2 November 2020
This week's additions focus on mindset, strategy, and finance, with new digests from Noah Kagan, Bill Gallagher, and Deep Questions with Cal Newport. Highlights include Get customers before you have a product — Bill Gates did it. Civility means communicating so others can actually hear you.
Showing 11 digests for 2 November 2020.
Customer discovery
YouTube
Five business lessons from the history of computing
Noah Kagan
November 7, 2020
Customer discovery
8
Hiring & recruitment
7
Vision & mission
5
Get customers before you have a product — Bill Gates did it.
Diverse, complementary teams outperform homogeneous ones every time.
Visibility matters as much as invention — Xerox lost, Apple won.
Civility as a Business Practice: Lessons from Reagan's White House
Bill Gallagher
November 5, 2020
Communication
9
Resilience & grit
7
Culture building
6
Civility means communicating so others can actually hear you.
Reagan treated adversaries with consistent dignity — policy fights stayed impersonal.
Protocol office secret: look like a swan, paddle hard underneath.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Cal Newport on digital minimalism, deep work, and rebuilding your tech relationship
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
November 5, 2020
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
8
Identity & self-belief
6
Strip your phone to 2008 basics — remove anything profiting from your attention.
A 30-day tech reset works only if you actively rebuild, not just abstain.
Shallow frenetic work is exhausting; deep focus matches how the brain evolved.
Gather's upmarket pivot: how going enterprise survived COVID and cut churn
Startups For the Rest of Us
November 5, 2020
Pivoting
9
Cash flow management
7
Customer discovery
5
Moving upmarket may have saved Gather from COVID-driven collapse
Churn fell to ~1% once small, price-sensitive clients churned out naturally
Patience over urgency: SaaS is a long game, not a sprint
Founder interviews
Podcast
Katherine Graham: building confidence while running the Washington Post
Founders
November 5, 2020
Founder interviews
9
Identity & self-belief
7
A woman with no business experience inherits a struggling newspaper empire
Four decades of imposter syndrome while running one of America's most powerful papers
Warren Buffett's private mentorship rebuilt her confidence — and tripled his returns
Common SEO myths that waste time and money
Ahrefs
November 4, 2020
No duplicate content penalty exists, but duplicates still hurt rankings
The top-ranking page gets the most traffic only 49% of the time
Social shares don't directly rank pages — backlinks from exposure do
Content marketing
YouTube
Four newsletter business models making over $1 million a year
Noah Kagan
November 4, 2020
Content marketing
9
Pricing strategy
7
Business models
7
Owned products beat sponsorships — ad rates fluctuate, your products don't.
AppSumo's 50/50 lifetime deal model is simpler than it looks.
One viral post built Lenny's $360k solo newsletter business.
Productivity & habits
Podcast
How Ashutosh Priyadarshy designs a focused, bullshit-free workday
How I Work
November 4, 2020
Productivity & habits
9
Time management
8
Processes & SOPs
5
If a task is two steps from your goal, it's probably bullshit
Separate meeting days from deep work days to eliminate context-switching
Two-day sprints force creative problem-solving and faster learning
Long-term planning
Podcast
Recession Signals, Tech Monopolies, and Work-From-Home Futures
Startups For the Rest of Us
November 3, 2020
Long-term planning
8
Cash flow management
7
Remote teams
6
Growth is flatlining for the middle 60% of SaaS companies—not recession yet, but warning signs to watch.
Google strips data to force reliance on paid ads, while antitrust suits reshape how founders compete.
Mid-market founders need access to public markets, but US regulations lock them out until unicorn scale.
Trump vs Biden: what $199M in Facebook ads actually teaches marketers
Noah Kagan
November 2, 2020
Paid ads
9
Conversion rate optimisation
8
Copywriting
6
Trump wins on landing page variation, message repetition, and raw UGC.
Production quality loses to a single repeated core message every time.
Phone number capture and text messaging drove more action than email.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Cal Newport answers work, technology, and deep life questions
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
November 2, 2020
Deep work & focus
10
Productivity & habits
8
Why grad school is almost never a good holding pattern
Three things agents actually need before signing a nonfiction author
FIRE retirees reveal what humans crave when truly unconstrained