Hey! 

Creativity is bullshit (I'm kidding), but I'm super jealous that some people just have it and I dont. It's almost been an internal struggle for me. The irony is that I'm forced to be creative because well...I send this email to you every week, but in a way it has taught me to understand creative struggle and how to approach it. 

Here are the 4 loops that cause creative struggle. Credit to Janis 

I really love these as it paints a pretty good mental model of how a lot of us get stuck in these so called loops, yet it shows just how damn simple it it to get out and at the same time just how hard the loop keeps us in.  

In other news...

As you may know, every Tuesday I resend The Slice to everyone that did not open, but that's now going to stop because I realized that a lot of you use email clients like Superhuman and ProtonMail that block tracking pixels and I'd really hate for you to get an extra email from me that will just clutter up your inbox. Big thanks to Jake for pointing this out to me.

- Nic 

Notice: 

Here is my new and improved advertising page with a new pricing structure and a better looking booking sheet made with Notion.

UserBooster is a Notion Dashboard that helps you build your launch strategy and get your first users. You will learn how to leverage online communities and get organic traffic. 

Mac app that lets you move and resize windows using keyboard shortcuts or snap areas.

Screely is a simple and free tool that lets you make amazing browser mockups, in fact its the very tool that I use to make all my other mockups on The Slice, including this one!

Microletter makes it easy to create your own newsletter. It is as simple as it gets, focusing on a great writing experience, and an easy-to-use interface. No fluff, no bullshit. 

Headline Analyzer is a tool that (as the title suggests) analyzes your headlines for your blog posts or newsletter subject lines and rates them on how engaging they are. 

This weeks newsletter of the week is First 1000, a newsletter that takes a dive deep on how founders got their first 1000 customers.

This is a really awesome newsletter that I only found recently and over the weekend, had binged all of their case studies. Two are my favourites are their case studies on OnlyFans and Discord

The Value of Doing a Little.
A zero day is a day in which you did absolutely nothing towards your habits, not even a tiny bit. If you want to get into the habit of writing a daily journal for example, a zero day is is when you don’t even pick the pen up. Writing a single word would put you in the green, preventing you from having a zero day. Read More

Building for 2 years, $194 in revenue. Lessons from a failed app. 
Here is a great little blog post on the lessons learnt from making a failed habit tracking app and how you might be able to avoid the same mistakes as Kyle did. Read more

I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it.
Reddit never ceases to amaze me, in fact I can waste hours on end just reading Reddit posts. This one in particular brings up the the topic of remote work and #WFH culture. Now that it's been some time since the pandemic first kicked off, companies are starting to go back to the office, but is that really such a good idea. Here is an anecdote on why remote is here to stay. Read more

Notion tools that will make your life better
If you're like me that uses Notion for just about everything, then you're going to want to take a look at this twitter thread of 5 of the best Notion related products. Check it out .

How to build a product with no code required (44 no code tools)
I've always been a big advocate for no-code tools because apparently I'm too much of a dumb ass to learn real code. In all seriousness, I use close to about 9 no-code tools in my tech stack alone to put this newsletter together and they have been a pleasure to use and honestly made my life a whole lot easier.  

Here is an awesome Indie Hackers post on getting started with no-code that I recommend everyone should take a look at. Check it out

A 15 point checklist for newsletter writers. 
I know that I have a few subscribers on my list that also write their own newsletters. Here's a great little blog post that I found incredibly helpful, even as a seasoned newsletter writer. Check it out

Wicked Templates - Well designed Tailwind CSS templates and landing pages for your saas, blog, app, extension, newsletter, e-commerce.

NewsletterOS - NewsletterOS is a Notion dashboard that helps anybody, new and veteran to the newsletter space create, manage and grow an email newsletter.

EmailOctopus - Email marketing made easy. Simple, powerful tools to grow your business. Easy to use, quick to master and all at an affordable price.