In 2014, I participated in a national Web Design and Development contest. As a developer student, a design teacher volunteered to help me with the design aspect. When I first met her, she offered to review one of my designs in class.

My taste of design was influenced by flashy drafs designs online, especially from Dribbble. Not understand much of its effectiveness, I thought having a huge footer was solid and cool.

But the teacher pointed out it wasn’t suitable for my design. Since it was an app, with the page’s max height is the browser’s height. …

Yesterday, I cross-post Not another productivity hack on reddit. Even though it reached hot, and users found it useful, it marked as removed after 10 hours.

No actual reason except the system generated notice (Sorry this post…). I messaged the mods, and no reply. As a user, I have no voice there.

It reminds me of Rand Fishkin — a well respected marketer’s view on his recent interviews/talks.

In short, many online platform take away the leverage from users to keep people on their platform. Where many of them are content provider for the platform.

For example, Google search results…

When I was younger, most of my time spent writing code, with 5 hours of sleep a day. I often read about productivity hacks, hope to squeeze a little more works. But nothing really works.

Having an unhealthy lifestyle drained my energy. In the past year, even if I wanted to, I can’t do it anymore. I need more breaks, more sleep, and more time away from the projects.

Turn out, it was for the better.

Most personal productivity hacks are to kick-start some unused parts of our energy. But when you have already drained them out, there is no…

What apps do you love and excited to use every day? Do you think they use tracking? For most apps, the answer is YES, they use tracking.

Tracking is there to improve the products, services, or prevent server attack and hacking. It collects data from the server, apps on your device, through email, or social media. Either love or hate it, you should be aware of it.

In this post, I will show you some common methods of tracking. Details about how it works, their purposes, and just in case, how to disable it.

1. Server-Side Tracking

Do you remember the last time reading something long, with high engagement? Most of the time, a long-winded conversation, or writing makes it hard for people to perceive.

In the past, I communicate by expressing all points I have in mind. And I saw people keep nodding head or squint their eyes. Those are sights of trying to engagement rather than actually engaged.

But recently, I’ve learned how to be concise.

Let’s start with why concise?

One goal for most conversations or writings is, make it easy for the readers to understand that conversation. …

When I was studying at a university, I had a part-time job in a bakehouse. And Adam was a senior colleague of mine. I was always interested in how did someone got to here, when we know each other.

One time, I asked Adam — how did you start as a baking chef?
More or less, it wasn’t what he wanted to be when he was young. He loved basketball and was an excellent player.

Though, he got caught up, and start to take practice less and less seriously.

One day, he looked back and realized his friends became much…

This is a summary of Courtland’s mental model about validating a Product

Try different channels

When validating your product, try different channels. The best channel should be the one you can use indefinitely.

For example: validating through ads can be quick and simple, but does your budget allow you to run in the long term?

Besides, Ad is one of the possible channels. If it doesn’t work there, it doesn’t mean your idea doesn’t work. It can be a few different reasons (bad message, wrong audience)

See The Bullseye Framework Gabriel Weinberg — founder of DuckDuckGo

The 4 wheels

To have a good product, it needs…

An interesting question I bumped into today — How to learn to sell? Asked by an engineer turned founder for his first time.

The question received interesting answers from engineer-turned-founders, sales-related-book-authors, and people who have been doing sells for more than a decade.

1. Separate Sales from Marketing

For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.

For larger deals you “sell with your ears” as much as you talk.

— answered by skmurphy

2. Direct and Indirect Sales

Sales can best be distinguished by indirect sales…