The Three Things For Curious Minds v2
Hey there curious minds,
Hope you’re doing well! I’m continuing the new custom of sending a Saturday newsletter shaped by things I am curious about each week. This is growing into a little club where I share my long form thoughts that don’t make it to my tweets. We’re at 80 subscribers and I’m grateful for each of you. My goal is to distill my discoveries and share them in a simple format of Three Things each week: an essay excerpt, a tweet, and a product that piqued my interest. Without further ado, let’s get going.
📰 AN ESSAY WORTH SHARING:
“We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback. We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way. The pattern was to share Slack with progressively larger groups. We amplified the feedback we got at each stage by adding more teams.”
— Stewart Butterfield, CEO, Slack
“Almost all of (our first ~15 users) are people we are personally close to. We're currently focused on making them really happy with their experience – rounding out the feature set, responding to their feedback, fixing bugs, and improving performance. As that continues, we'll continue to roll the alpha product out gradually to more and more people. There probably won't be any particular floodgate moment, more of a steady influx of new users.”
— Justin Rosenstein, CPO and co-founder, Asana
“At YC we use the term Collison installation for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask Will you try our beta? and if the answer is yes, they say Great, we'll send you a link. But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say ‘Right then, give me your laptop’ and set them up on the spot.”
— Paul Graham about Stripe's cofounders Source: How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers by @lennysan
🐦 A TWEET WORTH SHARING:
🚀 A PRODUCT WORTH SHARING:
mmhmm: meet your personal video presence
🎁 BONUS:
Other interesting things I’ve enjoyed reading the past week:
My intention with this newsletter is to keep the format simple so you can digest all of this in less than 5 minutes. I’ll keep iterating and tweaking each week to make sure I recognize opportunities to deliver more value in less. If you liked this, please share on Twitter so we can continue growing this tiny club of curious minds.
Thank you for your time. Hope you have a great weekend!