🤓 Growth-Hackers // Revscale Resources 💸
October 9, 2022 | Volume 1 Series 4 | Micro-SaaS products of the week, Gamification and Customer Success techniques, an unreal design system file + the reasoning to use it, & more.
🚀 Here’s another set of paid resources & brainwaves from founders and thought leaders alike, handed to you on a platter to help you crush this week!
(Also, happy to extend my offer for 33% off Revscale til the End of October - or if you pitch me and knock my socks off, I’ll give you the entire onboarding/branding session to you for free).
💻 Product Demos
A lot of us are selling constantly - whether it’s fundraising for our own ventures or talking to potential large or enterprise customers - and whether it’s to close a check or sell a tool, we have to demo our products and/or services. I snagged this resource from the team at Close.io since I think they put together an awesome checklist:
🔎 MicroSaaS Products of the Week
Because who doesn’t love a few good handy tools to add to the belt for when you need to knock down a messy bottleneck-ed process?
Leave Me Alone • Unsubscribe from unwanted emails.
ChimpCharge • Simple invoicing for freelancers.
Listenbox • Publish YouTube shows as podcasts.
Chainfuel • Telegram group management.
CartHook • Add post-purchase offers.
AutoIdle • Automatically put your staging and review apps to sleep.
OrgChartHub • Org charts for HubSpot.
Recapture.io • Abandoned cart recovery.
Squid Alerts • On-call calendars and escalation chains.
Bybrand • Email signature management software.
Storism • Model and share business data.
💰 For those C-level execs / Founders who are just swamped right now
I’ve got this awesome twitterpost-esque deck that is a collection of super helpful tips from Brett Adcock who is the newest addition to my “founders who just get it” watchlist to learn from, and I would be doing you an injustice if I didn’t share it. Highly recommend you give it a look through!
Here’s the link to the resource - let me know what you think!
👨🏼💻🧑🏾💻 For my fellow design geeks, here’s an AWESOME Figma UI kit that I found this past week and want to give to you - a breakdown of what Design Systems are, why we need to utilize them to scale, along with the link to the file that you can copy and use for inspo in your own files (here’s the link).
The name of the game / mission / goal / high-level strategy / whatever you want to call it is to “Create a tool that will reduce the time spent on routine and provide an opportunity for inspiration and innovation.”
Let’s take a quick look at Design Systems and Components, and why they’re so important to utilize for growth-hacking / growing at scale.
Reasons to Build and Utilize a Design System:
Efficiency
“Consistency is a result of efficiency, not the other way around. When the system is intuitive and empowering to use, consistency becomes an automatic by-product of adoption.”
A Design System ensures maximum returns on time spent on code and design, with minimal wasted energy, to achieve the same results.
It improves the approach, minimizing time spent creating products from scratch so it can be better spent solving problems.
It improves code through iteration, which is cheaper than writing quality code from scratch on demand.
It eliminates the need to repeatedly communicate design decisions that are documented and implemented.
It frees teams up from maintaining their own code, which is often duplicated.
Agility
“Agility needs two things. One is a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness. And agility requires stability, a stable foundation—a platform, if you will—of things that don't change.”
A Design System facilitates a product’s agility by preventing stagnation on topics already discussed, agreed upon, documented, and implemented.
It shares the design and coding workload evenly between all team members.
It allows us to create prototypes, experiments, and launch MVPs in less time. This makes sure elements like consistency and accessibility aren’t ignored in the initial product in order to meet launch times.
Quality
“Focus on the best solutions, quantity become as consolidation of Agility and Efficiency”
A Design System provides a systematic approach to managing code quality and design decisions.
Being in constant evolution through iterations means the quality of each component continues to improve over time, particularly in comparison to new components.
The fact it (the design system) is a modular, closed and versioned system reduces the risk of losses to both code and design.
It’s easily isolated in order to assess its quality and measure its external integration.
Design systems help with the three core pillars described above, and the components within the design system help with the following:
Reducing development costs
Devs from different teams don’t need to implement the elements provided by CDS
There will be less time spent on discussions/alignment between devs and design
Designers don’t need to create new elements for every project/task
Well-document components library
Avoiding mistakes and bugs
Consistent among different brands
Same interaction and UI among different modules and sections (e.g. Cashier, Sidebar, Reg, Inputs, etc.)
Theming
Validating ideas/hypotheses for stakeholders
You can build your own UI app (Rapid Proto) faster and not from scratch
Benefit for hackathons
Quality
Performance
Best practices across different brands
Lightweight (Less JS = more performance)
Faster UI Development
One place for all UI components (Source of truth)
Consistent icons
Non-frontend developers could build nice UI using CDS
I have more of these, so if you’re looking for something specific, let me know and I’ll dig through the archives.
📖 A Guide to Community Gamification and Customer Success
A great read for those of you who are implementing or plan to implement gamification features and strategies within your products.
Here’s the link - just request access, and I’ll get to it ASAP.
Ok, that’s it for today! Back to the grind 🧑🏾💻
📅 As always, here’s my calendar link if anyone wants to take 15 minutes to bounce any ideas, poke around the resource war-chest, or borrow some members of the team to help scale up faster.
PS - did you see the new Revscale video? I’ve got a great animator that I’ve trained/helped enhance over the past few years. Let me know, he’s not the cheapest out there (Roughly $3/sec) yet not the most expensive (top quality videos can run $5-$7/sec) BUT the quality is immaculate, and he works fast.