What's New

This week's additions focus on founder stories, leadership, and marketing, with new digests from Noah Kagan, Acquired, and Masters of Scale. Highlights include Ask for the email only after warming visitors with cheap article traffic. Apple acquired SoundJam, an MP3 player by former engineers, to accelerate iTunes development and execute Steve Jobs' di…

Founder interviews

YouTube

Building a $1 email subscriber system with Facebook ads

Noah Kagan June 2, 2017

Founder interviews 10

MVP & prototyping 7

Growth hacking 6

Ask for the email only after warming visitors with cheap article traffic.
Mobile-only ads cut costs by half versus desktop or Instagram.
Audit sign-up quality — wrong audience inflates list, kills engagement.

Origin stories

Podcast

Apple's Acquisition of SoundJam: The Birth of iTunes

Acquired May 31, 2017

Origin stories 9

Business models 7

Apple acquired SoundJam, an MP3 player by former engineers, to accelerate iTunes development and execute Steve Jobs' digital hub strategy.
SoundJam's brushed metal UI and polished design became the template for iTunes, which launched free and bundled with macOS.
The $2–5M acquisition (estimated) became the foundation for the iPod, iPhone ecosystem, and $7B+ annual services revenue.

Hiring & recruitment

Podcast

Leading through scale: lessons from Sheryl Sandberg at Google and Facebook

Masters of Scale May 31, 2017

Hiring & recruitment 9

Culture building 9

Management 8

Why your team's silence means you're already the bottleneck
Hiring for roles that never existed before requires abandoning prior experience
Mission is the one plan leaders must never break

Public speaking

YouTube

Three tactics for better public speaking

Noah Kagan May 30, 2017

Public speaking 9

Resilience & grit 6

Lead with a counterintuitive claim to instantly hook any audience
Give audiences an action during your talk — results create recall
Stories are remembered; slides and bullet points are not