13 July 2020
This week's additions focus on marketing, strategy, and leadership, with new digests from Masters of Scale, Founders, and Acquired. Highlights include Spelman cut 70% of room-and-board revenue while fixed costs held. Estée built a multi-billion empire by obsessing over product quality and direct personal selling.
Showing 9 digests for 13 July 2020.
Leading a historically Black college through pandemic and racial upheaval
Masters of Scale
July 18, 2020
Management
9
Cash flow management
7
Processes & SOPs
5
Spelman cut 70% of room-and-board revenue while fixed costs held.
HBCUs out-graduate peers on STEM PhDs with far fewer resources.
A Spelman student was tased — racial violence arrived mid-pandemic.
The relentless ambition and sales genius of Estée Lauder
Founders
July 18, 2020
Origin stories
9
B2C sales
7
Branding
6
Estée built a multi-billion empire by obsessing over product quality and direct personal selling.
Persistence, not talent or education, is the single trait that separates successful founders.
Youth Dew bath oil pioneered a product category that generated $150M in annual sales.
How Pinduoduo reached $100 billion in five years
Acquired
July 16, 2020
Case studies
9
Business models
8
Growth hacking
7
Team buying turned viral social mechanics into e-commerce dominance
Tencent's platform bet over advertising gave PDD its structural moat
Positive operating cashflow hides behind misleading GAAP net losses
Content marketing
YouTube
How to research blog posts and reuse content effectively
Joanna Wiebe
July 16, 2020
Content marketing
9
Processes & SOPs
6
Always be collecting research, not just when writing a specific post
Clip one data point at a time so research stays reusable across projects
Abstracts from scholarly sources are often enough to establish credibility
Link building for beginners: principles, tactics, and outreach
Ahrefs
July 15, 2020
SEO
9
Content marketing
6
Backlinks are essential for ranking competitive, high-traffic phrases.
Linkable content is non-commercial, helpful, and data-rich — not sales pages.
Outreach converts on personalised pitches with a genuine value exchange.
Scaling forward: how coaches are guiding businesses through COVID-19
Bill Gallagher
July 15, 2020
Pivoting
9
Pricing strategy
8
Management
7
Leader mindset — not industry — determines whether a company survives or grows.
Billing twice a month instead of monthly can transform your cash position.
Customer segmentation must be rebuilt around today's reality, not pre-COVID assumptions.
How to find a profitable business idea and validate its market size
Noah Kagan
July 15, 2020
Niche selection
9
Market research
8
Customer discovery
5
Six concrete signals to find ideas people already want to buy
Size any market in minutes using free tools before committing
Check customer lifetime spend to know if your price will land
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
10 career lessons for ambitious people in their twenties
Noah Kagan
July 13, 2020
Identity & self-belief
9
Niche selection
7
Communication
6
Geography shapes your peer group more than most people admit.
Failure is only useful if you reward yourself for attempting.
80% of long-term net worth comes from relationships, not skills.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Escaping the shallow life: email, deep work, and purpose
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
July 13, 2020
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
8
Processes & SOPs
5
Fix email overload by redesigning the workflows that generate it
Deliberate practice gives knowledge workers an outsized edge over peers
A concrete five-bucket game plan for escaping chronic shallowness