The Weekly Compass is a curated weekly newsletter for aspiring entrepreneurs that brings you the best tips, resources, and lessons learned from around the web to help you launch and grow your business.
Starting your business
Not all business ideas need to be unique or original. In fact, the best way to come up with ideas is to copy what others have done and simply make small changes. Jami Oetting discusses copying on a more broader scale in her post, Why the Most Talented People Copy. She gives some brilliant-yet-quirky advice like “Promote an Unusual and Irrelevant Feature.”
Adam Grant explains that entrepreneurs fear failure just like anyone, but they’re even more afraid of failing to try. Whoops–I spoiled the bait-y title. Still, it’s definitely worth the read. To Overcome the Fear of Failure, Fear This Instead
Growing your business
Speaking of copying, Justin Mares wrote a super detailed guide of exactly how he got 3,000+ email subscribers in 14 days to promote his upcoming book.Steal the Strategy “Traction” Used To Capture 3,000+ Emails. We actually followed this guide to a T at Compass with an email course we created last year. While it didn’t get us 3,000 emails, it was still effective and the guide is super actionable.
Speaking of actionable guides, Sarah Peterson put together one of the most comprehensive, actionable guides we’ve ever seen to growing your website’s audience (if you intend to blog). Growing a Site from 0 to 10k Visitors a Month: Sarah Peterson Edition
Useful tools
Nothing is worse than having an image with a background when you need the background to be transparent (okay, there are worse things in the world, but you get the point). Clipping Magic makes it insanely easy to remove backgrounds from images quickly. A shoutout to our friend Alex Persky-Stern, who introduced us to this tool. It’s saved us countless hours.