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Startups & Side Hustles
Hey there,

Whenever I hire a new employee, they tell me they want to be a "big picture" contributor. They want to see how all the pieces fit together and help move things through in a systematized way. The truth is, most employees (and founders) aren't very good at it.

This week, I wrote a quick piece on how you can start to think big picture:

Everyone Wants to Think Big Picture; not Everyone is Good at it
Recommended Reading*
I love marketing, but many books on the topic are so full of conjecture, dated hacks, and fluff that they aren't worth more than a blog post of your time. The 1-Page Marketing Plan keeps it short and simple, much like the marketing checklist I built, so I highly recommend it as a more detailed follow up.

Around the Web
"In most cases, even if a person is able to grow fast enough to keep pace with a hypergrowth company, after a year, two years, five years, or ten years, at some point either the company’s growth or the individual's growth starts to flatten out. And that’s totally normal."

"If we want to identify successful solutions, we need to start by building empathy for the people who will use or be impacted by our solutions."

Tigran Hakobyan, founder of Cronhub, outlines his plans for the first 100 days post-launch. Let's hope he follows it up when he's finished.

Probably the most relevant story for really early stage startups and side projects this week. Go out and get those first ten!

Harj Taggar - cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte - covers some of the considerations founders should make when hiring their first engineer. I've been hoping to write something similar, so keep an eye out for that soon.

"By its nature, that’s not sprinting. But sprinting now and then is a useful way to learn that we can make an even bigger difference."

Cloudflare is seeing a 4% to 7% increase in traffic from the continent every month.

"Algorithms are replacing middle management, and if you don’t have a job telling computers what to do, sooner or later your job will consist of doing what computers tell you."

Sponsor*
Whether you're running a content site, online store, or SaaS product, engaging customers and leads through email is one of the best ways to get people coming back to your site. I've been using Mailchimp exclusively for years to send emails to thousands of subscribers, and while it's not the cheapest service out there, nothing beats it for reliability, time-saving tools, and ease of use.

Tools
Want to start a monthly subscription membership site, but don't want to code it from scratch? Here ya go.

I've been fascinated by the job-hunting and employment software space for the past few years. While it's a really tough market to crack, here's an innovative approach.

If you use Bootstrap regularly, you know setting up the initial layout and grid can take some doing. LayoutIt makes it as simple as drag and drop. Truly awesome product here.

Writing doesn't have to start with a bang. Tinythoughts is all about making a little change every day to start writing something.

A neat way to find new color schemes based on keywords.

Thanks for reading,

Karl Hughes, Portable CTO