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
  1. Customer discovery in the context of existing products
  2. How to run a good survey and get valuable insights about how people use your product
  3. Listening To What People Say
  4. A Repeatable Metric for Usability
  5. Strong Positioning
• Product design
  1. What does responsible tech look like?
  2. Why do people use it?
  3. Design Conventions
  4. Designing Interfaces
  5. Finishing Touches
  6. How do people discover features in an app?
  7. Defining the boundary of the problem
  8. Thinking about retention from day one
  9. Tell me when to use it
  10. It’s hard to build a habit around an infrequent problem
  11. How often do users have this problem?
  12. Use case sweet spot
  13. Easy to use and simple to remember
  14. People were solving the problem before you came along
  15. We There Yet?
  16. Does your product make a clear promise?
• Landing page
  1. Landing Page Fundamentals
  2. Landing page optimization
  3. A high converting landing page
  4. Website copywriting
  5. Tripwires
  6. E-books Are Terrible Lead Magnets
  7. Web form design best practices
  8. Everything I Know About Conversion Rate Optimisation
  9. What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
  10. Improving conversion is a diagnostic process
• Copywriting
  1. Writing Design
  2. Nothing else matters
  3. Conversion Optimisation Is About Much More Than Design
• Email sequence
  1. Building A Micro Funnel: Leads From Your Website In 2 Steps
  2. Email marketing laws
• Growth Marketing
  1. The Product Growth Mindset
  2. I built it, now how do I get them to come?
  3. Everything is a loop
• SEO
  1. Lukewarm content that no one cares about
  2. How to be useful to the internet
  3. SEO for Web Apps
• Social
  1. A Field Guide to Twitter
  2. Twitter for Sales
  3. Twitter Marketing for Teams
• PR
  1. Getting Press
• Marketing analytics
  1. Google f@$%*#! tag manager
  2. Use Google Analytics To See Where Your Best Traffic Is Coming From
  3. Marketing Analytics
• AB testing
  1. AB testing for small businesses
  2. 1000 Transactions
  3. How Long Do I Need To Run An A/B Test For?
  4. Conversion Rate Optimisation Only Makes Sense If You Have 1000 Transactions A Month
  5. Improving Conversion For Small Businesses That Don’t Have Enough Traffic For AB Testing
• Onboarding
  1. Fuck onboarding screens
  2. Do you know where the single biggest drop-off is in your current onboarding experience?
  3. Segment your data by user intent
  4. Have you segmented your retention curve by the different types of users in your app?
  5. Using analytics to improve onboarding
• Engagement
  1. Have you spoken to five of your most and least engaged users?
  2. Have you mapped out the number of times each person performed your core action last month?
  3. How many people continue to use your product six months after they sign up?
  4. Do you know what your product’s core action is?
  5. Do you know how often people have the problem you help them solve?
  6. Core customer value and picking an activity to measure it
  7. There’s an important difference between revenue and retention
  8. Picking your core action
  9. Shaping your retention metric
  10. Break the journey to long term usage into smaller steps
• Retention
  1. User Retention Audit
  2. Customers sign up and don’t use the product
  3. Speak to people before they stop using your product
  4. How do you define a dormant user?
  5. Do you know why people say they leave?
  6. Reading to retain customers
  7. Understanding why people leave
  8. What to do when people stop using your app
  9. How to measure retention
  10. Why does retention matter?
  11. Optimizing Retention
• Product Analytics
  1. An overall picture of your product
  2. Why Bother with Product Metrics?
• Experimentation
  1. Reasons why we think the problem exists
  2. Defining the boundaries of a problem
  3. Avoid wasting time testing inconsequential stuff when growing a product
  4. Measuring the impact of a product experiment
  5. Running your first product experiment
• Productivity and organisation
  1. The lazy guide to losing weight and getting stronger
  2. How I’m getting my brain to focus again
  3. Strange is just better
  4. Product Roadmaps
  5. Putting a tracking plan together
  6. Stackranking
  7. An Ode To Hill Charts

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
  • Leading Growth
  • How will our product grow?
  • Product Messaging
  • Growth Strategy
  • Chirr Acquisition Loops