1 January 2024
This week's additions focus on mindset, founder stories, and leadership, with new digests from Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth, Cameron Herold, and TK Kader. Highlights include Coddling engineers backfired — accountability unlocks real senior roles Prospects only register one in three impressions — so hit them 27 times.
Showing 28 digests for 1 January 2024.
Engineering leadership: strategy, systems thinking, and treating engineers as adults
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
January 7, 2024
Management
9
Business operating systems
7
Processes & SOPs
5
Coddling engineers backfired — accountability unlocks real senior roles
Good engineering strategy is boring: constraints focus limited capacity
Shared EM/PM performance ratings fix misaligned incentives structurally
The marketing rule of 27: why repetition drives buying decisions
Cameron Herold
January 7, 2024
Paid ads
8
Conversion rate optimisation
6
Prospects only register one in three impressions — so hit them 27 times.
You're more tired of your marketing than your audience ever will be.
Remarketing ads are the lowest-cost way to stack those 27 touchpoints.
A three-part framework for go-to-market messaging in SaaS
TK Kader
January 7, 2024
Copywriting
8
Prospecting & outreach
6
Niche selection
5
Bad messaging kills every sales channel before it starts.
Three components — who, value, differentiation — define any effective message.
Deploy, measure metrics, and iterate; the first version is never the best.
How Small Businesses Can Land and Retain Corporate Clients
KeyPersonOfInfluence
January 7, 2024
B2B sales
9
Communication
6
Corporates buy slowly — budget three to six months minimum.
Long sales cycles become a moat once you're inside.
Socialization kits move committees to consensus fast.
From peer to supervisor: five principles for earning team respect
Dr. Grace Lee
January 6, 2024
Management
9
Delegation
6
Identity & self-belief
5
Shift your identity from individual contributor to team coach immediately.
Transparency makes you predictable — predictability builds trust with reports.
Needing approval destroys leadership grounding; audit your own limiting beliefs.
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Self-awareness, curiosity, and building real leverage in life and business
GaryVee
January 6, 2024
Identity & self-belief
9
Social media
6
Productivity & habits
5
Money exposes your existing emotional state — it doesn't change it.
Curiosity beats premature specialisation; try things before deciding you don't like them.
Build inbound leverage through content instead of asking cold contacts for favours.
Founder interviews
Podcast
Comedians on Stoicism: philosophy, ego, and the long game
The Daily Stoic
January 6, 2024
Founder interviews
9
Identity & self-belief
8
Resilience & grit
6
Don't release work until you're in love with it.
The 'one more project, then I'll rest' voice is the ego lying.
The Stoics were funny — one literally died laughing.
Product-market fit
YouTube
Key metrics for consumer startups: growth, retention, and NPS
Y Combinator
January 6, 2024
Product-market fit
9
Retention & loyalty
8
Unit economics
7
Organic growth via viral loops compounds forever; paid ads stop working instantly
Negative unit economics at scale burns capital fast — fix before scaling
NPS below +50 means your product needs rethinking before you grow
Founder interviews
YouTube
Four billionaires: what 100+ hours taught one founder
Dan Martell
January 5, 2024
Founder interviews
9
Management
7
Your reputation is your brand — building it early compounds massively.
Uber's growth came from sacrificing every other relationship for one outcome.
Apply DevOps-style people development to every department, not just engineering.
Clarify your intentions: the Stoic case for defining your end
The Daily Stoic
January 5, 2024
Goal setting
9
Identity & self-belief
5
Without a defined end, no wind is favorable — Seneca
Marcus Aurelius interrogated his own soul so no one else had to
Defaulting to others' goals is a guarantee of directionlessness
Why UX research fails and how to fix it
Lenny's Podcast Product Career Growth
January 4, 2024
Processes & SOPs
8
Iteration & feedback loops
7
Management
6
Most UX research sits in an unactionable middle range that rarely changes decisions.
User-centered performance: teams signal customer obsession without genuinely wanting to learn.
Researchers embedded from the start — not called in to validate — drive real business impact.
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Three habits destroying your self-esteem and how to stop them
Brendon Burchard
January 4, 2024
Identity & self-belief
9
Productivity & habits
6
Speed judgment — phones train your brain to label everything instantly.
Gossip degrades your own self-concept more than the person you're discussing.
Compare yourself only to yesterday's version of yourself, never to others.
Tracking SEO performance with the three-box strategy
Semrush
January 4, 2024
Google, SEMrush, and your own team each give distinct signal types
Qualitative data from sales teams reveals what analytics platforms miss
Search results vary by device and location — test across both
Resilience & grit
YouTube
How HR professionals can prevent burnout in themselves
HR Party of One
January 4, 2024
Resilience & grit
9
Productivity & habits
6
Processes & SOPs
5
98% of HR pros are burnt out — including you
Intervene at the warning stage, not after collapse
PTO, boundaries, and daily grounding habits prevent burnout
How the New York Times built a nine-figure affiliate business
Ahrefs
January 3, 2024
SEO
9
Business models
7
Content marketing
6
Wirecutter's affiliate links quietly became a nine-figure revenue stream
Brand authority and domain strength are the real moat in affiliate SEO
A $30M acquisition in 2016 delivered 15x traffic growth by migration