Over the past year I have sent 46 emails to my list of people who are interested in bootstrapping side projects and launching digital products. I try to be weekly, I’ve missed a few due to travel schedules. My aim is to filter all of the things that I read during the week, and bring readers links with a bit of commentary, why I liked that article or found it helpful.
As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be interesting to extract all of those links. So here they are month-by-month, minus the commentary. The entire list archive can be found here, and if you like this sort of thing sign up on that page for more of the same next year.
January
A Tiny Hack For Your Mailing List
Running a Business
Growing From $5,000 to $25,000 in MRR
Founders Library
Startups For The Rest of Us: Our 5 Biggest Mistakes of the Past Year
Trello
OmniFocus
The Ultimate Guide to Bootstrapping
Boostrapped Discuss
Getting Traction for your build an audience phase discussion
Is this coupon code promotional technique spammy?
Interview with Zach Klein
Interview with Zach Klein transcript
My Damn Book
Quitting Consulting via Productization
Skill Helper
Writing is Thinking
Writing on Writing
5 ways to get through writers block
bootstrapping.io
speaking.io
MicroConf 2013 Video
The 3 Ingredients Recipe for Homeworkers
Founder Stories on Medium
I Don’t Know a Thing
Industry Conf 2014
Bokardo
Release quality sets expectations
Perch CMS
Content Marketing for Bootstrappers
Write On
Shop Talk Show
What is the best way to validate a business idea?
Elezea
Elezea, start here
February
Making Time for Side Projects
The Experience is the Product
Choosing the right path for you
Entreprewired Podcast
My interview on Entreprewired
The Ultimate Guide to Funnel Optimization
Marketing for Developers
All I Know is How to Work Hard
Presentation on Technical Support
Finish Your Projects
Marketing Metrics and the Systems you need to Measure Them
Data Drives Customer Support
Troubleshooting email delivery issues
Use Improve Repeat
Awwwards Conference
ConFoo
Mobile Developer Weekly
How to setup goal tracking in Google Analytics
Son, it’s time we talk about where startups come from
Strategies for avoiding shiny object syndrome
Slow down and break things
Do not end the week with nothing
Getting Started Autoresponders: An Experiment in Empowerment
Write great lifecycle emails
Eat and Run
The road to SaaS revenue is painfully slow
How to create a self-paced email course
How Evernote onboards new users
Ask HN: What’d you do to get your first 100 users?
Drip
Motivational Triggers
Validate Your Startup Idea
The case of the abandoned clients
24 quotes on the future of business and work from The Year Without Pants
Not Great Expectations for Email Support
Complaint Driven Development
Good UI
No Silver Bullets
Building a Successful Product – start small and listen
March
Ebook Launch Tactics
A Simple Improvement to Product Emails
Does Marketing seem complex and overwhelming? Start with these three things
Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
Life outside the Mac App Store
Rebuild Conference
Scenes from an internet
24 ways
Using questionnaires for design research
Data-driven design with an annual survey
Reducing Irrelevance
Bootstrap
Surveymonkey
You’re Either Venture-Backed or a Lifestyle Business: The Big Lie
Jeff Archibald
Your 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
Lefft
Practicing Simplified GTD
Urgency
Playing a mind game – on distance running and product launches
Want to Build and Launch Your First Product – Here’s What Not to Do
My Personal Organization Is a Joke
Snappy Widget
Everything I Know, debuted at #1 on Amazon in Creativity and Entrepreneurship
Perfectionism or Procrastination reframing the minimum viable product
The Story of Telling Blog
Bootstrapped With Kids podcast
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Why it pays to be kind
10 reasons why I self-funded my startup and so should you
System for Selling
How to Start
Saying No
The Modern Marketing Workshop
April
Imagine no SSL Encryption, It’s easy if you try
Lastpass and the Heartbleed Bug
Heartbleed
Monotype Acquires Web Design Studio Mark Boulton Design
Mark Boulton Design
Selling Digital Products with Shopify, FetchApp and Stripe
CSS3 Layout Modules
SSL Certificates explained
Creating Ebooks
Designing for the Web
Five Simple Steps
Gridset
Industry Conf
Five Reasons not to Raise Venture Capital
Monthly Experiments
5 Tips for the Healthy Frequent Traveller
We’re Not Doing a Startup
I ran the London Marathon
Founder Health Podcast
Taming Metrics
Putting Together an App Press Kit
Here’s what I learned hanging out with Jason Fried
Small screen productivity
Trak.io
9 Entrepreneurs Reveal How They Validated Their Business Idea
Xero
Conversion Funnel Survival Guide
Google Analytics Dashboard
Mixpanel
Kissmetrics
May
Four Million to One
My Trello Workflow
Insurance by Jack
The Best Advice for Public Speaking
MLKSHK Shutting Down
Public Speaking for the Formerly Terrified
Conference Speaking, Transparency and Fairness
Very Important Strangers
How to ask to get paid to speak
Business Ideas
Clear Stickers
A Formula for Speaking Fees
UIKonf
Your First Customers
The Distance
Chicago’s Last Tannery
The Complete List of Evergreen Content Ideas For Your Blog
Nightly Tech News
Trust Based Sales Funnel
Who do you love
One Page Marketing Plan
Workign Out Podcast
The Economics of a Kickstarter Project
The Startup Guide to Budget Design
Inside OmniFocus
Lefft
Nine Four
Brain Pickings
Seth Godin on Vulnerability, Creative Courage, and How to Dance with the Fear: A Children’s Book for Grownups
Kev Adamson
OmniFocus
How to Cultivate Curiosity and Build Better Products
The Bootstrapped FM Conference
How Timehop Growth Hacked It’s Way To The Top of the App Store
Your Email Inbox Is Not Your To-Do List
The transition from client work to product business
Use Panda
The Product Design Sprint
Happy Monday Podcast
Pact Coffee
June
First Time UX
Perch Runway
3 Great Examples of Productized Consulting Services
What Happens If You Succeed?
Small is Beautiful Live Blog
Bill Jones Business Motivation Posters
Industry Conference Videos
Double Your Freelancing Rate
Desperation
Boost
How Samuel Hulick made over $37,000 with his self-published book
The Anatomy Of A $31,155 Product Launch
Mailing Lists for Bootstrappers
Managing Bugs and Feature Requests
My presentation at UIKonf on video
Beautiful Docs
The cost of VC Money
The Problem with Profitless Startups
ProductPeople.tv with patio11
GTD and OmniFocus 2 My Productivity Workflow
Six Hacks for Building Your Mailing List
Responsive Day Out
Discussion on when you should give customers refunds
3 reasons I changed my mind on moneyback guarantee
Summer of Marketing
The philosophy of great customer service
July
Are you working on the right thing?
Busy means you’re not focussed
My Lanyrd Profile
Why are you not shipping?
MicroConf Europe
Pinboard Turns 5
Boostrapped.fm episode 43
Google Analytics Resource Guide
Retain Customers By Talking To A Human
Laravel
The Profitable Side Project
CSS Books presentation
Userscape
Ian Landsman presenting at Laracon 2014
My CSS ebooks starting point
Ship Higher Quality Software
Your first customers
SEO Tips for Perch websites
Creative Block
Stirling Engines
Business Models
The Product Spectrum
August
A candid look at Unread’s First Year
Finding Balance Between High Productivity and Burnout
We Analyzed Nearly 1 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned
Do you trust your gut or rely on data in business?
Study of self-funded business
What was your best passive income in 2014?
Staying sane with small incremental releases
https as a ranking signal
The Perch Podcast
The complete guide to making a full-time salary from one book
thepipe.io
My Adventure Sharing my Book as Pay What You Want
Fired up and focused bootcamp
Real life bootstrapped meetups
Knowing your audience
Storemapper store locator bootstrapped to 50K
Tone of Voice Guide
Google Webmaster Tools
Frontend Conf
Productize
Why Productized Service
Product People Club
How to perform and SEO Health Check on your website
Me on Medium
Bootstrapping Entrepreneurship
Dependence Day – the power and peril of third party solutions
Getting to the Action
NathanBarry.com
Creating a Promo Video for your product
Announcing Sweat the Product
Sweat the Product
September
The local shops of the web
The silent grateful majority
Buy Bootstrapped
69 Bootstrapping Resources
Aftershokz
Startups for the Rest Of Us Episode 200
Andy Croll on Twitter
CSSConf.eu
Work Life Imbalance
Bootstrapped.fm Episode 48
Traction Book
Startup Vitamins T-shirts
Effective marketing for introverts
Discover Meteor Case Study
As I Write This. Depression, Anxiety & Entrepreneurship
Happy Endings
The Myth of Venture Capital
How to find profitable product ideas
What is a good product idea?
Personal Branding Strategy
My talk at Milton Keynes Geek Night
Slide from MKGN
15 lessons from 15 years of blogging
This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales
Let’s make some stuff
Support the Independents
Introvert or Antisocial?
October
How side projects saved our startup
Book Toolkit
Writing 1000 words
The horrible implications of the EU VAT place of supply change
EU VAT on Github
9 tactics for aggressive time management
Trust signals for your website
Are you prepared for the long haul
WPDesk
Not 1 person after all this work? Is a sick joke being played with me?
Seeing past the highlight reel
This is not a map
Convert Kit
Pave the Cowpaths
Free Pricing Course
Geek Mental Help Week
Live Blog of my MicroConf Europe talk
Slides from my MicroConf Europe talk
Slides from Ryan Delk’s MicroConf Europe talk
Linkspy
Software Promotions
November
The Wantrepreneurial Cycle of Delusion
No Exit Plan
Raven
Unfinished Business Episode 93
60 great tools for entrepreneurs and startups
MicroConf Europe Hub
Dave Collins on Twitter
Switching from Authorize.net to Stripe
Chatroll
Bringing my web book to print and ebook
Productized
Hangouts on Air
Growth Accelerator
SW Founders
How to run a successful webinar
Data driven products now
Closing up shop
Using Tweets as Social Proof
Implementing the new EU VAT Rules
Key Takeaways from MicroConf Europe
Wired article on Twitter search
Twitter search
Hulimail
HelpSpot
United Pixelworkers
Cotton Bureau
Pebble
A2 Hosting
December
24 ways
Developing Robust Deployment Procedures
Don’t Push Through the Pain
How we’re spending $55,930.08 a year on SaaS products
Build Products
Slack research hack
Consensus and VATMOSS
Free product roadmap template
Recurly and VATMOSS
Recurly
Recurly VAT microsite
Sendowl
2015 Freelance Tools
SEO in 2015 and why you should care
The bootstrappers bargain
Single Founder Handbook
Launch, the documentary of a startup
When We Were Small – Under Armour
Everything Web Designers Need To Know About VATMOSS
The right way to ask users to review your App