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
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?