27 July 2020
This week's additions focus on founder stories, mindset, and strategy, with new digests from Founders, Noah Kagan, and Joanna Wiebe. Highlights include Genius emerges from uninterrupted focus and learning from those who struggled before you. Your spending and screen time already contain your best business idea
Showing 10 digests for 27 July 2020.
The Relentless Inventor: Alexander Graham Bell's Unconventional Mind
Founders
August 2, 2020
Origin stories
10
Deep work & focus
6
Genius emerges from uninterrupted focus and learning from those who struggled before you.
Connected ideas across unrelated fields—understanding the human ear led to the telephone.
Nearly gave up multiple times; perseverance through seven lean years built a monopoly.
12 exercises to generate profitable business ideas
Noah Kagan
July 30, 2020
Niche selection
9
MVP & prototyping
7
Your spending and screen time already contain your best business idea
Validate before building: three customers and $100 in 48 hours
Piggyback on popular products — accessories beat building from scratch
Content marketing
YouTube
Five Ad-Free Revenue Streams That Let Bloggers Earn Six Figures
Joanna Wiebe
July 30, 2020
Content marketing
8
Pricing psychology
7
Revenue streams
6
AdSense needs 20k daily visitors for $100k; five alternatives don't.
Affiliate integrity rule: only promote products your audience actually uses.
Pro bloggers earning $25k/month credit 80% of income to online courses.
How to write a link-attracting stats page for SEO
Ahrefs
July 29, 2020
SEO
9
Content marketing
7
Stats pages attract links because journalists cite facts, not opinions
10% of stats on a page drive 90% of its backlinks
Outdated competitor stats with broken redirects create outreach opportunities
Nine lies about work: why human uniqueness is a feature, not a bug
Bill Gallagher
July 29, 2020
Management
9
Culture building
7
Fear of failure causes leaders to suppress the individuality that drives performance.
Cascaded goals don't change behaviour — only self-set goals unlock real contribution.
Build on people's strengths; excellence is where we are most productively unfinished.
13 lessons from working directly under Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook
Noah Kagan
July 29, 2020
Case studies
9
Hiring & recruitment
7
Long-term planning
6
Zuckerberg turned down $1B from Yahoo to pursue a bigger vision
Delete folder: why Facebook ignored 10,000 customer feedback submissions daily
Hire fast, fire fast — Zuckerberg fired aggressively, including Kagan himself
Productivity & habits
Podcast
Balancing writing, side careers, and life buckets with Cal Newport
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
July 29, 2020
Productivity & habits
9
Work-life balance
8
Processes & SOPs
5
Writing side careers only get hard once you actually succeed.
Support roles need sequential task execution, not just fewer distractions.
One tracked daily keystone per life bucket prevents any area hitting zero.
Be both a painkiller and a vitamin for your customers
Masters of Scale
July 28, 2020
Case studies
9
Pivoting
7
Customer experience
6
Compliance infrastructure transformed Hearsay from nice-to-have vitamin into must-have painkiller for financial institutions.
Proactive customer engagement—resetting yearly, realigning goals—stitches vitamin and painkiller into sticky moat.
Firing unprofitable customers who fit neither mission showed real commitment to customer success and scale.
Cash flow management
YouTube
How Noah Kagan spends and invests his $1M+ annual income
Noah Kagan
July 28, 2020
Cash flow management
8
Productivity & habits
6
Founder interviews
5
Lifestyle inflation silently absorbs income gains at every level
Reframe high costs as investments by valuing your time at $2K/hour
48% in cash, 26% stocks, 21% real estate, 5% risky bets
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Deep work environments, career advice, and applying deep thinking to social change
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
July 27, 2020
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
7
Processes & SOPs
5
Big law's billing model structurally rewards inefficiency over focused thinking.
Social media posts are not rare or valuable — career breaks come from skill.
Cicero, Lincoln, and MLK show deep problems demand deep thought, not just passion.