This week's additions focus on customer, strategy, and finance, with new digests from Noah Kagan, Masters of Scale, and Acquired. Highlights include An ugly internal tool earned nearly $1M with zero active marketing Whatever you are when small gets amplified when you grow.

Customer discovery

YouTube

How KingSumo grew to nearly $1M with minimal effort

Noah Kagan January 25, 2018

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Customer discovery 8

Growth hacking 7

Business models 5

• An ugly internal tool earned nearly $1M with zero active marketing
• Most buyers never used the product — activation beats acquisition
• Score ideas on ease and impact, then run one-week sprints

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Community building

Podcast

Building online communities that scale with human values

Masters of Scale January 24, 2018

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Community building 9

Culture building 8

Niche selection 5

• Whatever you are when small gets amplified when you grow.
• A non-decision on community values hands control to your worst users.
• Flickr's culture scaled because Fake personally set the tone from day one.

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Case studies

Podcast

How Zappos built a billion-dollar company on $10M and customer obsession

Acquired January 23, 2018

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Case studies 9

Bootstrapping 7

Customer experience 6

• Lack of money forced Zappos to achieve unit economics from order one
• Amazon launched a clone — Zappos countered with free overnight shipping
• Irrational competitors kill startups; a culled market let Zappos survive

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