Design Personal Growth Startups & Tech

When you’re facing a particularly challenging task, it can be helpful to incorporate a forcing function into your routine.

A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.

Need to stay productive at a meeting? Make everybody stand. Want to cut online time wasting? Leave your charger at home. Having trouble writing enough? The Most Dangerous Writing App forces you to keep typing until the timer ends, or you lose all your work.

When designing the most important steps of your app—or your life—think about ways  to incorporate behavior-shaping constraints.

Startups & Tech

GoDaddy has horrible UX and predatory pricing.

Yet GoDaddy, and companies like it, maintained virtual strangleholds on the domain registrar market since the 1990s. Domain registry was a commodity, and companies like GoDaddy the utilities that provided it.

Pundits said the registrar world wasn’t going to change any time soon because registrars needed to mark up Top Level Domain prices because navigating the deluge of TLDs, and ICANN’s stringent rules, was so complicated.

But every industry is disruptible.

In September, Cloudflare announced that it would offer registrar services with zero markup. It would include WHOIS privacy for free. And the experience of using Cloudflare would be nothing like the bloated, complicated process of working with other registrars.

When Cloudflare decided to give away free SSL certs in 2014, they doubled the size of the encrypted web. If Cloudflare’s entry into the world of domain registry goes anything like that, the space will look markedly different by this time next year.

The same thing could happen in virtually any industry. What would happen if a company like Slack decided to make a free learning platform that undercut Skillshare and Udemy? All utilities—power, communication, education, you name it—are ripe for this type of disruption. All it takes is a company willing to treat commodities like commodities in service of a different business model.

Personal Growth Startups & Tech

Regardless of what you’re working on, knowing what’s good enough is critical.

If you’re a busy parent cooking dinner for your 2 kids after a grueling day of meetings, healthy, palatable, and quick is probably good enough. If you’re a chef at new restaurant on opening night and you want to stay in business more than a month, then the food better be delicious. If you own a Michelin Star restaurant and command top-tier prices, then everything—the food, the service, the decor—had better be perfect.

Most projects fall near the middle category, but most people manage them towards one of the extremes.

Know your good enough and strive to hit it.

Reviews Startups & Tech

TLDR: Gmelius is a fantastic extension for Gmail, packed full of features that make it well worth using.

Click here to get your first month of premium free.

Gmelius is an extremely popular email tool.

So if you’re looking for an affordable way to track email opens, automate bulk sending, and more, this Gmelius review is for you.

But is it really worth it?

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Reviews Startups & Tech

TLDR: When comparing Bluehost vs GoDaddy, most experts believe Bluehost is a far better option. I strongly agree.

Get a free domain name and free SSL from Bluehost with this discount link.

If you’re looking for a cheap, reliable web host Bluehost and GoDaddy are two of the most popular choices.

To help you choose, I analyzed 30 expert reviews and conducted my own comparison of the two hosting services.

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Startups & Tech

One of my all time favorite movies is Rounders.

Rounders is the story of two broke card sharks—played by Matt Damon and Ed Norton—faced with the daunting task of paying off a large debt to some Russian gangsters in just 5 days. If they fail, the gangsters will (of course) kill them.

It’s a fun 90s classic that still holds up well 20 years later.

But it’s also a fantastic metaphor for what’s happening in the world of tech startups today.

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