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TIKTOK LAUNCHES NEW IN-STREAM SHOPPING PUSH

TikTok reports that millions of items have been purchased from nearly half a million merchants and brands over the past year through its in-app shopping feature. As part of its push to boost in-stream shopping, TikTok has launched the “Fall Deals For You” campaign, offering discounts from brands like Dyson and e.l.f. Cosmetics. However, despite efforts to replicate the success in China, Western users remain cautious about shopping directly within social apps.

THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY HAS REACHED A WATERSHED MOMENT

Subscribers are frustrated by rising prices, lack of flexibility, and "vampire subscriptions" they can't track. While password-sharing crackdowns have led to new subscriptions, many users are opting to cancel or seek alternatives. The popularity of tiered subscriptions, particularly those with ad-supported plans, is growing, but they risk diminishing user experience through excessive advertising. In Europe, indirect subscriptions through telcos are thriving, and Super Bundling platforms that consolidate multiple services are anticipated to lead the market by simplifying billing and enhancing customer satisfaction.

6 TAKEAWAYS FROM STORYLANE'S DEMO DUNDIES

Storylane's Demo Dundies event successfully reactivated cold enterprise deals by focusing on customer advocacy. By aligning the event with pop culture, specifically referencing The Office, it tapped into an engaged fan base. It maximized reach with shareable content, involving over 100 nominees and panelists to promote the event, and incentivized participation with a $5,000 trip to Paris. The team carefully scripted and rehearsed the event, using costumes and humor to enhance engagement. The event's recording was repurposed for sales enablement, helping close deals with cold prospects.

HOW SOCIAL LISTENING INCREASES CUSTOMER ADVOCACY: 6 EXAMPLES

Customer advocacy is built by turning loyal customers into promoters of your brand. Social listening helps brands identify these advocates, track online conversations, and respond to feedback in real time. This approach enhances customer relationships and drives brand awareness. Examples of this strategy include brands like Grubhub, which used social listening during the pandemic to address concerns, and Spotify, which created dedicated social accounts for support.

A COMPLETE GUIDE TO CREATING AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR

An editorial calendar plans content over time, while a content calendar handles day-to-day tasks. The guide presents 9 steps for building an editorial calendar, starting with defining goals and conducting research. It recommends choosing publishing channels, mapping resources, and assigning tasks. Flexibility is key to adapting content based on industry trends or business shifts. Sharing the calendar with teams ensures alignment with business objectives.

LETTERDROP

Letterdrop improves B2B demand gen and prospecting on LinkedIn by simplifying thought leadership content. The tool listens to your sales calls to learn what buyers are asking, then generates LinkedIn posts based on real customer conversations you've had. The result is more buyers connecting, following, coming inbound, and responding to outbound.

SONOS, CUSTOMER BACKLASH, REDDIT, AND A GUY NAMED KEITH

The r/Sonos subreddit has grown to 261,000 members, with many expressing frustration over the recent Sonos app redesign. Amidst criticism, Keith Nieves, a Sonos employee known as "KeithFromSonos," has managed to earn user appreciation through authentic and transparent engagement in the community. His approach includes balancing customer support with genuine interactions, such as using humor and participating in conversations.

PAINKILLERS VS VITAMINS IN B2B MARKETING

Selling "painkillers" is easier than "vitamins" because they address urgent needs, leading to faster purchasing decisions. In B2B marketing, painkillers solve immediate problems that prospects can't ignore, reducing objections like “call us back next year.” This approach contrasts with vitamins, which offer long-term benefits but don't create the same urgency.

BYTEDANCE'S WEB SCRAPER IS ON A MASSIVE DATA GRAB SPREE

ByteDance's web scraper, Bytespider, is rapidly collecting online data at a rate higher than other tech companies. It has increased its activity in recent weeks, gathering data 25X faster than GPTbot and 3,000X faster than Anthropic's ClaudeBot. ByteDance's bot ignores restrictions set by some sites to block scraping, raising concerns about its aggressive data collection.

REDEFINING BUY NOW, PAY LATER: A CUSTOMER-FIRST APPROACH WITH AFFIRM'S COO & CFO MICHAEL LINFORD (61 MINUTE PODCAST)

Affirm COO and CFO Michael Linford discusses the company's no-consumer CAC model, how it manages consumer sentiment swings, and more.

5 CONTENT IP EXAMPLES

Examples of who's doing “Content IP” well on LinkedIn.

20 SEOS TO FOLLOW ON LINKEDIN

A list of 20 SEO strategists, digital PR experts, and industry watchdogs to follow on LinkedIn.

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PRODUCT OPERATIONS TEAMS AREN'T FOR EVERYONE. ARE THEY FOR YOU?

The decision to separate product operations into a distinct role or keep them integrated within product leadership depends on factors like company scale, product complexity, and product culture vision. Ultimately, it's a strategic choice to either streamline operations for better alignment and efficiency or maintain flexibility by having existing teams manage product ops responsibilities alongside their core tasks.

PLAYING GAME ONE

There are two career strategies: Game One, where you focus on solving high-leverage problems for your company, and Game Two, where you prioritize personal outcomes like titles and scope. Playing Game One is generally the better choice, especially in startups, as it aligns your success with the company's and builds a reputation that benefits your long-term career.

REPLIT'S PATH TO PRODUCT-MARKET FIT—THE $1 BILLION SIDE PROJECT

Amjad Masad made three key decisions that drove Replit's explosive growth. First, he bet on supporting multiple programming languages rather than focusing on just one, which positioned Replit to benefit from Python's rise. Second, he adopted AI early, integrating tools like Ghostwriter and launching AI-native features. Finally, he formed partnerships with enterprise companies like Google Cloud and Salesforce, which boosted Replit's expansion. The launch of tools like Replit Agent continues to democratize software creation for a broader audience.

USING ENABLING CONSTRAINTS FOR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

The "Great Stink" of 1858, caused by London's inadequate sewage system, highlights how rapid growth can lead to inefficiency and neglect until problems reach a breaking point, forcing action. Similarly, in fast-scaling businesses, implementing "enabling constraints" can help address inefficiencies and incoherence before they spiral out of control, providing early warning systems and encouraging more thoughtful decision-making.

HOW TO REGAIN CONTROL OF A MEETING

When meetings get derailed, it's important to regain control without being abrasive, especially for collaborative leaders. Strategies like acknowledging tangents, refocusing the group, and pointing out deadlines can help keep discussions on track while maintaining a positive, cooperative tone.

COACHING STAKEHOLDER COLLABORATION (29 MINUTE VIDEO)

Christian Idiodi and Lea Hickman from SVPG explore stakeholder collaboration, providing a practical definition of stakeholders and discussing strategies for effective engagement. They share real-life examples and tactical advice on how to avoid common pitfalls, highlighting the value of proactivity, 1:1 meetings, and navigating stakeholder-driven roadmaps.

HOW TO ANSWER ‘WHY THIS COMPANY?'

This question often comes up in interviews. Using a strong framework can help elevate your answer from average to outstanding.

OUTRUNNING YOUR OVERHEAD

It's important to understand a business' fixed and variable costs as various businesses often "outrun their overhead" to achieve profitability. Effective business management often comes down to simple arithmetic — ensuring revenues exceed expenses — and the need for owners to remain attuned to their financial rhythms to navigate challenges such as seasonal fluctuations and unexpected disruptions.

MODELING IMPACT OF LLMS ON DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

This post discusses the development of a systems model that analyzes how LLMs could enhance the software development process, revealing insights such as the importance of reducing production error rates to improve productivity. While increasing development speed through LLMs may not significantly impact ticket closure rates, focusing on minimizing errors is crucial for achieving greater efficiency in software delivery.

HOW TO STOP GETTING INTERRUPTED (AKA, TURN THE WORST OFFENDERS INTO THE BEST DEFENDERS)

Frequent interruptions during meetings hinders open communication among participants.

THE ERA OF THE IC

The appeal of founder mode lies in the singular vision and execution, but even brilliant individuals face limits in time, cognitive load, and specialized skills, leading to diluted outcomes in collaborative teams.

BENCHMARKING THE PERFORMANCE OF CSS @PROPERTY

This article benchmarks the performance of CSS @property, a new feature that allows developers to register custom CSS properties. PerfTestRunner was used to measure the performance of different types of properties, including regular properties, unregistered custom properties, and registered custom properties with different inheritance settings. The results show that registering a custom property with @property comes at a slight performance cost, but using `inherits: false` when registering a custom property can significantly improve performance.

SERVERLESS SERVERS AND THE CHALLENGE OF NEW REACT ARCHITECTURE

Vercel's new "serverless server" feature optimizes Node.js concurrency within Vercel Functions, allowing multiple requests to be handled by a single function instance. This improvement addresses a key challenge of React's new full-stack architecture, where increased server traffic and async calls are needed to handle server-side rendering and data fetching.

TYPEDDICTS ARE BETTER THAN YOU THINK

TypedDict, introduced in Python 3.8, provides a powerful way to type-annotate dictionaries. While initially overlooked in favor of dataclasses and Pydantic, TypedDict works best in scenarios where not all fields are required, such as for representing PATCH operations in APIs.

AUTOMATING PROCESSES WITH SOFTWARE IS HARD

Automating processes is far more complex than most people realize. The difficulty stems from handling exceptions, not routine tasks. Most automations are defined by their ability to manage unexpected inputs and situations, making them fragile and requiring a lot of effort.

MY NEGATIVE VIEWS ON RUST

Rust has a reliance on "magical sugar" constructs, which lead to cryptic compile errors and make the language harder to learn. The language's focus on efficient memory representation and its insistence on no garbage collection are also detrimental, as it forces developers to grapple with low-level details that don't always translate to real-world performance gains.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER PAY HEATMAP ACROSS THE US

An interactive heatmap that allows users to explore software engineer salary ranges across the US by DMA region.

SETUP CI

Setup-CI is a command-line tool that generates GitHub workflows for common CI tasks in React Native projects.

THE AI STARTUP DRAMA THAT'S DAMAGING Y COMBINATOR'S REPUTATION

PearAI, a Y Combinator startup, launched an AI code editor that turned out to be a forked clone of an existing open-source project, Continue.dev. The controversy stemmed from PearAI's attempt to misrepresent its code origins and change the open-source Apache license to a closed one. The incident raises questions about Y Combinator's vetting process and investment strategy.

THE PROMIND STORY LOOKING BACKWARDS

A developer created an application that offered personalized AI assistants for various professional tasks. Eventually, rapid growth led to infrastructure issues, causing service disruptions and user churn. They rebuilt their application with scalable infra. They go through the process in this article.

THE EMERGING ECONOMY OF LLMS

The key resource in the new "LLM economy” is computational power, mainly GPUs. Tokens, the smallest units of text processed by LLMs, are the new currency of this economy. The cost of using LLMs is typically determined by the number of tokens processed.

10 TAILWIND TECHNIQUES

Shadcn, the creator of shadcn/ui, provides 10 techniques for using Tailwind CSS to create better dynamic UIs.

BEHIND THE PRODUCT: NOTEBOOKLM (50 MINUTE PODCAST)

This is a podcast interview with Raiza Martin, a senior product manager at Google Labs, about the development and success of NotebookLM, Google's AI-powered research tool with a unique "Audio Overviews" feature.

JAVASCRIPT STRUCTS: FIXED LAYOUT OBJECTS AND SOME SYNCHRONIZATION PRIMITIVES

This ECMA proposal introduces JavaScript structs, a new object type with a fixed layout that enables shared memory multithreading, synchronization primitives like mutex and condition, and unsafe blocks for managing memory access.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DEVELOPER HAPPINESS

Five strategies for increasing developer happiness: create a great developer experience, use AI to secure code, customize LLMs, prepare repositories for teamwork, and invest in learning opportunities.

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DOJ INDICATES IT'S CONSIDERING GOOGLE BREAKUP FOLLOWING MONOPOLY RULING

The Department of Justice has indicated that it is considering behavioral and structural remedies as a result of its monopoly ruling against Google. The remedies could include contract requirements and prohibitions, non-discrimination product requirements, data and interoperability requirements, and structural requirements. They may include limiting or prohibiting default agreements and other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products. The remedies are still far from being decided - Judge Amit Mehta says he'll aim to rule on the remedies by August 2025, and an appeal by Google will likely draw out any impact for potentially years.

TESLA ROBOTAXI REVEAL: WHAT TO EXPECT

Tesla plans to reveal its Robotaxi today at an event at Warner Bros. Discovery's movie studio in Burbank, California, starting at 7 pm. The vehicle will be a two-door, two-seater, Cybertruck-like compact vehicle likely without a steering wheel or pedals. Tesla may run into regulatory issues for the design - Elon Musk is expected to use this as a reason for why getting the vehicle to market will be difficult. The movie studio features large sound stages and sets. The environment is closed and controlled, with no other traffic, making it the perfect place for Tesla to demo its new technology.

GOOGLE IDENTIFIES LOW NOISE “PHASE TRANSITION” IN ITS QUANTUM PROCESSOR

Google has published a paper that identifies a phase transition in its quantum processor and uses it to identify conditions where the processor can operate with low noise. The paper shows that it would take a supercomputer a dozen years to simulate things even in those conditions. This article details the findings and their implications in more detail.

ZAP ENERGY SHOWS OFF ITS NEW FUSION POWER PROTOTYPE, CENTURY

Zap Energy recently raised a $130 million Series D to build its Century device, an approach to fusion power that sends bolts of electricity through plasma streams instead of using magnets or lasers to squeeze the plasma. The current generates a magnetic field that compresses the plasma, which results in fusion. The final commercial-scale model, which should produce 50 megawatts of electricity, will occupy a footprint around the size of a double-decker bus. This article provides an overview of how Zap's technology works and the problems the company has to overcome before its technology becomes commercially viable.