Growing Tiny Businesses

These are a collection of different posts I’ve written over the last few years, pulled together from various unfinished blogs throughout my twenties and early thirties.
- Research
- Product design
- What does responsible tech look like?
- Why do people use it?
- Design Conventions
- Designing Interfaces
- Finishing Touches
- How do people discover features in an app?
- Defining the boundary of the problem
- Thinking about retention from day one
- Tell me when to use it
- It’s hard to build a habit around an infrequent problem
- How often do users have this problem?
- Use case sweet spot
- Easy to use and simple to remember
- People were solving the problem before you came along
- We There Yet?
- Does your product make a clear promise?
- Landing page
- Landing Page Fundamentals
- Landing page optimization
- A high converting landing page
- Website copywriting
- Tripwires
- E-books Are Terrible Lead Magnets
- Web form design best practices
- Everything I Know About Conversion Rate Optimisation
- What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
- Improving conversion is a diagnostic process
- Copywriting
- Email sequence
- Growth Marketing
- SEO
- Social
- PR
- Marketing analytics
- AB testing
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Have you spoken to five of your most and least engaged users?
- Have you mapped out the number of times each person performed your core action last month?
- How many people continue to use your product six months after they sign up?
- Do you know what your product’s core action is?
- Do you know how often people have the problem you help them solve?
- Core customer value and picking an activity to measure it
- There’s an important difference between revenue and retention
- Picking your core action
- Shaping your retention metric
- Break the journey to long term usage into smaller steps
- Retention
- User Retention Audit
- Customers sign up and don’t use the product
- Speak to people before they stop using your product
- How do you define a dormant user?
- Do you know why people say they leave?
- Reading to retain customers
- Understanding why people leave
- What to do when people stop using your app
- How to measure retention
- Why does retention matter?
- Optimizing Retention
- Product Analytics
- Experimentation
- Productivity and organisation
Projects
This is not an exhaustive list of projects I’ve worked on. These are the only ones I wrote stories about.
- Dec 2011 – This was one of my first consulting gigs with Google.
- Aug 2012 – Flipside – basic marketing for a friend’s small cafe
- Jan 2014 – Building one business a month – This is a newsletter I tried to maintain as I attempted to build a business a month for a year. I managed to build four businesses that year. Two made it to the market. I sold one.
- Nov 2014 – When pandas attack – releasing a friend’s album
- Dec 2014 – Barsoom- Launching a restaurant
- Dec 2019 – I tried repeating the one business a month project, but this time I could code, and I did it with a friend. We burned through 6 businesses. None made it. I only have a collection of half-finished notes and screenshots for this story
- June 2021 – Joined Chirr App