📰 Atomic features: small details that make a BIG difference

Joe Pulizzi has built and sold a few different businesses over the years, but he also maintains his own personal website and newsletter with 50,000 subscribers. "Those are connections and relationships I can keep no matter what I decide to do with my other businesses," Joe told us.

In 2021, Joe launched a content marketing newsletter, The Tilt. With some help from his existing audience, The Tilt quickly became a success, and Joe sold it just two years later for a six-figure sum.

Joe's story is inspiring, and his approach to building a personal brand alongside other businesses is a model that other entrepreneurs can emulate.

Making a big idea happen depends on getting a few small details right.

These small details are what I call “atomic features” – tiny details of your product or distribution that have an outsized impact for customers. Airbnb had a big idea: let anyone rent out their property to anyone. But making that vision happen depended on nailing the right small details, such as professional photos.

There are many kinds of atomic features. But in this post, I’ll focus on the one that Airbnb’s story exemplifies: the “taste” atomic feature.

Startup = Teaching.

A startup idea only becomes a real business if the founder can rally an army of customers, employees, and investors to contribute. And this rallying is all about teaching others:

What your startup does.

Why it’s in their interest to buy your product, work for you, or invest in you.

Teaching creates growth.

However, teaching is especially difficult for novel startup ideas. Teaching takes time, most people are skeptical of the new, and we often find it hard to understand and remember new things. This leaves many entrepreneurs wondering:

‘How can I explain my ideas so others “get it”?’

The answer is to use physical words that transform your idea into real objects.

During the migration of the Creator Support pages to Turnkey, we faced an unexpected challenge caused by the differences in these two approaches to Conway’s Law. Before migration, our support pages were collocated with the Spotify for Artists home page. This included our MastheadHeader and MastheadFooter components, which are key to unifying our user’s experience within Spotify for Artists. We wanted these components to continue to be the same from within the Turnkey system, but we also assumed that all the other “local segments” would want the same for their users.

To solve this, we leveraged the facade pattern, which “provides a single, simplified interface to the more general facilities of a subsystem,” and we created our own iteration, S4X-Masthead, to maintain parity between our Masthead components of these two systems.

We, as SEOs, made two mistakes: saying organic traffic is reliably sustainable and free.

I remember one of the big arguments for SEO that sounded like this: "When you turn ads off, you don't get any more traffic. When you turn SEO off, traffic keeps coming in." I've used it, too.

But the quickly changing search landscape plus Google's intransparency make SEO a volatile channel that can bring traffic to our site but doesn't guarantee that well to keep pouring water. Rather, we should think about how to bring organic visitors to channels where we can build deeper relationships with our audience.

Why I built Stackradar There's lots of incredible tools out there (as you know) (it's why you're here). But there's too many, and I find sometimes I get so carried away trying out new stuff that I forget what I was ever trying to do in the first place.

But what spurred the creation of Stackradar was actually a conversation with my housemates (both business owners) in which they asked me what I meant by 'Atlassian'. After that day I made a point to ask anyone & everyone (offline) if they knew what Atlassian was, or Notion, Intercom, Product Hunt... 8/10 people said no.

Since that fated 'Atlassian' day I've also noticed how often people - from small business owners to CEO's and management teams - are choosing the wrong products, or outsourcing and spending money where it doesn't need to be spent.