Swipe File #4: A business analogy you've never heard

We have a bunch of newbies this week - welcome to Swipe File!

If you have a great marketing story you think should be included, reply to this email to let me know. We have some really good stuff to get to this week (especially the tools) so let's get to it.

Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide via Walter Chen

I love this guide for two reasons:

1. It's really interesting, well-written and informative.

2. It's a great layout. Simple, nothing fancy but still easy to navigate. I often find that formats and layouts spark more creativity than topics or ideas.

Are You Making These 5 Common User Onboarding Mistakes? via Samuel Hulick

This post is a few months old but it's just loaded with great advice.

Lifecycle emails are CRIMINALLY underused in web apps. If you’re running with a blah “welcome” e-mail and then hoping that a “your trial is running out” email two weeks later will be enough to get people to achieve all the value your product can deliver for them, your appetite for risk is far greater than mine.

Samuel did an AMA on Inbound.org this week that is also loaded with good insight on onboarding.

"We’re turning Buffer into a forest" via Leo Widrich

What I like particularly about the forest analogy, is that one can seemingly dive into any detail of the forest as an organism and relate it to how things are working at Buffer now.

Leo from Buffer started a blog and newsletter recently. So far, it's really interesting. He's very philosophical and you won't find any of this stuff on the Buffer blog.

Engaging at Scale: The Secret to Automating Personal Emails via Lincoln Murphy

Personal welcome emails work really well, which is why everyone does them now. The problem is that as people have automated them, the personal feel that made them successful in the first place has been lost.

Lincoln has a really cool solution for this called the Customer Success Bot Method.

Awesome stuff, and perfect segue to the next link ...

My new favorite tool: SendBloom

I don't do outbound sales but I do a lot of manual outreach for link building. SendBloom is great because it can send emails through your own Gmail account so they look and feel just like a normal outreach email. You can even automate follow-up emails when people don't respond. Really cool tool that I'm saving a lot of time with.

It's also the perfect tool for the Customer Success Bot Method.

My new favorite app: Twindr

I found this on Product Hunt recently. It helps you unfollow people on Twitter but it's setup like Tinder. Swipe left to unfollow, swipe right to keep. I unfollowed 300 people and feel like a new person. It's a really fun little app if you're a heavy Twitter user.

Cheers,

Jimmy

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