01. Annie Cushing / Annielytics
Annie makes data sexy. She’s played just about every role one can play when it comes to creating and promoting content online. She’s written it, edited it, marketed it, optimized it, acquired links for it, e-mailed about it, pimped it on social media, you name it. And all those things are just fabulous. But she points out that if you don’t measure it, how will you know what you did right, what you could have done better, and what each of your audience segments wants more of? And if your data is ugly, you run the risk of not motivating others to take the actions you want them to take based on your data.
She will give you practical strategies to help you put your data in stilettos and make it work the pole. She’ll show you how to use tools like the ubiquitous Google Analytics, as well as various tools that help you analyze social media success and even competitive intelligence. (That’s when you’ll have to buckle your seat belt and return your tray to its upright position.) Her goal is to make my blog posts short and easy to digest.
02. Customer.io
Customer.io helps web and mobile apps send smarter e-mails. They blog about everything from sending and receiving data, setting up triggered and manual e-mails, segmenting, and integrating between e-mail clients. They also provide examples to get started.
03. Jim Gray
Jim is an engineer and data scientist, specializing in marketing automation, customer issues, and repeatable growth processes. His blog provides refreshingly direct coverage of product development, marketing strategy, and marketing trends, with a bit of a slant towards B2B SaaS since he’s currently bootstrapping a product in that domain.
He also publishes a newsletter on marketing strategy and technique, which I strongly recommend. Unlike many newsletters, it receives unique blog-length content, and is geared towards “use it today” advice about making your marketing both more effective and more conscious of its effect on customer experience and success.
04. Joanna Wiebe / Copyhackers
Joanna promises to help you write more persuasive, believable and usable copy – sans pixie dust – so you can boost your website and e-mail conversion rates.
She says she fell into copywriting. Just totally tumbled in, head over feet. She didn’t like the word “copywriter” when she first started – so she went by “creative writer”. She feels that was a big mistake that set her back three years. Now she know that COPY is awesome, and that copywriters are the best-kept secret in the sales and marketing world.
05. Kiki Schirr / Tech Doodles
Kiki’s other projects include blogging for {grow} and for The Craft.
06. Laura Klein / Users Know
Laura fell in love with technology 20 years ago when she saw her first usability test. Since then, she’s been an engineer, designer, and product manager, helping companies of all sizes learn about their users so they can build better products. She’s the author of UX for Lean Startups and a second book coming out in 2016 called Build Better Products. Her blog and podcast at Users Know cover topics ranging from product management, design, startups, growth, and general tech ranting.
07. Lincoln Murphy / Sixteen Ventures
Since 2006, Lincoln Murphy has directly helped 300+ SaaS companies accelerate their growth by optimizing the Customer Lifecycle, from customer acquisition to retention. On his blog you can learn about everything from Customer Success, to Growth Marketing, and SaaS business models and revenue models.
08. Patrick McKenzie / Kalzemeus
Patrick McKenzie was an engineer with an idea for some software. Programming came easy, marketing didn’t, but he appreciated the new challenge. At some point over the years, he graduated from being an engineer to running a software business. He’s been blogging regularly since 2006 — check out his greatest hits for a curated list of the best stuff he’s produced, or read this if you want the brief overview.
09. Peep Laja / ConversionXL
Get actionable business advice, latest research and experiments on conversion optimization and getting better business results.
Whether it’s your website, your landing pages, products, pricing or marketing campaigns – the content here will help you improve your business.
Peep Laja is an entrepreneur and a conversion optimization junkie. He runs a unique conversion optimization marketing agency called Markitekt (they make existing sites better and build new conversion optimized websites) + several niche internet businesses like T1Q and others.
He delivers trainings and workshops on conversion optimization and internet marketing, consult businesses in need and plan the architecture of websites that sell.
10. Price Intelligently
Price Intelligently empowers companies to get the most out of SaaS.
Their mantras:
- Data is essential, but simply translating it into graphs won’t solve the problem. Data requires critical thinking to become truly valuable.
- Success isn’t about raising money, it’s about happy paying customers. Ten happy customers will pay more dividends than a hundred ready to churn at any moment.
- Focusing on one industry helps us better understand and empower our customers.
11. Randal Olson
Randy runs the popular data blog at RandalOlson.com/blog/, most recently known for creating the “Ultimate American Road Trip” and solving Where’s Waldo?.
He tweets daily about data analysis and visualization and and leads the largest online community dedicated to data visualization on Reddit, /r/DataIsBeautiful, which now serves over 2,000,000 unique monthly visitors.
Beside all that, he works as an AI researcher at the University of Pennsylvania trying to usher in the next era of Artificial Intelligence, and does his best to ensure that AI will end up friendly rather than a malevolent Skynet.
12. Talia Wolf / Conversioner
“It’s not what you’re selling, it’s who you’re selling to.” — Talia Wolf, Founder and CEO of Conversioner
Conversioner’s blog is the textbook manual to all things emotional and psychological in conversion optimization. It provides actionable tips and guides on how to rock conversion optimization and grow your business.
Talia’s job is to build and execute her client’s conversion optimization strategies, using emotional targeting, consumer psychology and user behavior data to generate more revenues, leads, engagement and sales.
She’ll give you actionable tips on how to build better user journeys (from landing pages and registration forms to entire checkout flows and mobile sites), how to finally A/B test correctly and understand your test results and how to build marketing strategies and follow templates for higher conversion rates.
13. Tomasz Tunguz
Tomasz is a partner at Redpoint where he writes daily, data-driven blog posts about key questions facing startups including how to fund raise, startup benchmarks, management best practices and team building.
14. Vero
Vero offers a smart way to automate e-mails based on what your customers do. And that’s what you can learn about on their blog, which offers great beginner to advanced material about e-mail marketing campaigns.
15. Violeta Nedkova
She is a member of many startup communities, including Product Hunt, so she gets a lot of inspiration from there.
What I like the most is that Violeta always finds the quickest, easiest way to get the job done – if you’re looking for clients on twitter or trying to get more feedback for your app, she’s one step ahead of you. She even has this handy curation for those who wish to master startup marketing.
2 Comments
Great list Nichole, really liking the layout of your blog btw
Thanks so much! Jim Gray chose the theme and Trevor Hatfield built the site. Would recommend both / either of their services. 🙂