Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. You can click the heart button 💙 above or below to share some love. And you can reach out to me anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Links that are worth your time:
Very impressed by what my friends at Buffer have created: new podcast series, Small Business, Big Lessons
Time millionaires: living as if time is more valuable than money
New Demand Curve event coming up, and they have maybe one of the coolest ways to engineer virality into the event signups
Hi there 👋
Some of my favorite types of articles are interviews — which means yes, I will probably have interviews for this newsletter eventually (all ideas on that front are very welcome). Within the category of interviews, I even have my favorite interview questions, one of which is about the person’s media diet. What are the things they are reading, watching, listening to? I thought I’d share my media diet here with you all. Please do hit reply to share any of your favorite media lately also. Now you know how much I’d enjoy it!
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
My Media Diet: October 2021
When I was writing tons and tons of content at Buffer back in the day, I had to also be consuming tons and tons of content in order to have enough ideas and inspiration.
One of the tactics that helped me consume content at an efficient scale was curating from the curators.
Essentially, if I read from a small handful of people who are themselves reading and curating from their own groups of people, then I gain a shortcut to the best of the best … without my having to read eeeeeverything.
Fittingly, I wrote about the strategy here.
So what you might see from my media diet is that it’s not as hugely robust as it could be. Instead, it’s a small number of hand-selected sources that I rely on to surface meaningful content.
Oh, and funny dog memes of course.
My Feedly
Feedly is my go-to source for collecting all my content in a central place and separating the signal from the noise. Feedly has a couple of high-signal mechanisms: trending content and AI-powered insights. So I can follow a site like Ad Age, which posts dozens of times each day, and still see the most important and relevant news without have to read dozens of headlines.
To get Feedly set up, I’ve added RSS feeds from several favorite blogs, and I’ve signed up to a handful of newsletters via Feedly. You can also add web alerts and Twitter profiles.
My top Feedly sources:
Brand Strategy: Brand New
PLG: OpenView Ventures, ProductLed.com
Growth Marketing: Reforge, Demand Curve newsletter
Marketing news: Digiday
Startups: First Round Review, AVC
My Substacks
One of the interesting evolutions of Substack that bears watching is its growth from an email newsletter platform to a content platform. If you go to the main Substack website today, you are invited to start writing — of course — but you’re also met by a list of newsletters to subscribe to, which gives me major Medium-ish vibes.
All that to say, I write a Substack, but I also subscribe to a lot of Substacks. Here’re a few:
Sari Azout’s Check Your Pulse
David Sherry’s Art $ Attention
fio’s contentfolks
Emily Singer’s Chips + Dips
Jason Shen’s Cultivating Resilience
Kushaan Shah’s Marketing Mind Meld
(You can also see some of these on my Substack profile.)
When it comes to consuming these newsletters, I have a couple different ways. Some I subscribe to straight in my inbox and read them from Gmail. Others I treat as blogs and pipe them into my Feedly. There’s a whole feed set up just for Substacks.
My bookmarks
I save a TON of stuff to Pocket.
Pocket is my first stop when I come to add links to this newsletter each week. Favorite Feedly articles go to Pocket. Cool links shared in our Oyster Slack channel go to Pocket. Random tweets and viral posts go to Pocket.
(Pocket, too, is becoming a content home. If you haven’t checked it out lately, changes are a-happening.)
But I am also a major user of the old school browser bookmark — the “star” at the top of the Chrome browser. Here are a few things I’ve bookmarked as of late:
Around … Zoom alternative (and some differentiated branding)
Zoom Exotic … cool video backgrounds for Zoom
The Book Report 2021 … beautifully-designed, original website about Hayley Moir’s book reading this year
Pretend Store’s items for the office … I want this dice:
Geo Guessr … fun game for distributed teams
Orbital … remote work tool for collaboration
Full Page Screen Capture … for those times you see an awesome web design that you want to save or share
For fun …
No media diet would be complete without a list of all the non-digital, non-work stuffs, too. I’ll share some specifics down below, but generally I divide my “fun media” time into reading books and watching shows.
Books I’ve read recently:
You can see all the books I have finished reading (for, like, the past seven years). Recent highlights:
Things I’ve watched recently:
A lot of YouTube …
This launch video from Buffer:
This music mashup by William Maranci:
Clip videos for Parks and Rec, old Vine compliations, etc.
Totally gonna watch Dune this week!
I also have the NFL Gamepass package, which lets me watch replays of every NFL game each week. I wait until most games are over on Sundays, then I binge watch the ones that look interesting to me — no commercials, which is amazing.
How about you?
I’d love to hear any of your favorite news and entertainment sources. Feel free to hit reply to let me know what you’ve been getting into!
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
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