Luc Cheung

Testing and Iterating

After the first two weeks of posting twice per day, I had a pretty strong idea of what would do well and what would not. I would throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks first, and then focus in on what style you know is resonating with your audience.

Once you’ve figured that out, you can slow down to one video... See more

How to convince people to join your startup

I actually researched and covered this in a previous issue, so go read that post. Here’s the high-level summary of what you need to get right:

1. Captivating vision —Make it easy for candidates to visualize what you are building toward and to feel like their work will be meaningful.


2. A++ early team —The best

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Compounding Growth Loops for API-First Companies

A common API-First company’s North Star metric is developer adoption, and the number of developers in an API-ecosystem tends to compound naturally in four growth loops that reinforce each other .

1. The Developer Experience (DX) Loop: Developers who explore (and eventually thrive) with the API will... See more

Segment and Amplitude hired a customer success/support person as employee #1. Here’s Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment) on why they did this:

“ There’s something really magical when you write in to a startup and they fix your issue within a few hours. It’s something you’d never, ever expect from a big company, and it was one way for us to

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Falling into the trap of thinking other users will be like you is especially pernicious because the people building the product are usually among that early adopter cohort. The easiest north star for a product person is their own intuition. But if they're working on a product that requires customer segmentation, being in the early adopter cohort... See more