Sachin Rekhi

Most entrepreneurs assume that the marketing and audience building phase of their startup begins post product launch. Yet I’ve seen some startups successfully build their audience well before they reach this point.

They’ve been able to do this by investing heavily in building out a blog with independent value separate from their product yet designed to attract the target audience that their product will eventually serve.

YouTube sets the gold standard on creating an experience built from the ground up to strongly encourage content discovery. I’ve been using YouTube for years and I’ve seen it continue to evolve the variety of approaches used throughout it’s site and mobile app and constantly refine them to drive yet more video views.

Given so many of the experiences we create across the web are similarly trying to encourage content discovery (whether it’s videos, music, photos, news, people, restaurants, experts, and so much more), I thought it would be valuable to catalog some of the best practices YouTube leverages for the benefit of other product designers looking to refine their own experiences.

I recently gave this presentation on product management at LinkedIn that I thought was worth sharing more broadly.

I’m a firm believer that despite the growth of social networks and messaging app alternatives, email is far from dead as an important communication channel. Usage continues to grow with Google reporting over 425 million active users on Gmail and Microsoft with over 400 million on Outlook.com.

It also remains one of the most effective channels for startups to drive user acquisition, engagement, retention, and monetization.

I wanted to highlight one engagement mechanic that I’m seeing on the rise that strongly leverages email: the weekly digest email. A variety of tech companies leverage a weekly digest email as an avenue to deliver content and value directly to a user’s inbox as well as a key engagement tactic to remind the user of the service.

I thought I’d share my top ten favorite tools for helping me accomplish my day-to-day responsibilities as a product manager. These tools fall into three categories: collaboration, user feedback, and analytics.