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#startup is the reason you are able to read Curated as we started Curated because #startup's members had a fear of missing out on all the great content being shared.
Promoted
100 Days of growth
100 days of growth is a great source of actionable tips to make your company grow.
Team
The Design Sprint
Google Ventures released a do it yourself guide for design sprints for startups, clear and concise, just the way we like it.
Product Hunt: all-time leader board
All-time top #508 Products and top #1613 Hunters on Product Hunt. Gives you the option to find your own ranking. Our initiative #startup actually hits position #49.
Thank you
Expanding Curated
Hey there! We hope you are having a great weekend and that this week's Curated can contribute to that. If you are out and about doing amazing things, this email can and will wait.
Last Monday Bram Kanstein posted Curated to Product Hunt, and we received tons of up-votes, thank you for that. Due to this, our list nearly doubled in size with 2559 new subscribers since Monday. We're happy that so many of you have decided to join us, please feel welcome.
This week we found a ton of great content, and we are wondering if we need a max. or min. amount of links in our weekly? If you have an opinion about this, feel free to reply. Our current stance is a minimum of 10, with no max. limit as far as the quality is ace. We are also experimenting with the design and the categories, and really look forward to receive your feedback on this.
We hope you enjoy the content in this weeks issue as much as we did. If you do, please help us to grow and tweet: I just received my weekly Curated, check it out on http://ctt.ec/dB12f+ and subscribe for yours, it's worth it.
Thanks for reading, Leon, Eleftheria, Jeff, Sujan and Anuj
ps: Think you'll be great at curating the most important startup news of the week? Get in touch!
- Articles & Lessons Learned
From 0 to $1B - Slack's founder shares their epic launch strategy
"You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read about how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than 30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. But have you visited its Twitter Wall of Love?"
Be honest about whether your product really makes a difference
Startups in a world of massive markets can be confusing. The law of large numbers, platforms that can make your company blow up unexpectedly and the trendy nature of tech markets can be deceiving. Success for many is ephemeral. I have written about the deceiving nature of early successes before – in particular in the SaaS or B2B world leading to a phenomenon called “shelfware.” If you didn’t read it I recommend it. It’s important to understand. This is why I loved Brad Feld’s recent post about the “illusion of product / market fit.” This, too, is a must read for any entrepreneur.
Don't let the fear of your idea being stolen hold you back
"I am truly amazed by how afraid some inventors are. They fear that someone is going to steal their million-dollar idea. They assume that every company is eagerly lying in wait, ready to rip them off."
The answer to the eternal question: “Where do I find a technical cofounder?”
"The answer I give them is simple: you can’t. Seriously. The reason for this is simple. Cofounders are not found; they are grown."
Firing: How I Do the Hardest Thing as an Entrepreneur
"Letting someone go is hard to do, but the costs of not doing it could crush your business. Here’s how I handle firing…"
Lessons learned from scaling a product team
There’s been lots written about how Internet businesses should build software, from books like The Lean Start-Up, and posts from Google Ventures, but not many examples where startups open up their process and show how it really happens.
The 30 best pieces of advice for entrepreneurs in 2014
"We spoke to people like Pandora CTO Tom Conrad, lead Spotify designer Tobias van Schneider, Twitter VP of Engineering Chris Fry, CEOs and founders — and each of them shared their experience with one goal in mind: To build the strongest possible community of entrepreneurs. What follows is a roundup of the 30 most incisive and helpful pieces of advice we published the past year."
48 Hours later: stats from Product Hunt
A nice write up with data on what can happen when you get pushed to Product Hunt without notice, nice to see #startup playing a small role again.
The 6 essential growth competencies
"Great growth people are extremely hard to come by. The combination of skills necessary to be effective is rarely resident in a team, much less a single person. A true growth person is a unicorn.
At Founder Equity we’ve attempted to grow rather than hire. Over the last 18 months we’ve taken several novices and turned them into productive growth team members who can point to meaningful results for their respective companies."
The beta principle: skip perfection & launch early
Sometimes it’s best to launch a product before it’s perfect.
21 Welcome emails to inspire your lifecycle marketing
The success of your onboarding flow relies heavily on the first few touches. The welcome email should be actionable, informative and clear. The examples in this post cover a range of approaches.
Why I believe that this will be the most innovative decade In history
Many people believe that we’ve run out of ideas and that the future will be one of bleak shortages of food, energy, and water.
How much should I raise in my angel round? How should I spend it?
Every dollar needs to get into the product, and since the product is made by people (generally speaking) you should make sure that 80% of your spend is on payroll. Anything else is probably wasteful and unnecessary.
The complete guide to using HARO
HARO or Help A Reporter Out, is a great way to get access to 'free' publicity. Reporters looking for sources or quotes often use HARO to post inquiries. But how do you use HARO effectively?