Buffer Blog

1. Landing Page Copy:

This piece of text is your USP "Identifies which of your subscribers are influencers"

I think that all you need is , with a slight modification:

i. "Identify influencers in you email list" and

ii. the 4 bullet points above the How it works video. ie

"Generate relevant content for your audience (more traffic)

Segment your audience so you can send targeted offers (save money)

Create offers that will convert better (more revenue)

Target advertising dollars that reaches your ideal audience (higher ROI)"

Everything else is too much to read - most people are just not going to do that.

2. How it works Video:

This can then come directly under this copy (in place of the infographic you have currently.

3. Background Image:

This is just too random. You want something that's more reflective of your users end state after they've used your product.

4. Call to Action button:

Instead of what you have, induce a little excitement/urgency by changing the text in the button to something like "Get Early Access".

Being "notified" is just boring.

Note: Everything to this point, ie the landing page copy, the video and the CTA button should fit on one page without scrolling.

5. Other Links:

The purpose of this pre-launch landing page is to get people to click on the CTA button and give you their email address, not click around.

a. If you take the suggestion I made in #2, that removes the need for the "How it works" link in the header

b. Similarly, the CTA…

Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/)
to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered)
; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title.

A few feeds I follow:

News

* Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss [a lot of the posts are repeated over both, and note these are not necessarily the front page posts, my guess is that they are upvoted new posts, so I end up reading some posts before they reach the front page])

* Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/ (http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php)

* ThreatPost - http://threatpost.com/ (http://threatpost.com/feed)

* TheNextWeb - http://thenextweb.com/ (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenextweb)

* Wired - http://www.wired.com/ (http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index)

* iClarified - http://www.iclarified.com/ (http://iclarified.com/rss/rss.xml)

* TorrentFreak - https://torrentfreak.com/ (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Torrentfreak)

* r/WorldNews - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss)

Blogs

* Securelist -…

My goal is only to convince you to try taking one, perhaps a week of cold showers, and see if you like it and want to keep going.

1) First off, if you're not exercising much, you should probably spend your willpower on ramping that up. In general, research has shown that willpower acts more like a muscle than a purely "fuel tank" model and taxing your willpower in small increments can actually strengthen it in the long run. [1] But in general, your shower time is already allocated for, and happens at a regular interval, so after exercise (which takes up time that people sometimes say "they don't have") it is a good place to do some willpower strengthening.

2) In the book, I actually explain that I start cold for 3 minutes and then end warm/hot. It's actually better than just going warm right away.

3) I admit that when the water is cold, you are not able to think about much. But if you turn it back to warm after a period, you still can spend the rest of the shower thinking. Also I find that clearing your head via the cold means the rest of your day's thinking is more clear, which may be worth the trade off.

Ultimately, you should just try it once, go through it, and see if it serves you.

[1] http://blog.bufferapp.com/what-the-research-on-habit-formation-reveals-about-willpower-and-overall-well-being

I perform much better at interviews when I am relaxed. If you put too much pressure on yourself, then you will not be relaxed and will perform badly.

If you do a perfect simulation of an interview at home do you perform well? Find an interview question you haven't seen before, and attempt it exactly like you would at an interview. Have a software developer friend mock interview you.

If you feel like you perform better in a simulation, you may consider seeing a psychologist or reading some books on the subject. I once went to a workshop on how to deal with high pressure situations, and many of the exercises suggested made a difference to my interviewing.

The tips in the following article I feel apply equally to interviewing. I suffer the mentioned symptoms during interviews. When adrenaline levels are high the brain will enable a short-cut mechanism that allows you to make quicker decisions, but often not correct when considering a difficult question. The dreaded "tunnel vision" is a fight/flight response.

http://blog.bufferapp.com/what-happens-to-our-brains-when-we-have-stage-fright-the-science-of-public-speaking

Before I even do any real-world validation I like to score my idea based on four criteria -

1. how much time is needed to get this idea off the ground,
2. how much money is needed to get this idea off the ground,
3. how many new skills are needed to get this idea off the ground,
4. How much will I still enjoy building this a year from now?

Sometimes an idea is just too big or ambitious at first and this helps me sanity check it.

After that I like to validate my idea - for that I need to learn if people are:

1. interested in the idea
2. willing to pay/use it

I always recommend keeping it simple, fast, and cheap - customer interviews, landing pages, mock ups, etc.

This example from buffer - https://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it has been around for a while but I still like to point it out as a good way to test a concept and see if people are willing to pay for it.

I'd love to hear what you are working on, I'm a business coach and do a lot of free coaching for new startups ping me if interested jarrett@startupdaybook.com

I found this pic interesting:

http://blog.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-Shot-2013-04-17-at-4.50.28-PM.png

What I've found recently is I feel like I think better when I scrunch into a position like this. I don't know why, and it's not like my own scientific study.

Maybe it's just like going into an isolated place like a shower helps me think better, this type of position seems to as well. I'll cross my arms, and even scrunch my shoulders over. It might even look like I'm in pain.

But how many times have you also seen someone say "Let me think", and they might cross one arm over their chest to hold the other arm at the elbow so that arm can rub their head and cover their eyes.

So this thesis about these poses being better for power, and confidence is interesting. But I'm curious if there's a lot of usefulness from both.