Category: Figma
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The Love Metric
If you’re publishing content, one useful way to measure success is to read what people are writing about it online. Margarita Noriega, who’s the current managing editor of Morning Brew, calls this the Love Metric. When she sees someone saying something nice about her work online, she shares it with her team. I did something…
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Don’t check your blog metrics yet
Here’s the latest edition of my newsletter for early-stage growth leaders, Leading Thinker, which I also shared at LinkedIn: TL;DR: When you start a new blog or publication, your metrics will disappoint you. That disappointment leads to doubt, and often kills a content practice before it has a proper chance to make an impact. A…
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Five lessons for whispering into the Hacker News front page
A couple of years ago, I met a CEO of a series A startup. At the time, I was working as a content strategist on Figma’s marketing team, where I also found an informal role as the in-house Hacker News expert. At the time, Figma was expanding outside of its core design audience, and into new…
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Products, services, education, self service, and scale
If you visited a grocery store in the 1800s, one of many clerks would do the shopping for you. It was only a century ago when you might choose an item from the shelf yourself, which is what many of us do today at a supermarket. The same thing has taken place with paying for…
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Organizing principle
If an album has 12 songs, there are just over 479 million ways to organize them in a sequence (12 songs * 11 songs * 10 songs… all the way until the last 1). Out of all of these possibilities, a recording artist needs to decide which one tracklist represents what they want to say.…
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Customer satisfaction builds momentum
A business delivers a good product or service to a customer. A satisfied customer tells other people about the business. Those people find the business and become customers. As the years go by, the business builds enough of a reputation and customer base to sustain itself. If we agree that’s the core loop of a…
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Why applying to 100+ jobs doesn’t work
When I was entering the job market in early 2023, I caught up with my friend Fadeke. She had just started a really good job at DigitalOcean. She shared her process with me, and let me know that she did fewer than 20 job applications. This quantity was a really helpful anchor for when I…
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Teenage years, interfaces, and classic technology
When I was a teenager, I spent hours trying to improve my computer’s interface. I can’t tell you how many times I changed my Windows XP interface to try to look like a Mac. When Windows Longhorn was out in beta, I spent many afternoons trying to get it to work too—even partitioning my hard…