248. Best Articles of 2021 🤩
My favorite articles, essays, and emails from the past year
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.
Hi there 👋
Tis the season for “best of” lists. So for the next four weeks, I will share my favorite things from the past year, starting with this week’s breakdown of articles, essays, and emails. Here is the tentative schedule for the coming weeks. If there’s anything you’d like for me to list out, feel free to let me know. And of course, I’d love to hear your favorites, too.
Best articles of 2021 (this week)
Best new marketing tools of 2021
My favorite books of the year
Best of 2021 (allthethings)
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
P.S. Substack has a new feature where you can gift a subscription to anyone you’d like. I’ll include the button below in case anyone is looking for a different sort of gift for that marketer friend of yours. All proceeds from subscriptions to this newsletter go to iFundWomen.
My favorite articles, essays, and emails from 2021
Dragon Hoarding Enormous Pile of Treasure Seeks Unpaid Intern by Maeve Dunigan
Not marketing-related at all, but lol
Brand audit by Ana Andjelic
Ana is an authority on brand-building, and this essay from her substack is all signal, no noise (and there’s a ton of brand noise out there). She proposes a list of questions to ask yourself when auditing your brand across five different categories.
On Building Emotional Capital by Sara Campbell with Sari Azout
If you’re in the mood for a sit-back-relax interview with a brilliant, warmhearted person, I can highly recommend this conversation from Every.to. Sari Azout (the one being interviewed) writes one of my favorite newsletters, and her thoughts on business and marketing never fail to disappoint.
“Companies need financial capital. But they also need emotional capital—good energy, positivity, and resilience.”
Users are … / People are … by Ted Hunt
This super tiny micro-site (really, just the image below) helps articulate the distinction between what our data-driven user-oriented products see and what we are as people.
Usage-based Pricing 2.0 by Kyle Poyar
If I were to give out a Blog of the Year award, I’d be hard-pressed to find a more deserving winner than the OpenView blog. They write about PLG, startups, growth, and investing. This article on usage-based pricing is as good an example as any of their in-depth, actionable, and forward-thinking content.
(While we’re on the topic of OpenView, I also quite enjoyed this substack from Kyle Poyar about where growth lives within an org. It’s an essay I was lucky to contribute to.)
Onboarding artifacts by Ibrahim Bashir
This article wins the award for Most Times Kevan Has Re-Read.
Published on Ibrahim’s substack, the article covers all the documents that you should have on hand at your company to help new joiners learn the business. Even more than onboarding, I’ve found the list incredibly useful simply to gut-check what I know or don’t know about the business myself.
Here’s the graphic:
Finding the Words to Start Over. Again by Alex McDaniel
This article was technically published on New Year’s Eve Eve (Dec 30) before 2021, but I’m including it on this list because I found it an incredibly poignant story that shared a perspective I imagine resonates with a lot of people. Changing jobs, feeling lost, wondering what’s next. The essay tells that narrative through the lens of journalism, jobs, and covid, but I think some of the takeaways are universal.
All this time I thought I was suffering from a prolonged bout of writer's block when the truth is I wasn’t doing the work of becoming the person I want to be. And though I can’t predict what my LinkedIn will look like in a year, I have a pretty clear idea of the woman I hope to become by then: someone who finally makes room in her life for the things that will matter long after her words are forgotten.
Also … the top 5 articles I wrote (and emailed to you) in 2021
203. Brand strategy playbook 🦄 from January 24, where I share the way that I’ve built brands at Vox, Buffer, Feedly, Polly, and Oyster
228. Transparent Pay 💰 from July 18, in which I tell you how much I make :)
239. Partnerships 🤝 from Sept 26, including a partnerships playbook that we’ve used at Buffer and Oyster
234. Community-Led Growth 💥 from August 23, where I opine about what CLG could look like
246. Value 💶 from November 14 (just two weeks ago) where I break down the different surveys to discover willingness to pay
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.
Not subscribed yet? No worries.
I send a free email every week or so. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Already subscribed? You’re in good company …
I’m lucky to count thousands of subscribers as part of this list, including folks from awesome tech companies like these:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️