Team Roundup #7: What We’re Reading

As you might already know, Testomato was accepted to the 2015 accelerator program at StartupYard in early March. We recently completed a month of intensive mentoring, and as a result, the whole team has had experimentation on the brain.

Reading isn’t always just for keeping up with industry news! It’s also a great way to pick up new ideas and learn techniques that can help you grow as a service. With that in mind, here’s another team roundup of the best finds from our recent reading lists.

We hope you find something for your next coffee break at the office.

Improve JavaScript Performance Analysis Results with User Marks

A helpful tutorial from SitePoint as part of their web dev tech series from Microsoft, exploring several tools that can be used to gain insight on how your JavaScript code is performing and how to use user marks in the memory graph to analyze your performance.

If you don’t want to read the whole post, you can also watch this video.

SaaS: How We Automated Free Trial Extensions To Increase Paid Conversions By 33%

What do you do when everyone who signs up says they love your product, but no one’s paying?

Trak.io is a predictive analytics platform for tracking user interaction with apps. This informative case study explains their team’s experience with solving one of the hardest challenges that many SaaS companies face after launch – customer conversion.

In this post, they share their experience with segmenting their onboarding users and how they implemented a simple, scaleable tactic to increase their paid conversion rate by 33%!

How to Make a Landing Page That C.O.N.V.E.R.T.S.

We ran a landing page experiment this past month, and this post by KISSmetrics gave us an in-depth look at all the essential elements that go into creating a landing page that doesn’t just get people to visit your page, but gets them to take action once they’re there.

Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll learn about:

C = Clear Call to Action
O = Offer
N = Narrow Focus
V = VIA: Very Important Attributes
E = Effective Headline
R = Resolution-Savvy Layout
T = Tidy Visuals
S = Social Proof

You can read the full post, here.

The $1,000 Facebook Guide: How I Advertise to People You Can’t…Yet

Not sure how to reach your target users on Facebook? Glen Allsopp can help. This detailed guide from his blog ViperChill walks you step-by-step through the process of promoting any type of website on Facebook, including where to find information about your industry and tips for how he’s been able to make his own Facebook pages reach more people than the competition.

It’s a great basic guide to follow if you’re just getting started with marketing your projects online, and also a great way to learn more about reaching audiences you might not have thought were accessible.

Override Gmail’s Mobile Optimized Emails

We’ve also been working hard on improving our emails and newsletters. This can be particularly frustrating when it comes to dealing with Gmail’s mobile optimized emails. All the hard work you put in to create an awesome email can end up being hi-jacked (or even broken) by Google in order to improve legibility.

CSS Tricks created a great tutorial about what triggers Google’s font-size bump-up and shows you a few methods for overriding it.

What Inspired Us Last Month

Looking for some new sources of inspiration?

• Grav: A modern flat-file CMS that’s fast, easy, and powerful.
• PapaParse: The world’s fastest, multi-threaded CSV parser for the browser.
• npm Private Modules: Create and share private modules through the official npm registry.
• Crow: A fast and easy to use C++ micro web framework inspired by Python Flask.
• Fourk.js: Spawn your web app on multiple threads by taking the script it’s executed from and re-spawning it as as web worker.

What We’re Writing About

If you enjoyed this roundup, you might enjoy these posts from our own blog last month!

• 7 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Going Mobile: MobileGeddon is upon us! We take a look at Google’s advice about the top mistakes they see websites making and how to fix them.
• Why Testomato Says Your Site Is Down When It’s Not: Ever received an alert from Testomato that your site is down, only to find it’s accessible? Check out this quick guide to learn more about what can cause this issue and why you might receive an alert from us.

What have you been reading lately? We’d love to hear your suggestions! 

Share with us in the comments or on Facebook. You can also find us @testomatocom.