Edition #1
My favourite reads from the month of January
Highlight:
Ben Evan's State of Tech 2020 (128 slides)
Ben Evans is one my favorite tech philosophers and his yearly “State of Tech” presentation is on par with Mary Meeker's Internet Trends.
Highlights:
Of the 5.5bn adults on earth, 5bn have a phone and 4bn have a smartphone.
E-commerce is massive, but currently only 15% of the total addressable retail market - with the line between offline and online blurring more every year.
40% of global ecommerce value is in China.
China and India use more mobile data than the rest of the world combined.
More than half of Netflix’s base and most of their user growth is now from outside the USA.
Product:
Stop trying to make users do things (2 min read)
This article is relevant for beginner and experienced PMs alike.
The killer quote:
“Once your team slips into thinking about making or getting people do anything, you’ve lost sight of the real goal: connecting as many users as possible to the product. It’s disrespectful to your users and they’ll eventually notice.”
How To Know If You've Got ✨Product/Market Fit✨
Seven ways to tell if you've got PMF, and five frameworks to help you to find it if you don't
Product Market fit remains the most important and elusive concept for startups struggling to take off. I've personally felt that most advice was non actionable “You'll know when you have it” or reactive, “Your problems change”.
In this article Lenny Rachitsky does a good job in collecting the best literature around. My personal favorite was Rahul Vohra's method at Superhuman. It's a must read.
How Do You Measure Lifetime Retention, Without Waiting a Lifetime? (8 min read)
It's all about that “Aha!”moment where the user derives value from your product.
Increasing Retention with Push, In-App and Email
How to implement marketing automation of push, in-app and email campaigns to increase retention and LTV.
18 minute read
Pretty cool collection of how successful internet companies used different mechanics to decrease churn, increase sales and improve retention. There's something for everyone here.