I Done This Blog

The 5 Best Online Course Creation Tools

September 6, 2018 by Walker Donohue 1 Comment

There’s never been a better time to earn an income by creating and selling online courses. More people than ever before are going online to learn new skills and using online courses to explore new hobbies, diversify their skill sets, and even explore entirely new career paths.

However, if you’re a creative thinking about putting together your very first online course, the first decision you have to make is which tool to use. Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools and platforms designed to make creating and selling online courses easy—but how do you know which tools are worth your time?

In this post, we’ll be taking a look at the five best online course creation tools on the web. We’ll be exploring the features that make each tool unique so you can choose the online course creation tool that best meets your needs. Let’s get started!

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

August 31, 2018 by Blake Thorne 5 Comments

Synchronous Communication

Add this to the long list of things about working that will puzzle your grandkids.

“Tell us about fax machines again, grandpa.”

“And what about synchronous communication?”

Well just have a seat, sonny. Let me tell you a story.

Synchronous communication meant when I exchanged information at the office, you had to send and receive the information at the same time. So I would call someone on the phone, wait for them to pick up, say some information while at the exact same moment they received that information. It happened all the time. Even way back in 2015 when we had all sorts of tools to stop it, it happened all the time.

How to cultivate a culture of open feedback

August 14, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Giving feedback can be terrifying. You’re often afraid of being too direct and setting a team member on the defensive. Or you’re worried that you’ll temper criticism with too much praise — losing your message in translation. Because giving feedback is difficult, people often do the exact wrong thing and avoid giving feedback altogether.

That’s one of the worst decisions you can make. When you withhold feedback not only do you risk the team member making the same mistake over and over again — but you deprive them of the opportunity to improve.

When you create an organizational culture around clear, open feedback, you’re making a promise between team members to compound and learn from past mistakes.

5 Checklists Applied to User Onboarding

August 8, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

If you’re a product person, you’ve probably spent a lot of time obsessing over the minute details of your app. You’ve spent hours tweaking the wireframes in Sketch, and even more hours working with engineering to make sure that everything’s absolutely perfect.

But even once you’re satisfied, none of that hard work actually matters unless you can get people to use your product.

Your users won’t always care about gutter sizing or great typography, especially when they’ve just signed up for a new product. They just want something that they can use and that can work.

The good news is that you’ve already sold them on your product’s value proposition. They’ve downloaded or installed your app and, in doing so, given you a clear signal that they’re interested in what it has to offer.

All you have to do is roll out the welcome mat and show them how it works. But demonstrating the value of your app and the way it works is the key to engaging users who will actually stick around.

A simple checklist is often one of the best tools for that. As productivity guru Atul Gawande writes in The Checklist Manifesto, “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.”

Checklists break a complicated system into small steps that are easy to accomplish. They hook into psychological principles, creating motivation for new users to actually complete onboarding tasks. From scheduling a social media post to creating a channel in a chat app, breaking these desired actions into small, simple steps is the key to actually getting people to do them.

In this article, we’ll look at five different examples of how products use checklists to drive success in user onboarding.

7 Lessons on Survivorship Bias that Will Help You Make Better Decisions

July 24, 2018 by Walker Donohue 1 Comment

Everyone loves a survivor.

We love watching movies like Gladiator, where a muscular Russell Crowe stands tall after defeating wave after wave of enemies.

Sometimes, however, we concentrate on the fact of surviving and fixate on that, and overlook everything else. This is a well known cognitive bias that psychologists refer to as “survivorship bias.”

Put simply, survivorship bias describes our tendency to focus on the people or things that have passed some kind of selection process—whether it’s literal survival in the gladiator pits, or getting a perfect score on a standardized test—and forgetting about other important factors.

Survivorship bias explains why people often believe that cars that were made 50 years ago last longer than those made today—even though these ideas are empirically false. The problem with falling prey to survivorship data is that it clouds your judgment and distracts you from getting to the root cause of a problem within your personal life, your team, or your product. It makes it easy to pattern-match and conflate correlation with causation.

Understanding survivorship bias and how it can cloud your judgment is the key to becoming a sharper, more critical thinking. That can lead to better team-decision making, building a more cohesive product, or making data-driven decisions like a scientist. Let’s walk through some examples!

The Advantages of Being a Solo Founder

July 17, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of advice out there for “solopreneurs.”

Ever since Paul Graham published The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups, back in 2006, in which he listed “Single Founder” as the first in a lengthy list of missteps, many people have argued against striking out on your own. The article was published just after Y Combinator was established. Since then, countless accelerators and VCs have looked down on the solo founder.

These days, being a solopreneur is almost as stigmatized as lacking a technical cofounder.

I may be only one person, but I’ve cofounded three successful startups. I founded my most recent startup, Podia, by myself. Your mileage may vary, but I think I’ve learned a thing or two about launching a startup on your own.

The Top 21 Tools for Social Sharing Across Every Channel

July 10, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Your customers don’t hang out in one place online. They’re scrolling through their Facebook feed first thing in the morning to catch up on updates they’ve missed, firing off a quick tweet or two as they grab a coffee and browse their Snapchat feed throughout the day.

Your customer’s attention is split across a ton of different platforms, so your content has to be everywhere as well if you’re to have a chance of getting noticed. That’s why it’s important for you as a marketer to know your audience and speak to them in the places they spend time.

Treating social media as a one size fits all strategy means you end up missing opportunities to engage with a wider range of customers in your target audience. Plus, if you have goals like increase ROI or conversions, you have no way of tracking data if you aren’t clear on who you’re marketing to and why.

The right set of tools will help you figure out where people spend time online, help you engage with customers and expose your brand to more people.

We broke down the top tools according to category, from social sharing to content management, to help you figure out where and how to share your content. Here’s a list of the top 20 tools to get you started.

7 People Management Tips that Will Help You Hone Your Craft as a Manager

July 3, 2018 by Paige Picard Leave a Comment

People commonly make the mistake of thinking that managing people is about meeting revenue targets or sales goals. That’s the product of good management—but how you get there is what really counts.

As a manager, you have to understand all of the small quirks and big ambitions that drive your people. You have to augment their strengths and help them improve their weaknesses.

In today’s data-driven world, we’re used to solving problems by digging into the data. If you want to ramp up user growth, you might analyze different marketing channels to see where your users are coming from. If you’re identifying a churn problem in your product, you want to find out how people are engaging with your product.

But management is something that’s less quantitative, and often more elusive. You won’t become a great manager by staring at spreadsheets all day—you have to put in the time and effort with your people. Luckily, as with any other craft, management skills can be learned, if you’re willing to put the time in.

How to Set Team Finance Goals that Don’t Suck

June 26, 2018 by Kathryn Vandervalk Leave a Comment

Goals are the glue that holds a company together. Setting the right business goals help all the people in a company—from customer support to sales—align around making progress and moving forward to a shared vision.

They don’t just help a company’s bottom line either. Research shows that goals help increase the drive and persistence of the people who are trying to achieve them.

Goals give your company the capacity to incentivize and motivate your team toward specific action.

For a finance department, though, setting team goals can be extremely tricky. Other teams in a company often have clear goals to drive the business forward: “Decrease churn by 20%” for your product team, or “Increase user sign-ups by 4x” for marketing. Within a finance department, it isn’t always clear how specific goals connect to the growth of the business—they’re often more focused around managing cash flow or containing costs.

For goals to succeed, you have to be able to connect them to the broader trajectory of what your company’s trying to do. You have to connect the dots between the bigger strategic goal of your company, the operational goals of your team, and the individual goals of your people.

The 28 Best Productivity Software of 2018

June 12, 2018 by Sasha Rezvina 37 Comments

With productivity apps popping up left, right and center, it often feels like you waste more time looking for the perfect software than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we’ve worked to improve our done lists and integrations to eliminate the need for meetings — but we realize that there are many more ways that you and your team can get more done in less time.

To spare you hours of Internet sifting, we put together a collection of the 28 best productivity software tools of this past year.

The 5 Best Online Course Creation Tools

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

Synchronous Communication

How to cultivate a culture of open feedback

5 Checklists Applied to User Onboarding

7 Lessons on Survivorship Bias that Will Help You Make Better Decisions

The Advantages of Being a Solo Founder

The Top 21 Tools for Social Sharing Across Every Channel

7 People Management Tips that Will Help You Hone Your Craft as a Manager

How to Set Team Finance Goals that Don’t Suck

The 28 Best Productivity Software of 2018

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