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Building a One Man Media Company - Week 1 Recap | Reaching Gymshark CEO

Hi guys,

Last week after some deliberation I launched Founderness. Founderness is a business magazine for entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs, delivered via email 2 days a week (for now).

The goal of Founderness is to be like the best business magazines - with interesting business stories, Founder interviews that focus on experiences, a tiny bit of news sprinkled on top of that.

THE WHY

So why on Earth would I start such a complicated project? Let me tell you:

There are a few different reasons.

  • I want to show that entrepreneurship is not something unattainable for people who want to make that jump. Inspiring others to start their business is something I've always done, having shared knowledge of any industry I've been in with anyone that asked.

  • Business media is filled with irrelevant information for us, Indie Founders. TechCrunch is filled with the information on someone's latest Series A round, Forbes is hitting people up to pay them $3000 to be included in another 30 under 30... I could go on. Only Inc. and StarterStory provide stories that I've been interested in lately.

With Founderness, I want to celebrate the small business owners, the Indie Founders, the go-getters.

  • Running 2 previous businesses, I realized that the most interesting people I've met are other Founders. However, similar to us, they struggled with getting featured about their unique path to entrepreneurial success. We want to be the media channel you can do that in.

FIRST WEEK STRUGGLES

  • Launching any project is filled with doubt and impostor syndrome. I still question myself daily but I'm getting better at committing to the project every day.

  • Clarity. Clarifying the message I want to put out with this project has been a slight struggle. As someone who has worked on plenty of branding/slogan projects, I find it amusing that this is one of the struggles I experience.

  • Readership. We're still tiny so we haven't had the greatest readership numbers quite yet. This should improve as we publish more founder interviews and content in general.

FIRST WEEK'S SUCCESSES

It's not all bad, however. I'm super glad how the content looks visually and I've been pretty consistent with publishing on the website and on my Twitter account.

  • We were able to reach Ben Francis, Gymshark's CEO with one of my tweets. That was a great rush and encouragement at the beginning of the project. A screenshot of him liking one of my tweets.

  • Our article about Microaquire went well - the company retweeted it and it was well-received overall.

NUMBERS

  • My personal Twitter account grew to 309 followers. I was able to reach a whopping 26.2K impressions. That is mad to think about. I want to reach these numbers in my newsletter soon.

  • The Google Analytics stats show that we had 162 unique visitors to our website. I'll count this as a win.

  • We have been able to grow our mailing list to 31. Hoping to double by next week.

  • 24 pieces of content published (I had some articles pre-written, like most of the book summaries).

  • 4 Founders I contacted agreed to an interview. Some of them being fellow Indie Hackers like Kyle from Removaly, Mike Slaats and Ben from Tiny Projects. First interviews will get published next week.

GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK

  • Publish 2 Founder Interviews

  • Contact 10 people every day about Founderness. That can be reaching out for an interview or just generally explaining what we do

  • Double the subscribers we currently have

  • Overcome the fear of posting on Reddit. Reddit can be brutal.

IDEAS

How can you help me with Founderness? I'm all ears. :)

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