Forem: Tobias Hikari

23 Remote Sports Tech Companies Hiring Right Now

Tobias Hikari — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 13:54:50 +0000

If you are a web developer and a sports fan, you can combine your love of sports with joining one of these sports tech companies that are hiring right now.

Calm - App for Meditation and Sleep
Hydrow - Hydrow is the Live Outdoor Reality rowing machine
Second Spectrum - Sports Analytics company
Headspace - App for Meditation and Sleep
Forza Football - Popular football app
ATP Tour - Tennis
Signa Sports United - Sports commerce and tech platform
Tonsser - Football player app and community
Toca Soccer - Soccer training app
Oura - Fitness hardware
Pandascore - Esports data provider
Hudl - Sportsanalytics company
Peloton - Fitness hardware
FitBit - Fitness app
Fanatics - Global leader in licensed sports merchandise
Statsbomb - Sportsanalytics company
Zelus Analytics - Sportsanalytics company
DAZN - TV and Media
Drapper Labs - Blockchain company
Sportradar - Sportsanalytics company
MyFitnessPal - Fitness app
GreenPark Sports - Gaming and eSports
Synergy Sports - Sportsanalytics company

Want more?

Browse through openings from sports tech companies all over the world.

Growing a platform for learning how to code - Interview with the founder of Scrimba

Tobias Hikari — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 18:03:32 +0000

Hey Per, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you are working on?

We’re building Scrimba, which is the easiest way to learn to code. Through our courses, you can learn stuff like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React.js, Vue.js, and more. What separates us from other video-based course platforms for developers is that our courses are 100% interactive. We’ve built a technology that lets students interact with the code directly inside the screencasts, meaning they can experiment with the code when they get confused. This also changes how teachers actually teach, as they’re now able to give tasks to students much more easily.

One of your projects is Scrimba - how did your get your first users for it?

We got our first users from creating free coding courses and marketing them through Medium and YouTube. We created top-notch content that we gave away for free, and then we exported it to other formats (like text and video) and allowed other communities with a lot of users to share it for free under their name. This gave a ton of traffic back to us.

How has your marketing strategy changes as you have evolved?

This one is interesting. In the beginning, we relied heavily on posting articles to Medium, and especially via popular publications. This gave us a ton of traffic. However, throughout 2018, this channel started to become saturated, and it didn’t move the needle for us anymore.

We then moved onto getting Scrimba screencasts linked to sponsoring open source libraries and providing them with content to their docs, like Vue.js. This is great, for the following reasons:

a) improves their documentation

b) gives us relevant traffic

c) helps the open-source team stay alive

The next path to unlock growth was SEO, as we suddenly started getting enough domain authority to break into the first page on certain queries developers search for when they’re looking to learn new skills. It has grown from almost nothing to almost a quarter of our traffic now, and we’ve started investing time into understanding keywords better, e.g. figuring out which keywords we should try to rank for and which one we should ignore (either due to too little traffic, or too much competition).

YouTube has been an important driver all along, and it continues to be.

What “social media strategies” are you doing for your projects?

We encourage people heavily to thank the creator of the screencasts on Twitter. This has been great, as it makes the teachers and students connect better, which hopefully makes the students come back, and motivates the teachers to create more content.

We also have a Spectrum community where our users can talk with us and talk with each other.

What SEO strategies have worked for you?

Focusing on the right keywords to target.

For example, our ES6 course might have link juice to rank on the first page for a popular query like “es6 tutorial”. If so, we’ll aim for it.

However, our CSS course might not have enough link juice to break into the first page of “css tutorial” (popular search phrase), but it might have enough juice to rank for something like “learn css” (less popular phrase, but still with some amount of traffic). In which case, we’ll aim for “es6 tutorial” for our ES6 course and “learn css” for our CSS course.

This has helped us a lot. Essentially, it’s about understanding where you have a chance and where you don’t have a chance, and where it’s not worth competing at all.

What content marketing are you doing for your projects?

Content marketing has been one of the most important drivers for our growth. It’s what got us off the ground. This is natural though, as Scrimba is a tool for creating learning content for developers.

We’re trying to squeeze as much as we can out of our content. When we have a create Scrimba tutorial, we’ll often times export it to video and share it on YouTube, and also write it out as a text-based tutorial and publish it as wide as we can. This way, we’re getting much more traffic and links back to the original tutorial.

How to make an event around your product launch

Tobias Hikari — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 10:42:46 +0000

This article was originally published on my project Growthhacklist, where I try to help people grow their online business.

Big companies like Apple or Facebook have big events to announce new products or services - so why don’t you do a little event around your launch too?

Impossible - well, not really. Take a look at the launch event around the second version of Leave Me Alone App. For their newest version of their email unsubscribe service they created a launch stream on Twitch interviewing well known indie makers.

Ideas you can do around the launch event

Interview people in your niche
Bring in guest speakers
Do an AMA
Q&As and how-to sessions
Present features, new services or products in a little live presentation
Little videos of features, new services or products
Show inside in your business: For example, tools you use or an office tour
Behind the scenes tour of your desk
Spotlight a customer success story
Create a Instagram story of your launch
If you are a small team you could talk about the whole workflow - from the design, programming perspective etc.

Planning out your event

Here are some short thoughts about planning your event:

You should script your event thoroughly.
Take notes and build an exact time schedule about when and what is going to happen.
Another element you could plan in advance are pre-recorded videos.
Do multiple streaming test runs the days before
Expect internet issues and be prepared for them
Have backups of everything

You also need a good live streaming setup. You could use platforms like Twitch, Youtube or try out a streaming software like Dacast. For a more detailed technical overview you can also look at this article:

6 video streaming software compatible with your live streaming platform.

Marketing and building buzz

Last but not least you need to think about ways to promote your upcoming live stream. Here are some ways in which you could do that:

Go where your audience is - Share it on social media channels, groups and your accounts
Share it in forums and communities you are active in
Invite email subscribers to tune in
Make a little video teaser of the event
Send a few invitations about the live streaming event to journalists and influential individuals

Sources
How to Use Live Video in a Product Launch: 7 Ways
Broadcast Live Product Launch with Live Streaming Software
How to boost your new product launch with live streaming

You can find me on Twitter, read more on Growthhacklist, or join our community.

How to build an online video maker - Interview with the founder of VEED.io

Tobias Hikari — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 17:38:47 +0000

Hey Sabba, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you are working on?

Hi, I am Sabba. Technically, I am a designer, but my never-ending appetite for learning new things means I also like to code (pretty bad) marketing products (even worse) and also make youtube videos (Despicable)

Anyway, I'm the co-founder of VEED, an online video maker. We let users do a bunch of cool video stuff online, like make Instagram video templates, add glitch filter and VHS video filters to video and we are most well known for our automated subtitle generation.

You are working on Veed.io - How did your get your first users for them?

Our first users were pretty easy, we launched on product hunt super early. Our build at the time was pretty much bad and only allowed you do some basic features such as trimming videos, cropping videos, adding images. That was pretty much it!

After that, we hit Reddit and answered about 100 questions on quora about video editing. After we did all this, we were pretty much buoyant and would see users to VEED every day, not many, but enough to see some basics working.

You are working on Veed.io - How did your get your first users for them?

What tools/services are you using and would you recommend to other indie makers?

Nothing fancy - Drift, google analytics, Mix panel, webmasters tools

What “social media strategies” are you doing for your projects?

We are not that big on social media as most of our traffic comes from SEO right now.

We do like to launch products on Twitter, Reddit, hacker news and on product hunt, but don't have a social media strategy (YET)

My advice for any other indie hacker is if social media is an important acquisition channel for your industry, you should work on it. But it's not necessary for everyone.

What SEO strategies have worked for you?

Landing pages!

Every time someone searched something like a term like “add image to video” we show up in the top few results. When you land one of our landing pages, there is just one button above the fold that takes you to our video editor. This method has proven really effective for us and we have managed to acquire the best part of 30,000 users a month with it. We actually wrote a blog post about how we got 50,000 MAU with no marking budged. If you're looking for more technical detail, check that out.

What content marketing are you doing for your projects?

I am the first to hold my hand up and say we were REALLY bad at content marketing in the early days, mainly due to being really bad at writing, but we got better at it over time.

We now have a few blogs, we write about how to grow your audience with social media on VEED GROW and we also write about our own startup on our blog.

Our blog content is really hit or miss. When it comes to results, one blog post we wrote, about how we got rejected from YC, brought in about 40,000 users overnight, with around 500 concurrent users at any point in time, It was crazy.

And other articles about the future of silent film just get a few views, but is our most backlinks blog post.

Let’s talk a bit about pricing strategy - what did work for you and what didn’t work out?

We are pretty new to pricing and have only been charging for 4 Months. 4 months ago we had to start charging as we only had 3 months runway in the bank. We started off charging $5 as we thought no one would pay. After acquiring 20 users over one weekend, we then put the price up to $10. Charging $10 was good as we learned what our users found valuable and how we could improve it for them. Once we made significant product improvements, we put the price up to $20. I do recommend checking out Van Westendorp price sensitivity model for a more strategic way of doing this.

What advice would you give someone to get his first 100 customers?

Get your first 10, then do whatever you did that first time, but 10X more! For example, 10 PH launched, 10X quora, 10X Reddit, 10X blog posts, 10X landing pages. You get the idea.

This post first appeared on our interview series on Growthhacklist

Interested in sharing your knowledge in an article, tutorial or an interview? Shoot me an hi@toomai.me or hit me up on Twitter!

How to send a magic link with Nodemailer and Namecheap

Tobias Hikari — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 12:34:36 +0000

For my project Growthhacklist I needed a simple and fast way to send new users a “magic link” after leaving their email address on my landing page. To do so, I hacked together a little recipe with Nodemailer and Namecheap.

As you can see on my landing page I have a little input field where the user can submit an email. After clicking the Start Learning button he will be redirected to the “Create Account” page.

Now in the background my little recipe will start working. To get the "magic link" working you need a namecheap account (in my case, can also be another email provider) and the npm package Nodemailer.

First of all install the npm package and require it in your controller (i am using express js) with

const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');

After that you need the following code which will do the magic.

The var transporter part is for your email provider. For security reasons make sure to put the account details in your environment variables.

In the var emailOptions you need to set up the sending email address. You can then add the subject of your email address and after html: set your welcome message for your first email to the user.

You also need to add the post request somewhere. In my case I added it to my index.js file.

router.post('/email', userController.newEmail);

You could also do that in one file but it is cleaner to have an index.js in your routes folder. The only thing you need to do now is to add the code for the form to your frontend. I am using Pug JS but of course you could use also use another template engines.

Frontend code
That's it already. I hope it helps, if you have questions please let me know in the comments section.

That's it already. I hope it helps, if you have questions please let me know in the comments section.

This article first appeared on my project Growthhacklist

Growth idea - Start sending Plain-Text emails

Tobias Hikari — Sat, 18 May 2019 12:04:52 +0000

Start sending Plain-Text emails

This article first appeared on my project Growthhacklist.

Sending plain-text emails can increase the response rate of your newsletter. Karthik Suroju of Newton shared this little idea in an interview. They increased their email response rate by +156% by just sending Plain-text email instead of HTML emails.

Another Email Example

They are also following always three important rules with every email:

They never send ‘No reply’ emails
They encourage users to reply to all emails, newsletters included.
They respond to all queries within a few minutes, even on holidays.

What are other makers doing?

While writing this article, I started to ask other indiemakers in the subreddit of Entrepreneurs and on Indiehackers what they think about plain text emails - here are some answers:

Reddit Post

Indiehackers post

It's really interesting that all comments are in favour of plain text emails. If you want to see what other bigger companies are doing, you can also take a look at the website Good Email Copy and copy the style of successful StartUps/Companies like Slack or Basecamp.

Sources:

Case Studies: 2019’s Top 10 Growth Hacks
Lessons Learned: Why Newton Swears by Plain-Text Emails