25 December 2023
This week's additions focus on mindset, leadership, and strategy, with new digests from Cameron Herold, Rob Walling, and TK Kader. Highlights include You're the only person the CEO truly trusts to say no. Poor onboarding — not a missing feature — drives early churn.
Showing 19 digests for 25 December 2023.
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
How to secure your COO role and stay confident
Cameron Herold
December 31, 2023
Identity & self-belief
9
Management
6
You're the only person the CEO truly trusts to say no.
Peer groups dissolve imposter syndrome — everyone feels like the outsider.
Your skills must grow as fast as the company or you're at risk.
Four UX mistakes that cause SaaS churn in early-stage products
Rob Walling
December 31, 2023
Processes & SOPs
9
Hiring & recruitment
6
Poor onboarding — not a missing feature — drives early churn.
Visual hierarchy separates power users from overwhelmed newcomers.
Watching one user sign up reveals more than months of guessing.
B2B SaaS growth: using add-ons to drive net revenue expansion
TK Kader
December 31, 2023
Pricing strategy
9
Business models
8
Retention & loyalty
6
Churn is inevitable — expansion revenue is how you grow past it
110% net revenue retention means churned customers are fully replaced by upgrades
Three add-on types: usage pricing, higher-tier plans, services and training
Resilience & grit
Podcast
100 Life Lessons From Marcus Aurelius
The Daily Stoic
December 31, 2023
Resilience & grit
9
Identity & self-belief
8
Deep work & focus
5
Your character is the only measure of success that endures forever
Obstacles are fuel—they reveal opportunity to practice virtue every time
Reread what matters repeatedly to unlock new depths and applications
Why expertise makes your ideas harder to articulate
Dr. Grace Lee
December 30, 2023
Communication
8
Identity & self-belief
5
Deep expertise creates unconscious knowledge that others can't access.
Ideas shared too early get adopted by whoever articulates them better.
Communication strategy — not mechanics — determines whether ideas land.
How a co-founder coup nearly destroyed a $100M food brand
EO
December 30, 2023
Post-mortems
9
Business models
6
Minority shareholders staged a legal coup to oust the founding CEO
Ownership stake does not equal operational authority — conflating them kills growth
Misaligned vision on dividends vs. reinvestment breaks co-founder partnerships
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
GaryVee's top mindset and business lessons from 2023
GaryVee
December 29, 2023
Identity & self-belief
9
AI strategy & adoption
6
Hiring & recruitment
5
Material goals — six figures, big house — reliably fail to deliver happiness
Fire bad hires immediately; ego, not judgment, keeps bad people too long
Whoever hosts the platform first wins the niche land grab
Productivity & habits
YouTube
Nine strategies to stop overdue tasks causing overwhelm and stress
Layla at ProcessDriven
December 29, 2023
Productivity & habits
9
Resilience & grit
6
Negotiate scope and delegation before touching a single due date.
Communicate late work early — silence turns a small problem into a crisis.
Structured in-person jobs build self-management skills remote work can't.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
How to become indistractable: a practical framework for focus
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
December 29, 2023
Deep work & focus
10
Productivity & habits
8
Management
5
90% of distractions come from internal emotions, not technology
Your to-do list is killing productivity — schedule everything instead
Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a character flaw
Founder interviews
YouTube
How early Facebook and Dropbox shaped one founder's approach to risk and growth
EO
December 28, 2023
Founder interviews
9
Delegation
6
You don't need to know how — you need to start building
Facebook's 'move fast' and Dropbox's 'sweat details' demand opposite cultures
SPC helps founders find the right mountain before they start climbing
HR Party of One: top five episodes of 2023
HR Party of One
December 28, 2023
Communication
7
Culture building
6
Processes & SOPs
5
Knowing what is not your job protects HR from liability.
AI literacy is now a baseline competency for HR professionals.
Your brand is how others perceive you, not how you see yourself.
Company culture survives remote work — physical offices were never the point
Cameron Herold
December 27, 2023
Culture building
9
Vision & mission
6
The physical office accounts for just 5–15% of company culture.
Core values only count if you're willing to fire people who break them.
A BHAG, vivid vision, and core purpose lock culture in place remotely.
Two frameworks for building consumer and marketplace startups
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
December 27, 2023
Business models
9
Product-market fit
7
Growth hacking
6
Why MAUs and GMV are vanity metrics that mislead founders
The one user action that predicts whether your product will retain
Focus on a tiny market first — then tip it, then dominate
Founder interviews
Podcast
How Postpone grew from zero to mid-six-figure ARR in three years
Startups For the Rest of Us
December 26, 2023
Founder interviews
10
Pricing strategy
7
Bootstrapping
6
Going full-time unlocked multi-week initiatives impossible on nights and weekends
Raising prices 20% caused subscriptions to go up, not down
Reddit's API pricing scare nearly shut down a Reddit-only business overnight
Social media marketing in 2024: attention, platform fit, and content strategy
GaryVee
December 26, 2023
Social media
9
Content marketing
8
Niche selection
6
LinkedIn organic reach is at a 2013-Facebook-level opportunity right now.
Posting identical content to every platform is the most common strategic mistake.
An asphalt business tripled revenue to $2.5M with a few TikToks.