the scribblings, musings and reflections of a dad, co-founder and digital marketer
currently working on: Slidecraft | FlipRSS | Little Walden
FlipRSS was a small side project we set up in 2016. It was set up to allow for the automation of multiple RSS feeds in newsletters. More specifically, it was set up to allow subscribers to choose which content they received and which they didn’t. We’ve recently pushed a big upgrade to the system on the back of some pretty impressive results for clients and continued growth. New user...
Recently my Calendar has started to look like a brightly coloured periodic table. Pre-scheduled tasks, meetings, calls and even emails have made it to my daily and weekly plan filling up 90% of my days. Finally it looks like I’m getting to grips with my productivity without it filling my head. I’ve never been a person who has enjoyed too much structure before. I like the freedom to...
Well today we pushed hard and closed of our sprint. We stopped short of the prototyping but stuck to the plan as much as possible up to that point. Having closed off yesterday with Lightening Demos of the sites and features we’ve seen and liked we moved into sketching mode. This was a really enjoyable but hard session. As we’re working on a feature that’s been in the system for...
We got stuck in to our first product sprint today following the process set out by Google Ventures and adopted by many startups. This isn’t something we’ve used before, but with limited time and a lot we want to achieve for the next Slidecraft release it felt like a good time to test it out.
Whether you’re creating it, consuming it or curating it, content marketing is hot business. With an estimated 27,000,000 (source) pieces of content shared every day it is pretty likely you’re struggling to keep up with either, the flow of links channeled through your social feeds, or the channels available to get your content to your audience. Although we’ll never be able to read everything that...
Curated newsletters are becoming more and more popular and they are a great way to share any great content you find with your audience, particularly if you’re regularly reading and sharing content anyway. So I’d been sitting on the idea for Little Walden for some time. Little Walden is a newsletter curated especially for creatives. Five inspiring links sent on a Friday at 5pm each week — the...
The last 12 months have been crazy to say the least. Becoming a Dad to twin girls and co-founding a bootstrapped startup was always going to be a pretty awesome ride but I never saw the parallels until now. It turns out having kids and starting a business have much more in common than I’d ever have imagined. The two journeys couldn’t have been more in sync if I’d planned it. The lessons from one...
I love digital tools – I have countless apps and social profiles but they still can’t beat a notebook and a pen.
None of my apps and profiles help me as much as scribbling and doodling my thoughts and ideas down in a pad.
Just the process of transferring ideas from my head to paper makes them become real and memorable rather than fleeting thoughts.
Spreadsheets are great. They make complex tasks simple and they allow you to do sums you couldn’t imagine doing without a Maths PHD but they can make your head spin. Last couple of weeks I’ve been working on business projections for Slidecraft and have been building a model we can use to test some of our assumptions. Over this time I’ve come up with a few strategies to get me through the days...
I live on the small but beautiful Isle of Man with my wife, Donna and our twin girls Ella & Erin. I'm Head of Digital Media at Home Strategic and Co-Founder of Slidecraft.