Welcome to your weekly edition of the SaaS Founder Gems Newsletter from @PocketBryan!
The #1 criteria for anything included below is it must be actionable. No fluff, hollow inspirational silliness, or platitudes (empty feel-good content) are allowed. Every item mentioned below is worth your time (IMHO)
Ready? Here we go!
Articles
I’ve read through dozens of articles and picked out the best and most actionable ones that are worth your time.
- “I despise cold pitching. Here’s how I made $19,000+ in 46 days from referrals alone… without sending a single cold email“
The real meat of this article is about halfway down. Skim through the first half (we all know that referrals are better than cold emails), and start with the “So what do you recommend instead of cold pitching?” section. There’s some real gold in there, and even if you’re not selling anything now (or freelancers), you can’t just show up one day and expect people to buy. Learn about how to keep your best leads warm and growing. - Indie Hackers Growth Bites
Keep an eye on this page for bite-sized and practical articles about how you can grow your audience and your business. Recent topics worth reading include: - Get in the habit of writing a weekly progress update, even if you don’t have investors or employees (yet) 👇 Read below first, for context
When I was at Amazon, I wrote a lot of documents, even as an engineering manager (not a PM or anything you might expect to be writing a lot). Writing is hard, and writing in a clear, concise, and engaging way is even harder. I am convinced that writing is a skill that anyone can build over time. But just like a muscle, you have to practice (exercise) in order to improve and get stronger. One of the best ways to do this as an early founder is to spend a couple of hours at the end of a week and write an update of your progress for the week. If you don’t have investors or employees, pretend you do and write it to them. In 3-4 paragraphs (at most) describe: 1) your wins (what worked), 2) misses and lessons-learned (what didn’t work and why), 3) what you planned vs what you accomplished, and 4) what you plan on doing next week. This will not only be a useful journal of your progress (to help you feel good about your progress during those Imposter Syndrome moments or bad weeks), but it will also help you bring clarity to what you should be doing next. Try it for a month and I guarantee you’ll find it valuable.
Interesting Twitter Threads and Tweets
Here are a few key Twitter threads that you may have missed this week (or should read again). Click on the image below to read the full thread
👆 If you’re looking to do some freelancing, stand out by being awesome at communicating!
Podcasts to Listen To This Week
- Everything Is Marketing | Matt Johnson — Marketing for Introverts, Becoming MicroFamous, & Audience Monetization
As an introvert, I appreciate this take on marketing: “Matt is all about building expertise and authority in order to build an audience that you can monetize. He’s started multiple successful podcasts and has a unique view about what it takes to build a business on the audience you’ve built. You’ll hear about how to do marketing as an introvert, staying true to who you are, and how to be influential without a huge audience.” - Speaking of podcasts, I have an exciting announcement to make next week. Stay tuned 🔥
- If you’re looking for other SaaS Founder podcasts to get into, check out this list of the “Top 25 Best Podcasts for SaaS Founders“, by FEI International.
Videos to Watch
- Founder’s Guide to Advice (Whiteboard Breakdown) (duration: < 10 mins)
“Some advice for taking advice: As founders, we get a lot of different advice from lots of different people. Most of it is not very valuable. Some of it is — some of it contains gems — but that’s the problem, you get a lot of advice, and the quality is very variable. That’s the biggest problem with advice.” This video walks you through a framework for how to know how to recognize and extract the gems, and what to do with the rest.
My #buildinpublic Progress This Week
For those that are following along on my journey, here’s a summary of my progress this week:
- I’m building “Simple Invoicing for Freelancers“
- This week, I focused on building out the core functionality of creating invoices quickly and easily. I’ve been posting easily consumable 2-minute video demos every few of days on my YouTube channel.
- 📺 Day 14: Even when going full-time on a project, some days can be slow and frustrating. I talk about this and show progress on one of the most interactive parts of my app: creating invoices
🥂 That’s it for this week!
👀 If you got this far and see this, please reply or ping me on Twitter and let me know! A lot of work goes into this, and I’m honestly not sure if people are finding it valuable. Please let me know!
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