This week at erxes, we talked with Ben from SquirrellyJS, an ultrafast, lightweight, modern JS template engine. He gave some really hands on tips on how to monetize and increase publicity of your project. If there are any other developers or marketers in the early stages of project/product development, this interview might be interesting to you.  erxes is an open source application for the complete growth marketing lifecycle with a focus on mission and community.

Picture this: You’ve just finished writing what you’re sure is a winning cold email that’ll get you lots of conversions. You’re convinced that whoever you send it to will want whatever you’re offering. Well, mostly convinced. There’s always that bit of doubt that lingers in your mind when it comes to emails. “What if they read my email but no one acts on it?” But you’re still pretty confident that you’ve done a good job, and then you click ‘Send’. And then you wait. And you wait. And then you wait some more. You wonder why you’re not getting the conversions you were expecting. Chances are you don’t have to picture it because it’s already happened to you. It’s one of the most disappointing things when you’re offering something, and can't seem to sell it. It leaves you wondering if emails are even worth it. But emails can be worth it if you do your email marketing right. You can get considerable conversions from them if you craft the perfect calls-to-action. Before learning how to write compelling CTAs, understand what makes them different.

For so many startups and even larger tech incumbents, the point at which they hit the shoulder in the S-curve is a mystery, and the author suspects the failure to see it occurs much earlier. The good thing is that identifying the enemy sooner allows you to address it. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit. In strategic planning, the question in building a forecast is to flush out what the author calls the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It's an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or a planner in finance.