Show IH: Sustained Surge - Weekly newsletter showcasing the best new marketing tools
Hey there IH!
Sustained Surge is a weekly newsletter showcasing the newest products & tools for marketers. Think of it as Product Hunt for marketers, growth hackers & entrepreneurs looking for tools to grow their business or audience.
You can find the first two editions below:
Why I built it:
I’m a startup junkie and sites like Product Hunt and Beta List (plus blogs like TechCrunch etc.) are great for discovering consumer-facing apps and startups. I read them all the time. But I find them to be too general for most marketers. You have to sift through a ton of consumer-facing products & other random stuff to find tools that might actually help you grow your business.
Most busy marketers don’t have time to do this stuff on any given day. They’re focused on their business or their clients. The folks that I’ve talked to say they usually find new tool recommendations from their internal networks: friends, work colleagues etc.
Not only that but marketing-specific news sites like Inbound.org don’t really cover tools in depth. Or if they do, they’re buried amid other news stories. It’s not really their focus. And obviously it’s hard for existing product companies to cover this subject without people thinking there’s an inherent bias towards what they sell.
So I felt there might be an opportunity to publish something valuable to marketers and entrepreneurs as a “roll up” of all of the new marketing products & tools that launched on any given basis. And I don’t mean simply what’s new in “MarTech” but anything that might be helpful to a marketer on a day-to-day basis, from free web-based tools to freemium software products. My rule of thumb in evaluating products to include in the list is that it has to be useful to a marketer’s day-to-day role in growing a business, either their own or that of their clients.
Plus I moved to a new city a few months ago, I work from home and I’m pretty introverted. :) So it’d be great to be able to meet new marketers & entrepreneurial folks through it that I could learn from, bounce ideas off of etc. (I’m a marketing strategist for a healthcare agency in my day job; 10+ years in SEO/SEM in particular).
Future plans?
Obviously, I’d love to grow it into something larger, perhaps a stand-alone site. But I’m not really sure what the level of demand for something like this might be for marketers. That’s why I’m starting with an e-mail list as a MVP.
Thoughts & Recommendations
As growth-oriented entrepreneurs & hackers, would something like this be useful to you? What would make it better?
Grateful for any feedback you might have. :)
Cheers,
Blair
