Awesome
A living document of hand-picked resources for marketers (or, I bookmark too many things to read and forget which folder they're in). I also have another list of awesome-developer-marketing resources.
If you're in B2D or actively marketing to developers and want to join a likeminded group of people, check out the Developer Marketing Community I'm co-building.
I'm also co-building Savepad - a collaborative swipe file SaaS for cross-functional growth/marketing teams. Savepad is your little corner on the internet to store, organize, reference, and share all the amazing inspiration, resources, and examples you find online. Join the waitlist 👇
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ronakganatra/ronakganatra/master/Waitlist%20Banner.png">
If you found this list helpful, tweet it to let other marketers find it!
Why am I turning my bookmarks into a public repo? The problem with marketing related content online is that it's 99% crap and fluff. I try to read a lot and save my resources. So I thought I might as well make it public, so you can save yourself some time trying to find things worth reading.
Blogs and Websites (Personal or Company)
- Growth Supply - Great writing on startups and growth from Ali Mese
- Kevin Indig - No-BS long reads on SEO, Content, and Strategy (⭐)
- Brian Balfour - Long Reads on growth and marketing
- Sixteen Ventures - Sales acceleration and growth marketing posts
- Andrew Chen - Long reads on growth and business (⭐)
- Better Marketing
Books
- Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson (⭐)
- Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger
- Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley
- Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
- Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom
- Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin
- Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Bear
- All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin
- Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (⭐)
- Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
- So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Product Led Growth by Wes Bush
- Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore
- Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella (⭐)
Case Studies
- Four Category Making Case Studies
- WhatsApp, The Anti-Marketing Growth Phenomenon
- Duolingo, The antithesis to the bazaar
- The SEO-driven user acquisition behind Zapier's growth to $35M ARR
- From PPC to IPO: How Snowflake Did It
- How Notion Built A $2B SaaS Startup Through Community & Templates
- How Microsoft crushed Slack
- How Burger King Used FIFA 20 To Turn a Tiny Soccer Team Into Superstars
- How Fractl Earned Links from 931 Unique Domains for Porch.com in a Single Year
- How Airtable’s Long Tail SEO Strategy Is Helping Build Their Moat (⭐)
- Grubhub's link building strategy
- How Monday.com Scaled to $5.7B in Market Cap
- You can't win - How Freshworks rewrote the traditional SaaS growth playbook
- How Segment grew to a 1Billion business
- When Multi-level Marketing Met GenZ
- How Stripe Scaled - Notes from Office Hours with Claire Hughes Johnson
- Stripe's model of product-led, developer-centric growth.
- How Segment Scaled - from 300% to 40% to 100% YoY Growth
- How Ikea tweaked its products to woo India's shoppers
- How the MVPs of the billion dollar businesses got their first 1,000 customers
- IKEA x India — A Research Case Study
- “Traction Tactics” Behind Square, PayPal, Waze, Twilio & More (⭐)
- What is Product-Led Growth? The case of EasyBON
- Content(ful) is King
- Starting from zero
- Your guide to PLG + enterprise - Inside Similarweb’s $190M growth engine and how PLG unlocks Enterprise customers
- Amazon’s Guide To Marketing Psychology
- How Notion Grows
- How Apple Mastered a 100-Year-Old Strategy Used to Sell Beer
- Inside Jasper's explosive growth through PLG and community
- How Shopify Grows
Content Marketing
- Kevin Indig's 2020 Roundup - An Airtable of 225 bookmarks from 2020
- How Morning Brew's referral program built an audience of 1.5 million subscribers
- Content Driven Growth - A great writeup on Content Driven Growth from Lenny's Newsletter, focusing on Hubspot, aHrefs, Intercom, and Slidebean (⭐)
- SaaS content marketing: The ultimate (but simple) guide
- Acquisition Channel Opportunities
- "Mirage Content" Is the Reason Your Company Blog Isn’t Generating Leads
- 100m Posts Analyzed: What You Need To Write The Best Headlines
- Visual Hierarchy: A 2021 Optimization Guide For Marketers
- Knowing when to use "How to" versus "Why to" content
- The four forces of bad content
- Content marketing for founding teams
- 17 tips for great copywriting
- The Animalz Content Marketing Benchmark Report 2021 by Ryan Lewis
- 16 Ways to Generate Stellar Content Ideas
- Elon Musk's Storytelling Framework
CRM
- Really Good Emails - Email inspiration for every email use case
Design Inspiration
- Copper CRM
- Mollie Payments
- Heap CRM
- Miro
- Loom
- Taskade
- Monday
- Kong
- Metadata
- GraphCMS (Shameless Plug)
- Segment
- Twilio
- Algolia
- Drip
- Kajabi
- Proof
- Keap
- Mailchimp
- Aiva Labs
- Landbot
- Dynamic Yield
- Pitch
- 8Base
Newsletters
- Growth Newsletter by Julian Shapiro (⭐)
- Hitenism by Hiten Shah (⭐)
- Growth Memo by Kevin Indig
- Marketing Weekly by Corey Haines
Performance Marketing & Optimization
- Please, Please Don’t A/B Test That (⭐)
- Why most analytics efforts fail
- How to (Actually) Calculate CAC
- How to Build and Optimize CTA Buttons That Convert
- Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Meta, Discord App Store, Spotify Podcasts
- How acquisition and retention work together
- How to Scale Outbound Marketing
- A lesson from a DTC marketer to a B2B marketer
Podcasts
- The Tim Ferriss Show by Tim Ferriss
- Pivot by Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher (⭐)
- The Prof G Show by Scott Galloway
- Everyone Hates Marketers by Louis Grenier (⭐)
- This Old Marketing Podcast by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose
- Perpetual Traffic by Ralph Burns and Amanda Powell
- Online Marketing Made Easy by Amy Porterfield
- Marketing Scoop by Laura Morelli
- Marketing Over Coffee by John J. Wall and Christopher S. Penn
- Copyblogger FM by Darrell Vesterfelt and Curt Nickisch
- Growth Mapping by Sujan Patel and Aaron Agius
- Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffmann
- Entrepreneurs on Fire by John Lee Duma
Product, Community, and Developer Marketing
- Product Marketing Reading List - A reading list of PMM books by the PMA
- What is Product Marketing?
- How to build a successful Go To Market Strategy
- Community-Led Growth: The Product-Led Growth Expansion Pack (⭐)
- Coming for the Content, Staying for the Community” Started With Video Games (Or Maybe Religion?) But Will Define Media This Decade
- Online communities at every stage of the startup journey
- Ways to think about customer onboarding
- Community First, Product Second
- The Right Way to do a Competitor Analysis for a New Product Category
- Getting better at Community Building, one habit at a time (⭐)
- A Guide to B2B SaaS Product Onboarding (⭐)
- Relationship First Management
- Yes, you can pivot to Product Led Growth (⭐)
- Community ≠ Marketing: Why We Need Go-to-Community, Not Just Go-to-Market(⭐)
- Selling to the Enterprise: Crafting Product Narratives (⭐)
- The Buyer Intent Playbook: How Marketers Can Utilize Intent Data
- Product-Led Growth Tech Stack: 199 SaaS tools for growth
- Crash Course in Marketing Goal Setting (⭐)
- You Can't Buy Integration
- How to Create a Product Content Strategy (⭐)
- A Founder's Guide to Community
- How to Build a Product-Led Growth Strategy
SEO
- SEO Community - Public domain project listing resources for SEO (⭐)
- ahrefs SEO trends for 2021
- Learning SEO - Free SEO learning roadmap with tons of resources
- How does SEO Work? - G2 article on the basics of SEO
- Search Engine Land
- Pain-Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions (⭐)
- 9 Ways to Break Through a Website Traffic Plateau (⭐)
- There Are Four Kinds of Keyword Research; Make Sure You’re Doing the Right One(s)
Startups & Getting Started
- Early Adopter Marketing – How startups get their first users
- What I Learned About Startups by Collecting 30,000 Data Points
- Mapping the Insights that Drive Startup Ideas & Theses
- Offer-led Growth
- Why You Don’t Need to be “Enterprise-Ready” or “Scalable” as Yet and Other Notes on Crafting B2B Software with Contenda’s Founder, Lilly Chen
- SaaS Growth Strategy — Step-by-Step Worksheet
- If we can make a product work for anyone, it usually works better for everyone
- Seven Legends of Leverage
- Your North Star
- 9 Ways to gauge market demand for your startup
- How to know when to pivot?
- Founders should think about channel/offer fit instead of product/market fit
- Your northstar metric may be broken 🛠
Marketing Strategy and Growth
- Difference between SLG, MLG, and PLG
- The Ultimate Growth Strategy Guide: 26 Growth Strategy Techniques from 7 Tech Startups
- Growth Marketing Summit: Marketing with Speed and Data
- 25 Growth Strategies
- Growth as a Mindset
- This marketing strategy actually made me happier
- How to Run a Growth Experiment - Learn the 4 Steps
- Metrics to focus on before and after product/market fit. How to better understand your product at different stages?
- The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth
- Introducing enterprise sales to a product-led growth organization
- The SaaS Metrics That Matter
- How marketing sneakily affects our decision-making
- The Product Strategy Stack
- How to Master Product Virality
- Systems Thinking 101
- Hyper-growth is great, but don’t die while trying
- SaaS Renewal Best Practices
- Growth vs Profitability
- 11 Channels that consistently work
- Improving Your SaaS' Free to Paid Conversion Rate
- Don't Let Your North Star Metric Deceive You (⭐)
- Flywheels And How To Create Content Communities (⭐)
- How to get your company out of the MQL trap
- How to know if you've got product-market fit
- SaaS Churn and Short-Term Customers: The Contrarian View (⭐)
- Is it time to ditch the old SaaS metrics?
- The 4 Types of Defensibility
- How to use FOMO to Increase Conversions
- How Amazon Built It's Growth Ecosystem
- International Growth is no longer optional for SaaS Companies
- Do Your Marketing Metrics Show You the Full Picture?
- The three types of “good” onboarding friction
- Designing for Buying: How to Break Through the Ceiling in Product-Led Growth
- Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs a Conversion Funnel
- How People Discover New Products (⭐)
- How to Measure “Hard-to-Measure” Marketing Channels
- “Traction Tactics” Behind Square, PayPal, Waze, Twilio & More (⭐)
- 3 Unusual Drivers of Early-Stage Growth
- The 6 Patterns Of Uncommonly Successful Teams (⭐)
- Product-Led Growth’s Failure
- The GACC Marketing Brief: The best framework we’ve created (⭐)
- The Conversion Marketing Funnel: How to Unlock More Leads, Sales & Revenue with A Personalized Sales Funnel (⭐)
- Why premature scaling fails: The Traction Treadmill
- What’s A High Performance Organization?
- Where Freemium Thrives and Dies
- Product-led Growth Companies: A Framework for Prioritization
- Six rules of hiring for growth (⭐)
- Scaling to $100 Million - The definitive benchmarking report on how cloud companies grow operationally efficient businesses and scale to $100 million in ARR (and beyond)
- When and How to Take Big Swings
- The Best Way to Set Marketing Priorities and Smash Your Goals
- Marketing is Everything
- How to accelerate growth in 2022
- What is Hypergrowth?
- Product Driven Vs. Customer Driven
- [Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing are Becoming Obsolete](Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete)
- Exponential Growth Isn’t Cool. Combinatorial Explosion Is
- High Output Marketing
- Taking Your Customer’s Side Is The Most Underrated Growth Hack
- Trendjacking Without the Cringe
Teams, Leadership, and Management
- The playbook for hiring the right marketer at the right time for your startup
- The Startup Org Chart from Founding to IPO
- Leaders Whose Time Has Passed
- Your Marketing Org is Slow. Here’s a Framework to Move Faster
- All your VPs really need to do is tilt the curve
- How the Best CEOs Use ‘Thinking Time’ (⭐)
- How to Get Started with Agile Marketing
- The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers (⭐)
- 20 Technical Skills Every Marketer Needs
- Here's How Google Knows in Less Than 5 Minutes if a New Employee Will Get Off to the Perfect Start (⭐)
- How To Be Assertive At Work Without Being a Jackass
- Heuristics That Almost Always Work
- Managing people 🤯
- The Best Leaders in the World Are “Quiet Managers”
- The power of Amazon's written Narratives
- What are your company's anti-values?
- The People Roadmap for Startups
- GET YOUR OKRS OUT OF MY GEMS
- This Is What Happens When There Are Too Many Meetings
- Managing Your Mental Health While Running a Startup
- Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact
- Ask HN: I burned out but I don't want to let my team down
- 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
- Genuine VS toxic positivity in language: communicating with empathy
- 28% of people quit because of bad managers: The best way to confront your boss before it’s too late
- If you feel Stuck, Read this (Everyday)
- A Recipe to Grow Leverage
- Annual planning is a colossal waste of time
- Owner economics and Strategy
- What Happens When Stress Runs in Your Team
Tools
- The 2021 Marketing Tech Stack - Recommended stack from Intercom
- MarTech Base - Resource for building stacks and seeing who's using what
- Build Your DXP - Community durated list of API-first tools for Martech stacks
- What's your Marketing Stack?
- Marketing Integrations: The Challenge of Getting Your Marketing Tech Stack to Play Nice
- Letter to a new Startup CMO
Tweets
- When doing customer research, don't ask your customer for their OPINION — get them to tell you STORIES.
- Top Marketers in SaaS
- The first line of your copy is crucial. (⭐)
- 10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)
- Turn any SERP into a keyword research tool
- 2020 Best Campaigns we didn't create
- 10 Questions for Teasing Out Market Opportunities
- Digital PR for SEO Rankings
- How to Grow Startups
- Simple Copywriting
- 100 Landing Page Hot Tips (⭐)
- Mapping the Creator Economy
- Marketing to Developers (⭐)
- Best Threads on Twitter
- Marketing Framework for Communities
- How to determine value of backlinks
- The SaaS Board Meeting
- Oatly case study
- Uncommon SEO Knowledge (⭐)
- M&A Marketing and Acquiring Communities
- Community Capitalism
- Marketing to Developers and building developer relations
- Turning opinions into marketing proof
- Building a Community from Scratch
- Best SaaS Company Blogs
- Founder "Types", and how to hire accordingly
- OnlyFans grew faster than any other creator platform this year (⭐)
- Playing long term games in business
- Driving others to change to your product
- Landing Page Copywriting Tips (⭐)
- Linear Growth vs. Non-Linear Growth (⭐)
- The top 0.1% of marketing mental models.
- SEO is the magic ingredient behind billion-dollar companies (⭐)
- Long list of free and paid Marketing tools
- 7 ways to get attention for your product (⭐)
- An intro to startup growth (⭐)
- How to pick a North Star metric
- How Freshboards doubled their traffic in 3 months pre-IPO
- The best marketing doesn't look like marketing
- 30 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Marketing Right Now
- Blueprint to Optimize Landing Pages
- The "Why Now?" of Startups
- Is Your Startup on Fire?
- Customers don't care about how novel your startup is
- How to bring Fintech products to market faster
Others
- Kevan Lee's Interview Prep - list of resources for marketing interviews
- The mental models of Chinese tech
- Bottlenecks of Startups
- Kevin Indig's Good Reads - List of articles, books, and videos recommended by Kevin Indig
- The Unicornian - The onion for startups?
- Your Pricing Should Be Free or Ultra Expensive (And What To Do If It’s Stuck In The Middle)
- How to Find Product Market Fit - Peter Reinhardt (Segment) talk at Y Combinator
- Books people (re)read
- Stop Letting OKRs Masquerade as Strategy
- Welcome to your bland new world (⭐)
- How to Tackle SaaS Homepage Design for Your B2B SaaS Company
- Your website is your most important marketing asset. Here's how to build it right the 1st time.
- 6 Questions To Ask Before Adopting Usage-Based Pricing
- How to calculate and implement value-based pricing
- Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste
- What to look for when you're hiring a Head of Growth
- Why millennial managers are burned out
- Keep Them Coming Back: 23 Habit-Making Insights for Product-Minded Founders
- 37 Tasks Every Marketer Should Automate
- Annual Planning is Killing Your Growth – Try This Plan Instead
- Creating the Ideal Customer Profile as a Startup: A Step-by-step Guide
- Personalization Case Studies from Ninetailed
- Persistence and predictability of SaaS growth
- The Decision Making Pendulum
- 30 Years of dodging repetitive work with automation
- The Company-Building Cornerstones Every Founder Needs to Focus On
- Early-stage marketing compensation explained
- Focus is king, do not waste it
- 39 Moves to Survive (& Thrive) in a Downturn: 2022 Edition
- What to do Next When You Have a Business Idea?