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Building in Public Month #2 Retrospective

Looking back on the past month, I can say that I managed the workload a little better than the first month. There are ups and downs with every journey, I have to say I’m still riding high.

Let’s jump right into it!

The Numbers

  • 📈 480 Unique Visitors to Projekt19.com

  • 💌 19 Total Subscribers to this newsletter

  • 👋 670 New Users to Nineties.io

  • 🚀 Launched Where We Sweat - 21 orders, 400 unique visitors, 46 instagram followers

  • #️⃣ 5 New Twitter Followers

What Went Well

🚀 E-commerce Launch - Launching an e-commerce site in a weekend. Shopify is a fun tool and provides a quick way to get up and running. Happy that I chose to jump into an e-commerce project early. Fitness apparel has always been a passion of mine, this project was fun to build out. Bonus is I did it in a two days

🙏 Twitter rejoice - I’ve been able to get a more consistent posting routine on twitter. I’m getting the sense that my twitter following is engaging plus I’ve gained some new followers. Looking forward to putting more effort into growing my twitter audience. Recently started using Typefully, simple tool for writing twitter threads.

🗞 Content, content and more content - Providing valuable content is a tough hustle, but vital for building an audience. I’ve been able to set some standards for my content publishing, not only on this newsletter but elsewhere.

  • A Friday Fix twitter thread every Friday
  • Repurpose newsletter content for Medium
  • Not sure if subStack is the right model for my content. I’ve been experimenting with posting on IndieHackers

What Did Not Go well

🕵 Weekly Newsletter - I succumbed to the weekly effort of posting a newsletter. I missed one! I have been struggling about what types of content I want to share here. Last week I spent a few hours putting some shape on some content and creating a backlog of topics.

👕 Where We Sweat - Thus far the site hasn’t reached the potential I was hoping for. I am happy with the design, build and brand. E-commerce is hard to create traffic, especially early on. I’ve done an “okay” job at marketing - but it’s hard selling “another” t-shirt business. I’ve had some success with influencers and cold outreach but was hoping for more. Hoping during March I can get more eyes to turn to buyers.

Suggestions

🗓 Side hustlers out there, schedule your work nights! It’ll give you appropriate space and sets expectations for your partner and family.

Action Items

  • Start creating content for Reddit posts
  • Launch a design newsletter in the upcoming week
  • Ship out the first set of orders for Where We Sweat and push hard to get social content from fans
  • Dive into NFT’s 😜
  1. 1

    I'm always fascinated at people who can work on multiple projects at the same time, I can only focus on one thing at a time!

    What's your main way to drive subscriber's growth? I've been relying on the content I produce on my website and then people will "find out" about my newsletter.

    1. 1

      Yeah the multiple project is going to be a challenge at some point. I wanted to do it so that I could learn a lot across a lot of different places. At some point I will focus on a smaller set for sure.

      Yeah newsletter growth has been hard. It's really just a personal Build in Public substack.
      It's hard to get followers, I have tossed around links on twitter now and then but I want to potentially try to add a referral system like Spark Loop or something.

      I haven't yet since I am not sure if substack is the best way to go. I thought about just posting in Indiehackers and forget the substack newsletter all together.

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