Early Adopter Marketing, Addition by Subtraction, and New Google Docs Features

Here are the very best articles we’ve found this week. Enjoy!

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Startups

Early Adopter Marketing – How startups get their first users – An in-depth overview of how successful startups got their first users. I highly recommend the book Unscalable for more on this.

Why Toys? – Some of the biggest technology companies look like toys in the beginning. This article explores why.

US startups don’t want to go public anymore. – Going public doesn’t offer much benefit to startups anymore. And the US now has “abnormally few listed firms.

Product

Addition by Subtraction – “by eliminating every extraneous element, you could isolate what makes it work and just do that.”

26.2 Reasons Why Talking to Users Is Like Exercising – “You know it is one of the most important things you can do but it is shockingly easy to put off and justify focusing on other things instead.”

What is a “good” conversion rate for your signup flow? – “The biggest factor we found influencing signup rate was the one-click third-party OAuth signup.”

Technology

How Google Has Quietly Revolutionized Document Editing – “Now you can comment on Office files, PDF documents, and images in Drive’s preview pane—without even having to fully open the file in Google Drive.”

Amazon launches a Polly WordPress plugin that turns blog posts into audio – Maybe I should try it on these posts 🤔.