Description

Alex is sharing his short 30+ tips in an IndieHackers post on what to focus on during the creationg of your side project. It is focused on developers and what they have to do better like Marketing and Sales.
BootstrappingMarketing

How to make a how to video with a 0$ budget

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Description

In this post exdeve presents how they created a small how to video of their project. Including how to put songs below the video and just keep it simple. It works quite well and can help to grow your project as well.
BootstrappingStory Time

3 Lessons learnt from analzing dozens of MVPs

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Description

In this post Gordon analyzed multiple MVPs and put out the lessons learnt by him. Focusing on the landing page, the value provided and optimizing the CTA.
SEOGrowthStory Time

Gamification on your website

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Description

Salil is giving us a lesson on how he increased the time users spend on his website by a simple gamification tip for blog articles. It increased in a 100% uptick in organic traffic from Google because of these small challenges.
BlogGrowth

A video course by ahrefs regarding blogging for business

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Description

Probably the best resource on creating effective blogging for your business. From small startup to big enterprise. This course has it all. It will teach you methodically on how to find ideas for content to write and how to convert the readers. A masterpiece.
GrowthBootstrapping

Ways of building virality into your product

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Description

7 tips to implement techniques that will help your product to build a community by itself. It goes from simple tips like rewarding users through referral system to simply vanity metrics.
BootstrappingCopywriting

A tutorial on how to write Indie Hackers / Reddit post titles

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Description

In this post Naveh will describe how he reached multiple times the #1 spot on those platforms by choosing the right title. A workflow is explained how you can apply the rules to your content.
MarketingGrowth

Do Interviews, not Surveys

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Description

Getting data for your project is difficult. Creating a survey will most likely not help because it is not personal. Instead do interviews that are more personal. You will get more data but also much more true data. Read on why in this post.
MarketingBootstrapping

How to implement social proof on your landing page

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Description

Canny is probably the leading product feedback platform you can use. Social proof is really important for many projects to actually convert users into paying users. With these simple tips canny will share how it is easy to apply social proof to your project as well.
Marketing

The best tips for cold emailing

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Description

A discussion on IndieHackers on how to write good cold emails and the process behind it. When do you need to follow up and how to make your call to action clear.
BootstrappingGrowth

How to include gamification in products, or doing game design

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Description

In this presentation Rahul presents in the name of a16z on how game design can be applied in your product to enable growth and create user retention.
BootstrappingMarketing

Simple techniques to do marketing on a small budget

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Description

In this article the blog of product habits will present 3 techniques to do marketing for your side project. It does not cost a dime to execute the ideas but will cost some time of course initially.
BootstrappingCopywriting

A collection of cold email templates

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Description

This small free tool is a collection of 90+ email templates for different use cases. Really useful to copy paste some email content if you need to do a sale, refer someone or any other use case. I am sure you will find some content here.
GrowthStory Time

A guide on how to master anything

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Description

In this blog Iulian covers on the mastery of how to learn anything. Getting to expert-level within any field is difficult, but this article really guided me on reevaluating on how I tackle problems and learn.
BootstrappingMarketingGrowth

A collection of the best SaaS and Marketing blogs

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Description

This collection showcases the most popular blogs for marketing and SaaS. Most of them will talk about growth and principles that can be applied to your side project as well.
BootstrappingGrowth

11 tips to improve onboarding conversion rates

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Description

In this post you will learn how to apply 11 simple techniques that will help you to onboard more users. The onboarding is the first step in a user journey and doing this right will give you a lot of credibility.
Software EngineeringNode.js

A guide to lay out your Node.js application

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Description

In this repository the author will describe how you can structure your Node.js projects and which patterns to follow to create a nice application that can be understood but also changed in quick ways.
BootstrappingMarketing

Create custom campaigns within Google Analytics

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Description

Creating custom campaigns in Google Analytics will help you to track the traffic in more detail, where it is coming from and other things. The trick is that people will click on an URL rather than being tracked via the referrer header. More reliable and better event flows can be built with it.
Marketing

How to increase your retention rate on blogs

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Description

A simple tip to integrate pocket on your blog. Users from pocket tend to engage more with blogs.
BootstrappingMarketing

Where to post your project before hackernews or IndieHackers

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Description

A post that discusses which places you can post your startup at to actually get feedback and get initial traction for your side project.
GrowthStory Time

Growing a side project to 100k visitors and 5k email subscriber

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Description

Peter from built for mars, a UX analyzing blog, is sharing his intial findings on how he grew his website full of case studies.
BootstrappingGrowth

Lessons learned from running a product

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Description

In this post the author is presenting how they have ran a product for 6 months in beta and are quite successful running it. They had multiple acquisition offers and are sharing all of their tips regarding growing the business.
MarketingGrowth

How Harry of marketingexamples shares his content

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Description

Marketing Examples is one of the biggest marketing blogs out on the internet. Harry shares his process of sharing content, creating a content plan and in which way to distribute content. One key lesson: Provide value upfront on the platform.
MarketingGrowth

How to build a million dollar business with content

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Description

In this post groovehq shares their content marketing strategy. It is indeed interesting because they grew mainly through it during a high growth phase and the insights will teach you a lot.
MarketingGrowth

How to grow your content with really-long-lists

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Description

In this post Dan describes how he grew his subscriber count by writing viral content, simply by creating really long lists, a technique used by many content marketers to get a lot of users.
Tools

A SVG search for logos

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Description

Google really sucks to find SVGs for company logos. This tool will help you to find the SVGs. It is scraping multiple platforms to enable listing them.
Tools

Free products to build your project/app/webapp

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Description

This awesome list features many parts that are needed for a technical project but can be used for free till a certain limit. Still a lot of great services.
CopywritingMarketing

A copywriting case study

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Description

In this case study the landing page of remote leaf will be analyzed and optimized to really show the product value to potential customers.
Marketing

Improvements to the "Contact Us" page / widget

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Description

In this small post it is described how the contact us page or widget can be improved to be more personal and engaged.
Software Engineering

Using Stripe's dynamic tax rate feature for EU VAT

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Description

In this article it will be described how you can use the dynamic tax rate feature of Stripe to integrate EU VAT. A pain for everyone normally but with this new feature it can get quite simple.
BootstrappingTools

A marketplace to buy and sell SaaS

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Description

A marketplace to sell and buy projects. A lot of SaaS solutions are listed there and if you have a project that might be worth selling, try to list it there.
Bootstrapping

An Indie Hackers post on how to find ideas

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Description

In this post ideas are brought up on how to find ideas. A lot of mentions on how you have to be within a certain industry to really know the problem but also a lot of other methodologies are discussed.
BootstrappingSales

1000 true fans? Try 100

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Description

There is an essay about building communities of 1000 people that are willing to pay for your product. But a16z really shows that this is also possible with a following of around 100 fans that love your product a lot.
GrowthSEO

Scaling to almost 200000 monthly visits - a case study

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Description

In this case study Noel describes with a case study on how their business grew a client to 200k site visits per month. The website mainly grew through SEO and following the tips and tricks from this case study can help you as well.
Software Engineering

Hackernews gives tips on how to be a good tech lead

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Description

In this discussion hacker news is giving tips to new tech leads on what they have to focus on to be successful. A lot of golden advice is written here to helo you to get to tech lead level but also help you navigating in that role.
Software Engineering

System design till 100k users

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Description

In this article alex is showcasing generic rules on how to scale your application to 100k users. It is quite simply initially and will build up more and more with caches, read-write replicas and similar techniques to make your system ready to handle that big amount of traffic.
User Experience

10 sign in screen designs

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Description

In this post there are 10 different sign in forms presented. Really good user interface inspirations that you can use for your next project to make a simple design.
Software EngineeringStory Time

A guide on how to achieve career growth

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Description

In this interview Raylene Yung gives an overview on how she managed to grow here engineering career to be an engineering manager at Facebook and Stripe. She is sharing rare insights from the big tech companies and gives you tips to apply to grow as she was doing.
GrowthCareerStory Time

Working backwards, a technique to solving all problems

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Description

The CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels, gave the tip to work backwards for all projects. For example, when releasing a new feature, you should start with a press release and then work backwards over the FAQ, to customer experience to writing an user manaual and then maybe start implementing. This principle can be applied to many problem-solving processes and is highly paying off for me.
Career

How much is startup equity actually worth?

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Description

In this post Dan showcases on how equity can be valued and why it does not make sense in most cases to join a startup because the equity/options being worthy any kind of money is highly unlikely.
User Experience

34 simple UI and UX tips

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Description

In this post Marc is describing 34 simple patterns that you can use to improve the the user experience and interface of your application. If you like the book Refactoring UI you will also like this blog article because it has some really nice tips and tricks.
CareerGrowth

Operations and internal communication strategies for CEOs

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Description

This blog post is targeted for CEOs, but operating and communicating with other people is important for you as an employee as well. This blog shines some light on how CEOs should communicate. Simple tips like saying the why first when making a statement will help you in discussion. This and many more tips can be found in this article.
CareerSoftware Engineering

How to lead a team by the US Army

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Description

In this book you can find how the US army is training their leaders to be real leaders. Even though it is in a military context the lessons won out of this book are valuable for engineering leads or tech leads as well. You can find a version of epubs also here: https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/Details.aspx?PUB_ID=1007609
Career

The Manager's Path

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Description

A great book on what are the engineering manager's qualities and simple guides that you can follow to shine as manager and be loved by all your reports.
BootstrappingStory Time

A story of selling a side project

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Description

In this post Ryan shares the story of juicer, a combined social media feed for people to keep distraction low. He is explaining on how he grew the software and what motivated him to actually sell. The process behind it and how everything went.
Career

A Hackernews discussion regarding burnout

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Description

Burnout is probably heard of by everyone in the technology community. Technology requires a lot from your mental ability, to keep up with the current technology or just solving problems all of the time. A lot of people get burnt out and have serious problems because of that. Read that hackernews discussion to see what you can change to avoid burning out.
User Experience

How to build a drag and drop UI - with mobile support

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Description

In this blog post Graeme describes how you can build a simple drag and drop UI. Drag and drop is used in many applications and a lot of plugins exist to help you with this. But making it work on mobile is even more difficult. Learn how they did it at prototypr, a simple platform to build apps.
Career

Sharing tips to grow as engineering manager

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Description

Camille Fournier is sharing some tips on how to grow your career as engineering manager. She gives a lot of tips on structure, scaling and organization. What you should focus on and how you can distribute tasks to focus on the real bits.
BlogGrowthMarketing

100+ ways to distribute your blog content

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Description

Promoting your blog content is difficult. But once the blog is written you can create content around it. With content around it like Slideshows for instagram you can find even more opportunities to promote your blog.
BootstrappingStory Time

The first time getting $10k/month

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Description

In this article Kyle describes how he grew his product to the milestone of $10k revenue per month, what he learned and what you can get out of this.
BootstrappingStory Time

Free trials?

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Description

Kilian describes in his post how they increased their trial sign up rate 5x. Also a discussion have been turning out of this post on how it affects their trial to paid conversion rate. Quite interesting!
Software Engineering

How to do Code Reviews like a human

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Description

A simple guide on how to Pull Requests. With the tips you can organize the Pull Request flow within your company.
Software Engineering

A guide on how to write the perfect Pull Request

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Description

In this guide a GitHub Engineer guides you to how to create a good Pull request with really helpful tips to actually make all your reviewers.
SalesBootstrapping

Simple tips to generate sales on LinkedIn

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Description

11 small tips to make LinkedIn work as a marketing tool for you. LinkedIn can be a cringe fest, but it is sure worth it when used right.
MarketingBootstrapping

Content Marketing for Bootstrappers

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Description

In this guide James shows how he is growing his side projects with content marketing. He will cover keyword research, viability, how to create content and a simple publishing checklist.
MarketingBootstrapping

Simple little tip to improve description of features

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Description

In this post Harry from MarketingExamples is presenting how you can present your products features in a nicer way to actually show the real value of the product.
Story TimeBootstrapping

How to turn around a failing SaaS

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Description

In this blog Kevin is describing how they turned around their software for referral marketing from a failure to a succeeding business.
Tools

A startup equity calculator

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Description

A calculator that shows you how much shares should be given to all the founders. This is super useful for an initial equity split and an objective approach to share equity properly.
Bootstrapping

MRR is stuck but how to grow?

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Description

In this post a simple question is asked, how to grow a validated product. Someone created a product that makes 400 USD MRR for a certain time but they struggle with growing it even more. An itneresting discussion on how to grow in these periods.
BootstrappingMarketing

The power of competitor/alternative pages

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Description

In this post Harry from MarketingExamples will describe how alternative pages can actually drive traffic to your site. You just have to make sure your project is actually better in some parts and then create these pages. They will give Google a lot of signal and are super useful for getting high-quality traffic.
Sales

10 tips for Cross-and upselling

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Description

In this blog post Olivia shines some ligh on what cross-selling and upselling actually means and how you can build it into your product. The author will also mention how you can automate the cross- and upselling which will be useful if you have your own SaaS.
BootstrappingMarketing

19 lessons for launching on ProductHunt

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Description

In this indiehackers post some advice is shared how you can make the most out of a ProductHunt launch, get viral, get feedback and most importantly get initial traction. ProductHunt is a perfect platform for that but to get a good launch there you have to follow many things.
Software EngineeringProduct Management

How to have a great planning process

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Description

This blog post will cover how a great planning process looks like. Examples will be given how the planning process was implemented in bigger tech companies like Airbnb and Eventbrite and how it helped them to scale their company to where they are now.
ToolsCopywriting

Writing tools - by The Economist

Source

Description

In this blogpost Ahmed will present the 6 writing tools he has learned about when writing for The Economist. It shines a light on why the newspaper is delivering high-quality articles for years and how you can use the tools to improve your writing and improve the blog of your side project or simply the writing you do at your current company.
Story TimeBootstrapping

The best way to understand your most engaged users

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Description

In this article Andrew Chen is writing about how you can actually analyze the user behavior by your power users. He is explaning it from figuring out who is the power user and why this is important. Ideally you convert every user into such users and make sure your product is used to the maximum. More Value means a better world and more money for you, right?

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