thestove, Author at Glenn Stovall

thestove

Author Archives: thestove

Freelancing vs. Employment — When to Go Solo and When to Join a Team

Most creatives freelance at some point. Either as extra nights-and-weekends work, filling gaps between jobs, or building your own business. I advocate for learning the basics of doing client work. It gives you immutable job security. If you know how to find clients and profitable work, you’re never unemployed. The ability to fend for yourself provides freedom. At some point, you’ll face […]

What is a Marketing Developer?

When surgery was invented, the job title “surgeon” came with no modifiers. It didn’t matter what needed to come off or go in, you could see the same person. As medicine advanced, the job splintered. More knowledge meant increased complexity which necessitated specialization. Soon you would see one person for your war wounds and a […]

How to Apply Design Principles To Your Marketing Initiatives

I want to review a quote from Mike Monteiro’s book, You’re my Favorite Client: — So let’s look deeper into the design process, with a giant caveat. Every designer claims their own process… But whether you’re working on an agile or a waterfall process (or smartly between the two), all processes break down to some version […]

Win Clients With Robots: Marketing Automation for Consultants

A few weeks back a reader asked: Where should consultants start with marketing automation? I wanted to take a second to answer this. Here’s the challenge consultants face: working to relationships based business. You want to be efficient without being robotic. How can you put systems in place that make you more effective without turning clients off? Most of the times, […]

What Did The Contractor Say to the Consultant?

There are three terms used for a technical service professional, often interchangeably: contractor, freelancer, and consultant. Let’s put a more specific point on it. Contracting… is the closest to employment. As a contractor, you are effectively an employee that doesn’t get benefits or pay payroll taxes. Engagements are often months in length, and 40 hours/week. […]

Salutation Formatting For Nameless Subscribers

It’s a common use case: You want to personalize someone’s email by using their first name. You may try to use a liquid snippet like this: Hey {{ subscriber.first_name | default: “” }}, But there’s a problem. If the first name isn’t set, you end up with this wonky salutation with an awkward space: Hey […]

Breeze Through Your Next Whiteboard Interview

When applying for a development job, especially if it is your first, you may be faced with a horrifying request: Stand up, grab a marker & get ready to code on a whiteboard. No internet. No IDE. Not even a keyboard. Just you & the awkward silence of the interview room. The Case Against Whiteboard […]

Is Drip A Good Solution For Shopify Stores?

Drip, an email and marketing automation tool, recently launched a redesign and repositioning of their service: Drip’s New Look: 👇👇👇 Drip’s New Message The colors aren’t important. What’s important is how Drip changed its self-image. Here’s the important bit from their new manifesto: At Drip, our focus is on driving consumer sales, not B2B […]

No More X-Frame-Options Errors: How to Use Multiple URLs in A Rails Shopify App

If you are trying to build a Shopify app in Ruby on Rails, you may run into an issue when you try to include a link to another path in the application. Open up your dev tools and you’ll see a message like this: Refused to display ‘https://96cbc4ff.ngrok.io/sync’ in a frame because it set ‘X-Frame-Options’ […]

Who Do You Serve? Defining Positioning

The first problem any service business needs to solve is deciding who they are going to serve. Being a generalist makes marketing harder. If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one. Other consultants Philip Morgan and Jonathan Stark advocate for what they call the fool-proof positioning statement: I help $TargetCustomer solve $expensiveProblem. Unlike […]

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