Small Tech Business is a weekly newsletter for people looking for inspiration and learning around starting their own small internet or technology business.
Content of the Week:
1) How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet
by Daniel Vassallo - Blog Post 📰 (8 min)
This piece follows the author’s experience and learnings after launching two successful info products. Tons of super thoughtful insights from Daniel that will inspire you to apply a similar level of analysis with your own product. In addition, info products can be fantastic businesses that can be great for people looking to learn about running a business. There’s a very low barrier to entry now with tools like Gumroad and Paddle. You get exposure to key concepts like price optimization, marketing, and audience building.
Selling more units at a lower price has highly beneficial side-effects, including being easier to do, better reviews, better customer satisfaction, fewer refunds, and most importantly the multiplicative effects of increased worth of mouth.
2) TinySeed Tales Season 2 | Episode 1: Introducing Gather
by Rob Walling via Startups for the Rest of Us - Podcast 🎧 (29 min)
Fresh season of a great podcast series where you follow founders of small SaaS businesses and hear about their weekly struggles and triumphs. Great content for anyone wanting to better understand the trials and tribulations of running a small tech business. A ton of valuable insights in episode around topics like funding vs bootstrapping and pricing.
3) DevDiscuss S2E6: How to Be An Entrepreneur
by Jess Lee and Ben Halpern via DevDiscuss - Podcast 🎧 (47 min)
Great podcast episode where Courtland Allen (founder of Indie Hackers) and Kelly Vaughn (founder of Taproom Agency) dive into their experiences and journeys in starting their own small tech businesses. Always inspiring to hear successful founders discuss their steps (and missteps) towards finding the success they have today.
4) The Ultimate Guide to No-Pain Copywriting
by Joanna Wiebe - Blog Post 📰 (12+ min)
A very informative post that covers many different ways to formulate your copywriting. Copywriting deals entirely with how you word your marketing and your business’ brand. The way your customers think about and interact with your company is so valuable, and it is important to build your awareness of how to optimize those interactions.
5) How HTTPS Works
by DNSimple Team - Article/Comic 📰 (10 min)
A very creative and unique way to learn more about how HTTPS works (something every small tech business owner should understand at some level). Bonus: it is a great example of content marketing that we touched on in last week's issue.
In the News:
AirTable raises $185M and announced some exciting new features. AirTable is a popular tool for many no-code small tech businesses. If you’re interested in building a small tech business without writing code, I highly recommend checking out MakerPad.
Nvidia acquires ARM for $40M. Will be interesting to see what integrations come from that partnership.
Apple released iOS 14, which has some new privacy features which impact ad targeting. I think this is great for users, as I value my privacy a lot more than having more relevant ads. It will be very interesting to see how this impacts online advertising moving forward. I found a detailed write-up on Reddit analyzing it.
From the Archives: How to brainstorm great business ideas
by Courtland Allen - Article 📰 (6 min)
This piece covers a lot more than just brainstorming business ideas, it provides a great framework for discovering and validating your business idea. Courtland packs in a ton of great information, I recommend reading every paragraph!
It's been said that ideas don't matter, and that only execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage.
Hope you enjoyed the newsletter, would love if you helped spread the word by sharing!
Written and curated by Justin Chu (@jstnchu)