Typo aside, that does not materially affect the point. “Management” in this case appears to be every other team at the company...
131 karma · joined October 10, 2018
One sentence later:
> ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).
Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it?
This place is a parody of itself sometimes.
Newsletters can generally charge a much higher CPM than a social media accounts or even podcasts in some cases. You can start making beer money with only a few thousand subscribers.
We’re also thinking of hosting a few live events as well once our audience is large enough.
(P.S. for the curious, the newsletter is called TechLoaf: https://techloaf.io)
Glad you're a fan, and always excited to see my extremely lo-tech baby get love on HN.
I'll send you some swag - reply to any of the emails.
Proud you're standing with The Loaf in this crowded Weekly Newsletter as a Service (WNaaS) space.
Lo-tech archive:
https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977...
That is legitimately brilliant.
At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc...
And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.
About 30% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing, which is drastically higher than what we saw earlier iterations do.
(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)
For example, I shared an early version of TechLoaf on here last year (https://TechLoaf.io — think: The Onion meets TechCrunch) and a) received super precise feedback on our landing page and newsletter format and b) recruited a few writers who now actively contribute each week.
I’m very grateful for this wonderful corner of the internet.
This could be a call to action included in the Rescuetime newsletter.
Despite their occasional authoritarian moments, Apple generally listens to enough frustrated customers.
1. Team Treehouse. They now have a huge library covering just about anything he could imagine wanting to learn, mostly geared towards beginners. Much of their work is a) project-based so students can understand the practical implications of what they’re learning and b) split up into short videos/sections to help keep their attention.
2. App Academy Open. App Academy just opened up their introductory curriculum in a series of short-form videos and programming exercises that are highly-entertaining and practical.
Once he’s graduated from those, I’d second the recommendation here to check out techyourselfcs.com. Bradfield is a fantastic resource for self-taught programmers who want to build up their CS fundamentals.
The only caveat would be that a lot of Bradfield’s curriculum assumes that students have some programming background already, so it might make sense as a secondary resource after starting with some more basic programming courses.
About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.
We’re not a SaaS company, so I realize this may be comparing apples to oranges, but we had experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that were similar to a few encouraged here.
And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.
(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)
About 50% of visitors click either the “preview” or “archive” link
And agreed, conversion numbers are highly dependent on how thoughtful our targeting is. We generally shoot for almost laughlibly small, but super targeted, outreach. Certainly factors into our unusually high conversion.
They were very similar to the CNN or NY Times home pages, but with less content visible and more (obnoxious) calls to subscribe to the email.
We also experimented with a minimalist landing page similar to the current one, but with screenshots of the email in the background. In hindsight, it was distracting and slightly confusing.
At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc...
And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.
About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.
(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)
It’s a satirical tech newsletter that I write with a few close friends who are successful founders/executives/investors.
It’s been very cathartic to poke fun of all that’s nutty about the tech world.
I disagree with some suggestions here that you should watch things like Startup School. Those videos, while well-intentioned, can make you feel even more inadequate and “behind” when you feel stuck.
If you’re losing a game of basketball, it’s not terribly fun to watch somebody else make dunk after dunk.
I currently run one of the largest newsletters in tech (https://techloaf.io), which I started purely as tiny side project to force me into action while in a similar rut. It started with just me writing up satirical jokes and sending out and email to a few friends each week, to now a project with about a dozen writers and a wide following.
As unhelpful or vague as this might sound, I’ve found that just doing something can have a snowball effect. Pick the smallest possible task for the easiest possible side project and start doing. For me, that was literally just telling a few people that I’d send them a funny email each week.
Best of luck, you’ll look back on this and smile once you’ve got your next project off the ground.
I’d like to think it’s cool because a) it articulates and ridicules a lot of nutty things that most of us in tech recognize, but refuse to talk about and b) it’s fun and makes people laugh each week.
Life’s too serious, so it’s fun to make something that lightens the load.
In my experience, the biggest difference between a startup and small business is that a startup feels intense pressure to scale up the business before the underlying fundamentals are strong. There’s a “land grab” attitude wherein investors are willing for the business take on massive losses the first few years as long as the company is building a moat around what they’re doing that will be difficult for competitors to penetrate later on. The idea is to build as much of a monopoly as you can early, funded by investment dollars, and “turn on” the revenue streams later.
A small business, on the other hand, generally scales hiring/marketing/sales along with their current revenue growth. It’s a bottom-up approach to building a business, wherein you scale as your company’s fundamentals incrementally improve. My current company is a newsletter-based business where we’re making fun of the tech industry (https://www.techloaf.io) where we’ve kept expenses extremely low, only hiring folks as the business improves.
Both approaches can make sense, it’s just all about your goals (both as an employee looking for work at either or as a founder building a company).