To the best of my knowledge, Klaviyo is more focused on e-commerce and Attentive more on e-commerce but especially SMS. I'm not familiar enough with their platforms to give a point-by-point comparison, but we're focused on the needs of our users within SaaS. If a customer needs a thing, we're going to work with them to understand it and build it for them. I think if we follow that compass long enough we'll end up differentiated quite a bit.
We are looking for an entrepreneurial Engineer Manager to take over the Frontend platform team at Ordergroove. If you love building great self-service Control Panels or Admin Panels, you will thrive at this role.
Ordergroove is a fast growing SaaS that enables DTC merchants to provide their products as a subscription. We are used by some of the top brands in the industry such as Dollar Shaving Club, P&G, L'Oreal, KIND, and many more!
Reminds me of Josh Waitzkin's concept of "investment in loss". Such a great and rewarding approach if you are able to suspend your ego and practice it.
"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away."
How many of us had to hardcode those one off "if" blocks to handle an annoying special case and get the damned thing shipped. Maybe the section has a nice TODO comment that stays in the repo for posterity. No one wants to take the effort to clean it up lest there be a hidden dependency somewhere that would break.
One way to deal with it is by being a producer instead of a consumer. That way you are forced to curate what you consume based on what benefits your "production".
For me that has been to start a blog, build an app etc.
Another approach is to go deep instead of wide. By that I mean, as you read, capture and take notes, start spending more time with your notes instead of capturing more.
Your feeling is shared by many. One way is to curate a set of tools that are your very own. By this I don't mean you build all your tools from scratch. Rather create a mix of "off-the-shelf" open source tools, custom scripts and methodologies that are your very own. You should have deep familiarity with them and improve your tool chain with time.
Keep this tool chain stable over the course of your career and over time you will see your effectiveness and personal velocity improve.
My personal examples:
- I maintain some simple scripts and tools of my own for dealing with AWS deployments and logs.
- I have my own flask app skeleton/scaffold for creating a new web app or web tool from scratch.
- I stick with vi for any kind of text or config editing
- I maintain a bunch of simple bash scripts for common tasks etc...
When you no longer feel you are learning or when the projects no longer stretch you with challenges.
A stagnation of challenging projects can also indicate a general stagnation in the company. That will eventually show up in business results. If see this, it makes sense to start looking around and joining a business that is more driven and aims high.
Other than that, content and email marketing would be an effective approach to consider.