13 February 2023
This week's additions focus on marketing, mindset, and strategy, with new digests from Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth, TK Kader, and Neil Patel. Highlights include Bootstrapping to $200M exit — and why he should have raised money sooner Burn rate is cash in minus cash out — not revenue, not invoices.
Showing 30 digests for 13 February 2023.
Resilience & grit, Productivity & habits, Motivation
Podcast
Investigative journalist Nick McKenzie on stress, trust, and staying sane
How I Work
February 15, 2023
Resilience & grit, Productivity & habits, Motivation
8
Collaboration, Communication, Conflict resolution
7
Resilience under extreme pressure, High-stakes decision making
6
Fear of failure — not ambition — is the best guard against confirmation bias.
How running mid-afternoon solves problems, purges anger, and wins source trust.
Five years of defamation warfare taught him to channel stress, not eliminate it.
AI strategy & adoption
Podcast
ChatGPT and AI's inflection point: what business leaders need to know now
Masters of Scale
February 14, 2023
AI strategy & adoption
10
Founder interviews
7
Business models
6
Every profession will have an AI co-pilot within 3–5 years.
Waiting for a polished AI product means ceding ground to faster movers.
The moral case for speed: delaying AI access measurably harms quality of life.
Resilience & grit
Podcast
How philosophy can help us live well, not just feel happy
Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life
February 14, 2023
Resilience & grit
8
Goal setting
7
Identity & self-belief
6
Happiness is a byproduct of living well, not the goal itself.
Acknowledging difficulty — not avoiding it — is the foundation of real connection.
Atelic thinking: value lies in the process, not the outcome.
Business operating systems
YouTube
Building a reliable meeting rhythm to scale your business
Bill Gallagher
February 14, 2023
Business operating systems
8
Processes & SOPs
6
Plans expire fast; the habit of planning keeps teams aligned.
Five-tier meeting cadence from daily huddles to annual offsite.
Schedule client meetings around your rhythm, never the reverse.
Competing with non-profits, agency spin-offs, and SaaS marketing channels
Startups For the Rest of Us
February 14, 2023
Business models
8
Content marketing
7
Niche selection
6
Agency product spin-offs fail most often from lack of sustained focus.
Latent-pain products need content authority, not search-based marketing.
For marketplace apps, shipping beats validating when build time is short.
How Notion's cofounders built a productivity platform through nine years of iteration
EO
February 14, 2023
Origin stories
10
Pivoting
8
Notion spent years building the wrong product before a full rewrite saved it
Relocating to Kyoto with a skeleton crew was the reset that unlocked growth
Ship early, solve real problems — distribution matters as much as the product
Seven-step online business plan to escape trading time for money
Sunny Lenarduzzi
February 14, 2023
Business models
9
Content marketing
7
Processes & SOPs
5
One program, one client, one message breaks the income ceiling
Your email list is the only audience you actually own
YouTube's search intent delivers warmer leads than any social feed
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Burning the boats: why eliminating plan B unlocks full commitment
GaryVee
February 14, 2023
Identity & self-belief
9
Management
6
Founder interviews
5
Contemplating a plan B measurably reduces your desire to succeed.
A nine-figure exit came from choosing radical transparency over concealment.
Structural integrity — no internal contradictions — is the rarest operator trait.
Compliance & regulation
YouTube
Common tax forms every employer needs to know
HR Party of One
February 14, 2023
Compliance & regulation
9
Request the W-9 before a contractor starts — not after.
W-4 errors at onboarding create tax bills or lost take-home pay.
W-2 and 1099 both due to recipients by 31 January.
Six ways to improve your Amazon product listing SEO
Neil Patel
February 13, 2023
Amazon ranks products on sales velocity and keyword mastery, not ad spend
Titles must match packaging and hit 60–80 characters to avoid ranking penalties
Six images plus one video is the listing quality target on Amazon
Eight practical communication habits for leaders and founders
Cameron Herold
February 13, 2023
Communication
9
Management
6
Repeat messages until employees start mocking you for it
BCC without telling the recipient quietly destroys team trust
Showing staff your full P&L flips resentment to motivation fast
No-code & low-code
YouTube
No-code SaaS: what it's actually good for
Rob Walling
February 13, 2023
No-code & low-code
9
MVP & prototyping
7
Automation & tools
6
No-code rarely produces standalone SaaS beyond a few thousand MRR
Speed and accessibility are genuine advantages for MVPs and internal tools
Platform risk and scale limits are the hardest walls to hit
Resilience & grit
YouTube
The pinata protocol: three principles for long-term success
Dan Martell
February 13, 2023
Resilience & grit
10
Productivity & habits
7
Bamboo grows 90 feet in five weeks — after four years underground.
1,000 days at 90% compliance transforms your life more than perfection ever could.
A failed course launch with zero sales led to an eight-figure business.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Why productivity and accomplishment are not the same thing
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
February 13, 2023
Deep work & focus
9
Work-life balance
8
Productivity & habits
7
Being organized reduces stress but predicts nothing about major accomplishment
The real differentiator for landmark work is ruthless workload management
Over-provisioning productivity skills to buy free time, not fill every minute
Founder interviews
Podcast
Bill Gates: the obsessive foundation behind the Microsoft Empire
Founders
February 13, 2023
Founder interviews
10
Identity & self-belief
7
Business models
6
Gates hacked a computer at 13 just to get more time on it
Refusing a flat IBM fee — and taking royalties instead — made him a billionaire
Microsoft's culture was Gates cloned: intolerant of slowness, obsessed with eliminating rivals