Copy
Startups & Side Hustles
Hey there,

It's tempting to think that you can build something great, pay for traffic, then scale to the moon, but as anyone who's run a successful side project or startup can tell, you that rarely happens.

"I think spending money to acquire your first customers is an unhealthy approach to product validation and, frankly, a waste of capital." - Julia Enthoven, Co-founder of Kapwing

This rings true with my experience, and it's a big reason why I compiled the Side Project Marketing Checklist last year. Paid advertising has it's space, but you need boots on the ground to talk to real customers first. They'll help you refine your message, product, and may even join you.

Read more
hG36XnH.jpg
Recommended Reading*
Frank Gruber has had the chance to be close to and learn from hundreds of startups over the course of his time building Tech Cocktail, so his advice from both personal business-building experience and osmosis is not to be ignored. It's a quick, entertaining overview of what to expect when starting a startup, and well worth a read.

Around the Web
A great list of security considerations for different stages of your business.

share-cto.jpg
What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one?

511mqD4qEHL._SY346_.jpg
"Despite the fact that many of the most talented people in the world are multi-passionate, we have gotten a bum rap. People label us flaky and distracted, society looks down at our nonlinear careers and choices, and counselors and advisors throughout our lives try to put us in a box that we keep breaking down."

what_youre_doing_wrong.jpg
It's easy to feel like you have to be a full time entrepreneur to be successful, but there's nothing wrong with doing a job you love. Like this author, I like having a couple side projects, but I can't imagine leaving my full time job either. I just hope that having one makes me better at the other.

Unnamedattachment
"We’ve deliberately chosen to add engineers at a slower rate than the growth of of our user base and instead take an iterative approach to recruiting and developing our team."

social.png
"Until recently, most white-collar jobs were shielded from automation by humans’ cognitive monopoly, but thinking computers like Amelia are opening a new phase of automation to a whole new class of workers..."

social
You don't hear much about the revenue sharing model of investment, but with more self-funded startups going live, maybe we should.

GettyImages-738785333.jpg
"A lot of programming is repetitive. That’s why developers spend so much time on Stack Overflow...We thought we can use machine learning to fix that."

IMG_0639.jpg
Sponsor*
I wear the same thing every day: t-shirt and jeans. Wohven reminds me every month to rotate an ugly old shirt out for the fresh new one they sent me. It might not seem like a huge life hack, but micro-optimizations like this add up.

Tools
Sunrise KPI gathers a key metric from all the services you use and sends you all your numbers.

Ideas are worthless, execution is everything. That said, ideas are fun to look at!

Cashflow is a huge challenge for freelancers, and until now it's been really tough to get credit without personal credit cards.

Ever wanted to be an old-school game programmer? Learn how classic game hardware worked by emulating it in JavaScript.

This list - curated by BetaList - shows you all the tech websites you should pitch your startup to as well as their popularity.

Taking no-code development to the extreme, Stacker makes sure you never have to leave your browser to build dynamic websites

There are a lot of simple, crappy domain name generators out there, but Namer is pretty unique. Uses machine learning to figure out what words might best match your topic area.

Thanks for reading,

Karl Hughes, Portable CTO