29 March 2021
This week's additions focus on founder stories, marketing, and mindset, with new digests from Bill Gallagher, Silicon Valley Girl, and Joanna Wiebe. Highlights include Waiting 10 years to hire a team was his biggest, costliest regret Ignoring a dormant .ru domain triggered a $20,000 trademark battle.
Showing 10 digests for 29 March 2021.
Founder interviews
YouTube
Mike Gunderson on building a direct mail agency from scratch
Bill Gallagher
April 4, 2021
Founder interviews
9
Hiring & recruitment
6
Waiting 10 years to hire a team was his biggest, costliest regret
Niching down to direct mail only ended the race to the bottom
A single warm intro turned into a 17-year client relationship
Intellectual property
YouTube
How a naming conflict cost one startup $20,000
Silicon Valley Girl
April 2, 2021
Intellectual property
9
Case studies
6
Ignoring a dormant .ru domain triggered a $20,000 trademark battle.
Bidding wars on your own brand name burn cash fast.
File trademarks in every target country before you grow.
How to plan a segmented email funnel for launch day
Joanna Wiebe
April 2, 2021
Email marketing
10
Copywriting
6
Sending one email to your whole list on launch day wastes your peak day
Map every click and no-click path — each action triggers a different follow-up
One segment on day one needs five emails and seven pages, not two
How Noah Kagan spent $222,000 growing a YouTube channel in 2020
Noah Kagan
April 1, 2021
Growth hacking
10
Content marketing
8
Product-market fit
5
90% of subscribers came from YouTube itself, not paid tactics
Off-platform giveaways backfire — half unsubscribed after the Tesla prize
At $2,000 per video, the channel lost money as a deliberate long-term bet
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Managing multiple projects and designing a deep work environment
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
April 1, 2021
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
8
Time management
6
Two-level planning beats deadline panic for concurrent projects
Delay new project starts until the idea feels inevitable, not just exciting
Physical activity preserves cognitive context better than passive waiting
Conversion rate optimisation
YouTube
How to use customer data and marketing automation to drive revenue
Bill Gallagher
March 31, 2021
Conversion rate optimisation
9
Email marketing
8
Automation & tools
6
A one-email survey that personalised sequences drove huge revenue lift
Lead scoring with data enrichment grew online orders 50% in a year
Specificity feels creepy — small wording shifts make personalisation welcome
Founder interviews
Podcast
What investors really look for: hunger, speed, and humility
Masters of Scale
March 30, 2021
Founder interviews
10
Fundraising & VC
7
Resilience & grit
6
Investors bet on founders, not ideas — character beats concept.
Raising money is an obligation, not an achievement.
Being broke removes fear of failure and sharpens execution.
Outsourcing & delegation
YouTube
Three tools to fix delegation and stop being overworked
Bill Gallagher
March 30, 2021
Outsourcing & delegation
8
Delegation
7
Responsibility without accountability is why delegation fails
One owner per function and per cross-functional process eliminates bottlenecks
Love/Loathe lists reveal mismatched tasks you can swap, automate, or cut
How Squadcast 10x'd Revenue in Two Years to $3M ARR
Startups For the Rest of Us
March 30, 2021
Case studies
9
Competitive analysis
7
Bootstrapping
5
Solved Zencaster's reliability failures with patented tech innovations in a crowded market
Shelter-in-place 2020 inflection doubled revenue repeatedly; deliberately over-engineered for scale
Tiny Seed pricing overhaul outweighed capital itself; bootstrapped founders require smarter guidance
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Cal Newport on email, deep work, and the hyperactive hive mind
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
March 29, 2021
Deep work & focus
10
Productivity & habits
8
Processes & SOPs
5
Email isn't the problem — unscheduled messaging is the real culprit
A 40-hour academic week is achievable with fixed-schedule productivity
Replace the hive mind process by process, not habit by habit