Bookmarks by Kevin
Here you can find useful links that I find over time. I will share mostly links that help me with my side projects and career. Feel free to discover many resources.
BootstrappingMarketingCopywriting
Description
A tweet that shows a video on how a copywriter should think about their copy.
BootstrappingUser Experience
Bootstrapping
Description
A simple blog post on how to use google searches to find leads for your B2B startup or companies hiring.
Documentation
Description
A good documentation about how to structure your documentation.
User Experience
Description
A video of different mobile menu design patterns
BootstrappingUser Experience
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping
Description
A calendar that tells you when specific events happen around the world. Target your marketing around these events.
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping
Description
Grammarly and others are doing that, so listen: If you have a pricing table the information is condensed most of the time. For that you can implement tooltips that give you an opportunity to show more of the feature directly on the pricing page. Do not link to an external page so people do not forget to actually pay.
Bootstrapping
Description
A thread regarding which acquisition channels make sense in the beginning. The consens is to use "spiky" channels like reddit, hackernews, facebook groups or LinkedIn because SEO which should be build at the same time will just take an affect 6 months after establishing the content.
BootstrappingStory Time
Description
This 3 part story covers how Udemy was created, how it grew and how it got VC investments. A quite interesting and unique story of struggling to grow a business.
BootstrappingUser ExperienceMarketing
Description
Marketing examples is a great resource to grow your marketing skills. In this article Harry is covering how a landing page should be done to convert visitors to customers.
BootstrappingVideo
Description
A talk on MicroConf 2014 regarding how to grow your business with social media and the like.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
Getting traction on Hacker News is difficult but posting at certain times will help you to actually receive upvotes. This article analyzed the data and summed it up in this blog article.
BootstrappingMarketingBlog
Description
In this short post Brendan is covering on how you can build content based on existing data and create your own data sets that can be shared with the communities. With these data sets you will be able to create even more content and enhance your existing articles. It also gives a lot of backlinks because if you share the data, organically people will link to it more often.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
A guide on how you can grow your startup or side project with a $0 budget. It is quite an amazing article and gives you multiple processes/frameworks on how to grow your marketing efforts with free tools and resources.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
A lot of SaaS are having monthly and yearly plans. The yearly plans are mostly more profitable and this guide will teach you how you can incentivize with discounts at the checkout how you can 'convince' people to signup for the yearly plan.
BootstrappingStory Time
Description
Jake from AlgoDaily gives a few lessons on what he learnt during building his side project: Engineering Quality Does Not Matter, you need people to support you, read less and do things.
Marketing
Description
These simple 13 steps will help you to grow your twitter audience. Really helpful insights that you can use as a framework to increase your follower count.
Software EngineeringPodcast
Description
This podcast with weekly episodes is talking about your software career. Many useful tips that you can get you more far within your career.
Marketing
Description
A simple collection of social templates to share your content on social media and the likes.
CareerProduct Management
Description
A great article that discovers what are the qualities needed to be an amazing product manager.
MarketingGrowth
Description
After launching your side project in many communities you might experience slower growth than usual. A discussion on what are the next steps with actionable advice.
MarketingGrowthTools
Description
This tool is perfect whenever someone on reddit or hackernews is mentioning your side project or has the need for it. An incredible tool to help you to provide value to people and link them to your project.
ToolsNext.jsTypeScript
Description
Generating meta tags and so on is annoying, use this tool to improve your technical SEO score.
ToolsGrowth
Description
Struggling to come up with cold emails for Sales, Recruitment, SEO, follow-ups, Marketing or Networking? This directory of cold email templates will help you out.
BootstrappingGrowthSEOStory Time
Description
This is probably the best guide on how to drive highly qualified leads to your website. It is in-depth and received a lot of traction on reddit. The advice is just next level and really amazing.
BootstrappingGrowthSEO
Description
A collection of useful links that can be used as a guide to improve the SEO score of your project.
BootstrappingMarketingGrowth
Description
Getting into publications and letting people write about your project is mostly the most efficient way to grow the amount of clicks your product gets. This guide explains a simple framework to get to this point actually.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
Ali describes in his blog how storytelling helped his clients to actually improve SEO because the stories actually caused an interest within blogs and similar.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
Julian created this handbook on how he is writing articles. You can use this handbook for your own blogging technique if you like. It has a lot of great ideas I try to follow within my blogs.
MarketingGrowth
Description
In this blog post hacker news post are analyzed when it comes to what type of post is upvoted, what category will give you the most exposure, when to post and many other things. Quite useful if you want to post something on there.
Software EngineeringCareer
Description
In this blog article Anna presents a way on how she iss entering a new team from a real story at Financial Times. It focuses on meeting everyone and building a map of who knows what.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
Using your own SaaS to create free tools will bring traffic to your website that will help you to get users. In this IndieHackers post Richard is shining some light on how he grew sheet2api.
Software EngineeringCareer
Description
This guide with 15+ tips will guide you to improve your LinkedIn profile to get more connections, better job opportunities or be able to promote your products in a better way. A lot of useful tips for all periods in your career.
CopywritingMarketingGrowth
Description
Harry from marketingexamples is giving a small slideshow of 30 slides that will help you to improve your slides.
CareerSoftware EngineeringProduct Management
Description
This website will teach you how to deal with different type of people in a software project, with their weaknesses and how to improve them or when to move on from specific positions.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
In this blog article Ilya will present you how they grew lemlist with extensive cold emailing. It worked quite great for them and the tips about personalizing the email are super interesting.
MarketingGrowth
Description
In this newsletter post the new generation marketing funnels will be explained. Traditional marketing these days like Ads and so on are competitive. This article will shine some lights on alternative marketing and sales channels.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
When creating your project and initial growth is important, backlinks are golden. Gathering these backlinks is difficult. The notion page linked here will give you an opportunity to post your projects at different sides and collect backlinks.
SEOStory Time
Description
A simple technique with an example on how Nicolas reached the first page in Google quite quickly.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
A guide on the different sales processes for B2B SaaS that will help you to actually get customers.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
This IndieHackers post is describing how you can push content to hackernews and how to structure your title to get more upvotes and more exposure.
Bootstrapping
Description
A short guide on what to look out for when onboarding new users.
BootstrappingUser ExperienceCopywriting
Description
In this post Sjors is presenting 7 tips on how to improve your landing page by improving your copy and the user experience.
GrowthMarketing
Description
Joe presents helpful on how to keep a routine about writing every day to create content to grow your side project.
GrowthMarketing
Description
Instead of writing a cold email to ask for a big demo, do a sequence of small and easy asks and continue doing so turning bigger and bigger.
Bootstrapping
Description
A website that generates names for your project based on animals.
BootstrappingMarketing
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
This GitHub repository is giving you many opportunities to post your startup and get some marketing visibility.
Software Engineering
Description
Building good software engineering systems is difficult. This free ebook by Google will teach you on how to do this exactly. Google builds scalable systems for a long time, so get that experience as well.
MarketingGrowthStory Time
Description
Patrick describes how he built a simple side project / info product and launched it. He got great success with it, because the project was needed and helpful. Quite inspiring story.
GrowthUser Experience
Description
In this article it will be presented on how Duolingo has one of the best onboarding flows for users and why the app is so popular.
GrowthBootstrapping
Description
An article on how gamification is a tool to use within your side project to grow. It will help to keep users onboard if you reward them at the right time with the right methods. See how other companies are doing this.
Story TimeBootstrapping
Description
Alex is sharing his short 30+ tips in an IndieHackers post on what to focus on during the creationg of your side project. It is focused on developers and what they have to do better like Marketing and Sales.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
In this post exdeve presents how they created a small how to video of their project. Including how to put songs below the video and just keep it simple. It works quite well and can help to grow your project as well.
BootstrappingStory Time
Description
In this post Gordon analyzed multiple MVPs and put out the lessons learnt by him. Focusing on the landing page, the value provided and optimizing the CTA.
SEOGrowthStory Time
Description
Salil is giving us a lesson on how he increased the time users spend on his website by a simple gamification tip for blog articles. It increased in a 100% uptick in organic traffic from Google because of these small challenges.
BlogGrowth
Description
Probably the best resource on creating effective blogging for your business. From small startup to big enterprise. This course has it all. It will teach you methodically on how to find ideas for content to write and how to convert the readers. A masterpiece.
GrowthBootstrapping
Description
7 tips to implement techniques that will help your product to build a community by itself. It goes from simple tips like rewarding users through referral system to simply vanity metrics.
BootstrappingCopywriting
Description
In this post Naveh will describe how he reached multiple times the #1 spot on those platforms by choosing the right title. A workflow is explained how you can apply the rules to your content.
MarketingGrowth
Description
Getting data for your project is difficult. Creating a survey will most likely not help because it is not personal. Instead do interviews that are more personal. You will get more data but also much more true data. Read on why in this post.
MarketingBootstrapping
Description
Canny is probably the leading product feedback platform you can use. Social proof is really important for many projects to actually convert users into paying users. With these simple tips canny will share how it is easy to apply social proof to your project as well.
Marketing
Description
A discussion on IndieHackers on how to write good cold emails and the process behind it. When do you need to follow up and how to make your call to action clear.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
In this presentation Rahul presents in the name of a16z on how game design can be applied in your product to enable growth and create user retention.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
In this article the blog of product habits will present 3 techniques to do marketing for your side project. It does not cost a dime to execute the ideas but will cost some time of course initially.
BootstrappingCopywriting
Description
This small free tool is a collection of 90+ email templates for different use cases. Really useful to copy paste some email content if you need to do a sale, refer someone or any other use case. I am sure you will find some content here.
GrowthStory Time
Description
In this blog Iulian covers on the mastery of how to learn anything. Getting to expert-level within any field is difficult, but this article really guided me on reevaluating on how I tackle problems and learn.
BootstrappingMarketingGrowth
Description
This collection showcases the most popular blogs for marketing and SaaS. Most of them will talk about growth and principles that can be applied to your side project as well.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
In this post you will learn how to apply 11 simple techniques that will help you to onboard more users. The onboarding is the first step in a user journey and doing this right will give you a lot of credibility.
Software EngineeringNode.js
Description
In this repository the author will describe how you can structure your Node.js projects and which patterns to follow to create a nice application that can be understood but also changed in quick ways.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
Creating custom campaigns in Google Analytics will help you to track the traffic in more detail, where it is coming from and other things. The trick is that people will click on an URL rather than being tracked via the referrer header. More reliable and better event flows can be built with it.
Marketing
Description
A simple tip to integrate pocket on your blog. Users from pocket tend to engage more with blogs.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
A post that discusses which places you can post your startup at to actually get feedback and get initial traction for your side project.
GrowthStory Time
Description
Peter from built for mars, a UX analyzing blog, is sharing his intial findings on how he grew his website full of case studies.
BootstrappingGrowth
Description
In this post the author is presenting how they have ran a product for 6 months in beta and are quite successful running it. They had multiple acquisition offers and are sharing all of their tips regarding growing the business.
MarketingGrowth
Description
Marketing Examples is one of the biggest marketing blogs out on the internet. Harry shares his process of sharing content, creating a content plan and in which way to distribute content. One key lesson: Provide value upfront on the platform.
MarketingGrowth
Description
In this post groovehq shares their content marketing strategy. It is indeed interesting because they grew mainly through it during a high growth phase and the insights will teach you a lot.
MarketingGrowth
Description
In this post Dan describes how he grew his subscriber count by writing viral content, simply by creating really long lists, a technique used by many content marketers to get a lot of users.
Tools
Description
Google really sucks to find SVGs for company logos. This tool will help you to find the SVGs. It is scraping multiple platforms to enable listing them.
Tools
Description
This awesome list features many parts that are needed for a technical project but can be used for free till a certain limit. Still a lot of great services.
CopywritingMarketing
Description
In this case study the landing page of remote leaf will be analyzed and optimized to really show the product value to potential customers.
Marketing
Description
In this small post it is described how the contact us page or widget can be improved to be more personal and engaged.
Software Engineering
Description
In this article it will be described how you can use the dynamic tax rate feature of Stripe to integrate EU VAT. A pain for everyone normally but with this new feature it can get quite simple.
BootstrappingTools
Description
A marketplace to sell and buy projects. A lot of SaaS solutions are listed there and if you have a project that might be worth selling, try to list it there.
Bootstrapping
Description
In this post ideas are brought up on how to find ideas. A lot of mentions on how you have to be within a certain industry to really know the problem but also a lot of other methodologies are discussed.
BootstrappingSales
Description
There is an essay about building communities of 1000 people that are willing to pay for your product. But a16z really shows that this is also possible with a following of around 100 fans that love your product a lot.
GrowthSEO
Description
In this case study Noel describes with a case study on how their business grew a client to 200k site visits per month. The website mainly grew through SEO and following the tips and tricks from this case study can help you as well.
Software Engineering
Description
In this discussion hacker news is giving tips to new tech leads on what they have to focus on to be successful. A lot of golden advice is written here to helo you to get to tech lead level but also help you navigating in that role.
Software Engineering
Description
In this article alex is showcasing generic rules on how to scale your application to 100k users. It is quite simply initially and will build up more and more with caches, read-write replicas and similar techniques to make your system ready to handle that big amount of traffic.
User Experience
Description
In this post there are 10 different sign in forms presented. Really good user interface inspirations that you can use for your next project to make a simple design.
Software EngineeringStory Time
Description
In this interview Raylene Yung gives an overview on how she managed to grow here engineering career to be an engineering manager at Facebook and Stripe. She is sharing rare insights from the big tech companies and gives you tips to apply to grow as she was doing.
GrowthCareerStory Time
Description
The CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels, gave the tip to work backwards for all projects. For example, when releasing a new feature, you should start with a press release and then work backwards over the FAQ, to customer experience to writing an user manaual and then maybe start implementing. This principle can be applied to many problem-solving processes and is highly paying off for me.
Career
Description
In this post Dan showcases on how equity can be valued and why it does not make sense in most cases to join a startup because the equity/options being worthy any kind of money is highly unlikely.
User Experience
Description
In this post Marc is describing 34 simple patterns that you can use to improve the the user experience and interface of your application. If you like the book Refactoring UI you will also like this blog article because it has some really nice tips and tricks.
CareerGrowth
Description
This blog post is targeted for CEOs, but operating and communicating with other people is important for you as an employee as well. This blog shines some light on how CEOs should communicate. Simple tips like saying the why first when making a statement will help you in discussion. This and many more tips can be found in this article.
CareerSoftware Engineering
Description
In this book you can find how the US army is training their leaders to be real leaders. Even though it is in a military context the lessons won out of this book are valuable for engineering leads or tech leads as well. You can find a version of epubs also here: https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/Details.aspx?PUB_ID=1007609
Career
Description
A great book on what are the engineering manager's qualities and simple guides that you can follow to shine as manager and be loved by all your reports.
BootstrappingStory Time
Description
In this post Ryan shares the story of juicer, a combined social media feed for people to keep distraction low. He is explaining on how he grew the software and what motivated him to actually sell. The process behind it and how everything went.
Career
Description
Burnout is probably heard of by everyone in the technology community. Technology requires a lot from your mental ability, to keep up with the current technology or just solving problems all of the time. A lot of people get burnt out and have serious problems because of that. Read that hackernews discussion to see what you can change to avoid burning out.
User Experience
Description
In this blog post Graeme describes how you can build a simple drag and drop UI. Drag and drop is used in many applications and a lot of plugins exist to help you with this. But making it work on mobile is even more difficult. Learn how they did it at prototypr, a simple platform to build apps.
Career
Description
Camille Fournier is sharing some tips on how to grow your career as engineering manager. She gives a lot of tips on structure, scaling and organization. What you should focus on and how you can distribute tasks to focus on the real bits.
BlogGrowthMarketing
Description
Promoting your blog content is difficult. But once the blog is written you can create content around it. With content around it like Slideshows for instagram you can find even more opportunities to promote your blog.
BootstrappingStory Time
Description
In this article Kyle describes how he grew his product to the milestone of $10k revenue per month, what he learned and what you can get out of this.
BootstrappingStory Time
Description
Kilian describes in his post how they increased their trial sign up rate 5x. Also a discussion have been turning out of this post on how it affects their trial to paid conversion rate. Quite interesting!
Software Engineering
Description
A simple guide on how to Pull Requests. With the tips you can organize the Pull Request flow within your company.
Software Engineering
Description
In this guide a GitHub Engineer guides you to how to create a good Pull request with really helpful tips to actually make all your reviewers.
SalesBootstrapping
Description
11 small tips to make LinkedIn work as a marketing tool for you. LinkedIn can be a cringe fest, but it is sure worth it when used right.
MarketingBootstrapping
Description
In this guide James shows how he is growing his side projects with content marketing. He will cover keyword research, viability, how to create content and a simple publishing checklist.
MarketingBootstrapping
Description
In this post Harry from MarketingExamples is presenting how you can present your products features in a nicer way to actually show the real value of the product.
Story TimeBootstrapping
Description
In this blog Kevin is describing how they turned around their software for referral marketing from a failure to a succeeding business.
Tools
Description
A calculator that shows you how much shares should be given to all the founders. This is super useful for an initial equity split and an objective approach to share equity properly.
Bootstrapping
Description
In this post a simple question is asked, how to grow a validated product. Someone created a product that makes 400 USD MRR for a certain time but they struggle with growing it even more. An itneresting discussion on how to grow in these periods.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
In this post Harry from MarketingExamples will describe how alternative pages can actually drive traffic to your site. You just have to make sure your project is actually better in some parts and then create these pages. They will give Google a lot of signal and are super useful for getting high-quality traffic.
Sales
Description
In this blog post Olivia shines some ligh on what cross-selling and upselling actually means and how you can build it into your product. The author will also mention how you can automate the cross- and upselling which will be useful if you have your own SaaS.
BootstrappingMarketing
Description
In this indiehackers post some advice is shared how you can make the most out of a ProductHunt launch, get viral, get feedback and most importantly get initial traction. ProductHunt is a perfect platform for that but to get a good launch there you have to follow many things.
Software EngineeringProduct Management
Description
This blog post will cover how a great planning process looks like. Examples will be given how the planning process was implemented in bigger tech companies like Airbnb and Eventbrite and how it helped them to scale their company to where they are now.
ToolsCopywriting
Description
In this blogpost Ahmed will present the 6 writing tools he has learned about when writing for The Economist. It shines a light on why the newspaper is delivering high-quality articles for years and how you can use the tools to improve your writing and improve the blog of your side project or simply the writing you do at your current company.
Story TimeBootstrapping
Description
In this article Andrew Chen is writing about how you can actually analyze the user behavior by your power users. He is explaning it from figuring out who is the power user and why this is important. Ideally you convert every user into such users and make sure your product is used to the maximum. More Value means a better world and more money for you, right?