Newsletter Q1 2025 Planning and Schedule

[ivanagas]

Goals:

• Publish at least one newsletter every two weeks
• Test a new format that can potentially help us publish more regularly
• Every issue gets a James Twitter post and a LinkedIn post
• Bijan and Danilo publish a newsletter

Schedule

• Jan 10: No deadline doom boom - @andyvan-ph
• Jan 24: Feature flag (release) mistakes to avoid - @ivanagas
• Feb 7: Activation metrics - @ivanagas
• Feb 21: Metrics you should track? SEO 101? - @andyvan-ph
• Feb 28: 50k sub special roundup - @ivanagas
• Mar 7: How to communicate as an engineer? - @bijanbwb
• Mar 21: Why Hog and HogQL or why JavaScript was not enough - @daniloc
• Apr 4: Product engineering 101? - @andyvan-ph
• Apr 18: @ivanagas

Polled ideas:

• Feature flags mistakes to avoid - 110
  • Feature flag mistakes to avoid #9485
• Product engineering 101 - 79
  • Building product sense, taste, intuition
• SEO 101 for startups - 63
• Metrics you should track - 62
  • Company / product metrics every engineer should know
  • Company / product metrics engineers should know #10034
• Writing better documentation - 54
• How to communicate as an engineer - 50
• Startup rules we've broken - 47
  • Startup rules we’ve broken #9469
• Design at engineering-led companies - 40
  • Making things nice
  • What does no design by default mean in practice?
• When to build vs buy - 40
• How we plan team goals - 33
  • Exec team doesn’t hoard information
  • HOGS
• The stages of product-market fit - 32

Ideas to poll:

• Quarterly planning for product engineers
• How we automate customer feedback
  • How we automate customer feedback / How to #9466
• How we’re building AI into our product. How to think about building AI into your product
• How to validate a new product idea
• How to do marketing with no experience
• Every type of experiment you could run
  • Every type of experiment you could run (using PostHog or not)  #9481
• How to remain customer focused as you get big
• How we run growth reviews
• How to make a big technology migration
  • Mr Blobby, Warpstream

More:

• Figure out another format: Potential new newsletter formats #10385
• Social posts guide
• Style guide
• Collaborations

[andyvan-ph]

At a glance, this looks fine, except I'm out of office until Jan 2, so shipping that newsletter on Jan 3 isn't doable. Shift everything by a week and it's fine.

[andyvan-ph]

RE: other formats, I think we should try some kind of AMA type thing with James and Tim. We could probably leverage the startup program to source questions.

I think this could work as a podcast format as well, so something we could experiment around podcast project.

I think probably fills one slot a month, which means finding something else for the other week in the rotation, assuming we want to reach weekly eventually.

[andyvan-ph]

RE: other formats, I think we should try some kind of AMA type thing with James and Tim. We could probably leverage the startup program to source questions.

I think this could work as a podcast format as well, so something we could experiment around podcast project.

I think probably fills one slot a month, which means finding something else for the other week in the rotation, assuming we want to reach weekly eventually.

[andyvan-ph]

RE: other formats, I think we should try some kind of AMA type thing with James and Tim. We could probably leverage the startup program to source questions.

I think this could work as a podcast format as well, so something we could experiment around podcast project.

I think probably fills one slot a month, which means finding something else for the other week in the rotation, assuming we want to reach weekly eventually.