The marketing resources I actually go back to
Blogs, books, newsletters, podcasts and case studies from my own swipe file, the ones I starred after years of saving everything.
TLDR
- I’ve kept a list of marketing resources on GitHub since 2021. It’s called awesome-marketing and 400 or so people have starred it.
- This post is the short version: the ones I starred myself, sorted by what you’d use them for.
- No “ultimate guide”, no affiliate links, nothing I haven’t read or listened to.
- The whole thing lives in my Savepad now, public, and it’s where I add new stuff first.
Why another list
Because most “best marketing resources” posts are written by someone who needed a post about marketing resources. You can tell. Every one of them lists HubSpot Academy, the Neil Patel blog and a podcast that stopped in 2019.
This one is what’s left after a few years of saving everything I read and deleting what I never opened again. It skews B2B and SaaS, because that’s where I’ve worked (Hygraph, DatoCMS and a few others before that).
Start here if you’re new
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. Positioning, explained by someone who’s done it for real companies.
- Traction Tactics from NFX. How Square, PayPal, Waze and Twilio got their first users. Short, specific and weirdly un-glamorous.
- Content Driven Growth from Lenny’s Newsletter. How HubSpot, Ahrefs and Intercom used content as a growth engine, with the numbers.
- How People Discover New Products, also Lenny. Worth reading before you pick a channel.
Blogs worth subscribing to
- Kevin Indig. Long, no-BS reads on SEO and strategy. He actually shows his data.
- Andrew Chen. Growth and network effects. The older posts hold up.
- Marketing Examples by Harry Dry. Not a blog exactly. The best short-form marketing teardowns anywhere.
Newsletters
- Growth Newsletter by Julian Shapiro and Demand Curve. Growth tactics you can use this week.
- Hitenism by Hiten Shah. Product and SaaS strategy from someone who’s built a few.
I wrote a whole post on marketing newsletters worth your inbox if you want more.
Podcasts
- Everyone Hates Marketers by Louis Grenier. For marketers who are tired of marketing-speak. Which should be all of us.
- Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Not marketing, strictly. Tech business with opinions, which is most of marketing anyway.
Case studies
- How Airtable’s long tail SEO strategy is building their moat. Programmatic SEO done properly, before everyone started doing it badly.
- How Notion built a $2B startup through community and templates. The template gallery as a growth channel.
- Stripe’s model of product-led, developer-centric growth. If you market to developers, read this twice.
- How we launch at Supabase. Launch weeks, written up by the people who made them a thing.
Books
The three I starred, none of which are really marketing books:
- Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Doing fewer things, on purpose. Marketing teams need this more than most.
- Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella. How a company changes its mind about itself.
- Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson. Yes, really.
Handbooks
Some companies publish how their marketing team works. Free, honest and better than most courses: PostHog’s marketing handbook, GitLab’s (it’s enormous) and Resend’s handbook.
Where the full list lives
The README on GitHub is still there, but the version I actually keep up to date is my public Savepad at my.savepad.app/@gunnyganatra. Same folders as the README headings, with snapshots of every page so dead links don’t matter, and searchable, so “north star metric” finds the Reforge post without me remembering who wrote it.
If you work on dev tools, there’s a second list: developer marketing resources. And if you want your own list to look like this, making a folder public is one toggle.