What are you working on this month? (August 2019)
With every new month comes a new chance to talk about what you're working on and meet other founders. Here's how you can join the discussion:
First, respond to someone else who's commented, just to say hello or leave them some feedback!
Next, leave your own comment describing what you're working on (or aspiring to work on), and your biggest goal for August.
That's it!
Excited to hear from everyone and see what you're working on!
#ask-ih
Launching and marketing somewordsfor.me
Launching
Marketing
(This is where I'm a bit stuck)
I will also be doing minor updates to the product, but I'm quite happy with it right now :)
I guess writing apps could be for anyone, but it may be worth trying to focus in on specific groups/niches to try to gain some traction. Then write, Tweet, etc with them in mind.
I like your site, it’s pretty clean and simple, very well suited to writing. I enjoy writing too. English is not my first language and I need to improve it. Many many years ago, I considered being a writer (before becoming a developer). I still do, but if I ever become one, it will be purely for joy. I love science fiction.
Anyway, good luck with your launch. Some advise, make a checklist of all the places you would like to publish. Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, BetaList. There are many. Some will even pick up your product after it appears on PH or HN. Twitter and share by LinkedIn your PH launch link.
An then prepare to receive lots of offers to advertise your product/service by email, from all around the globe. I was contacted many times by some people from an american tv show that runs early in the morning. They said something like they wanted to feature my product and to contact them back to arrange a meeting of sorts. It looked shady, so I googled them and it turns out they charge tons of money to advertise your stuff on tv. Totally useless.
Haha, thanks for the pointers. TV is still a thing? ;)
Ha, apparently, but they must be desperate.
Working on Versoly Development/Marketing/Sales :)
Development
Marketing
Sales
You should allow someone to build the page first then require signup after they built it.
i think this would be a good idea.
Already have that :), but decided collecting emails was important. People having the problem are more likely to enter their email.
It is a hypothesis and we might be wrong.
If you want to just test use app.versoly.com/demo :)
You may want to consider mocking up the image preview of the editor in sketch or any other ui mockup tools. that way when you upgrade the ui, you wont have to update the landing page to reflect it.
You can hit me up if you need help with that.
cheers!
Interesting idea, will have a think about it.
We can easily screenshot and add to Versoly in 10 seconds. Any other benefits in doing it a UI Mockup tool?
I'm working on finding clients for my video editing/marketing services: https://andstuffstudios
My one goal for August is to find 2 clients, that's all.
Keepin' it simple.
.com 👀
Validating a product that can help readers gain knowledge faster without going through the process of reading a full book (of a subject).
That's interesting. What sort of subjects would you plan to cover?
Well, I want to make it as a course marketplace. Sort of like Udemy but the courses are in writing. I think it can help learners to learn and instructors earn good revenue. For me personally, I'll probably teach Tech related courses (mainly Data Science). But I'm open to others who may want to share other subjects.
August is gonna be the month that the evergreen version of the Sales for Founders course launches!
I'm so, so excited for this.
The first 2 cohorts went well, and I learnt so much about how to make the course better and more affordable.
I honestly feel the course will now be at the point where it's an absolute no brainer for anyone who wants to build a business selling to prosumers or businesses.
in addition to editing some of the content, I'll be doing all the growth stuff and appearing on some podcasts to get word out.
Awesome!
"Selling to businesses or prosumers"... So, not for selling to consumers? :)
Kind of depends...
If you're selling something where the purchase trigger is primarily emotional (I want this) not logical (I need this) then the course can't really help you.
Selling sneakers to teens? I probably can't help you.
Selling orthopaedic shoes to professionals? I can help you get started
Selling a workout app to consumers? The course is a good fit for you
Is there something sales-related you're struggling with? My email is always open :)
Currently working a lot with twilio, zapier, and airtable to figure out what type of text/calling platform I could build with those tools.
Also, just posted an article about bad product ideas that I want to explore, just to get into the rhythm of building things quickly.
Matt
love the idea of getting into the rythm of building thing quickly. Thinking about playing with Gatsby + NetlifyCRM or some other headless CRM to quickly build out ideas
A growth feature for my social body weight tracker app.
I'd like the app to generate a sharable video that walks through the users timeline showing their weight loss progress on a graph, and sprinkling in notes, comments and reactions they received, kind of like a replay of their weight loss journey.
I've got a couple of users that have made amazing progress and want to give them something they can easily share on facebook/instagram to show off their progress (and market my app at the same time).
I was inspired by Scott Belsky's "The Messy Middle" where he talks about developing certain features who's main purpose is to provide a WOW factor and draw people into the app.
Going to launch https://www.jobtrackable.com/
It's a job application tracker which can save your time and help you land your dream job.
The app needs a minor touch up and has built with no-code. I used Wix for landing page and Bubble for the main application.
Launching and improving v1 of Deep Work Hub – an experimental time tracker designed to help you build and track a habit of working in a state of the deep flow.
https://deepworkhub.com/
It can already do 3 things:
I'm looking for like-minded people who find concepts of Deep Work and Flow inspiring. Your ideas and suggestions are more than welcome!
Have a productive August <3
I'm working 100% on Danger World (danger.world) this month.
The development goal is to ship multiplayer (great strides were made toward this last month, and I just posted some teaser screenshots on my Facebook page).
The marketing goal is to find my players! I've been growing at a good pace, but that's all the more reason not to let up. I'm planning an advertising push to go along with multiplayer.
Working on SCRL App. We create premium Instagram templates for their carousel feature.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrl/id1289057196
We recently did a collaboration with Louis De Guzman and created limited-edition templates. This is part of a new project called Artist Series.
https://www.instagram.com/louisdeguzman/
Shyte loads. Weekend I have few stuffs to sort for SXI.
😰
I'll be working on https://webmonitoring.online development. It's on early-stage and I have to do a lot of work.
Development:
Need some beta users also to test the app and get some feedback.
Working on version 1.3 of https://ds9soft.com/FreelanceStation/ developing and doing some marketing.
Development:
Marketing:
The nature of the app (Mac only) and the targeted market (freelancers) makes bringing traffic to my site very difficult. I’m currently seeing about 600 unique visitors per month, and that’s too little :(
I'm working on https://founderhackers.com.
Dev
Marketing
If you're learning about marketing, and you're concern is getting traffic to the website, you should check out Grow & Convert's website and research content marketing.
Thank you, looks like some good info. I hadn't even considered content marketing. Plenty of reading to do this weekend!
I’m working on visualization of places to book online taxi in Bali, so people know whether or not they could book online taxi from a particular place. It’s called carflag.info.
I’ve done some mini launch to Twitter, Reddit, and HN. But I’m having a hard time to figure out the next roadmap and the feedback loop seems stall.
I’d love to know if you have some ideas on what I should do at this point. Thanks a lot!
Finishing thegoodstartup.com's blog design and wrapping up articles and interviews for our ~tentative launch! I feel so held back by trying to find free traffic sources to gauge interest in our current landing page when I know I should just focus on moving forward with publishing
You could post it in a Facebook group you're a part of and have them rip it apart.
They're not only honest, but if it's interesting to them - they'll want to join as soon as you launch.
Looking at doing a bit of a relaunch of my crash monitoring service. The update includes the following changes:
Good luck with that! Just curious, what happened with the last launch? Where did you launch it?
I setup up a preview site before I launched and had around 40 people sign-up their interested and then launched it by advertising on Facebook/Twitter/Google/betapage/product hunt and it got a fair number of hits but nobody signed up. Nearly gave up with it but thought I'd give it another try.
I think my landing page sucked though so I'm hoping a redesign will help. Fingers crossed 🙂
I have 3 priorities for August:
I'm working on building a following for what will sooner or later become a physical illustrated Mexico City slang dictionary, probably near cards against humanity humor. Bit different than typical saas, but after leaving my engineering job of 4 years thought it would be fun to do something a bit different. Still decided to build a simple Clojure + Google Sheets app to generate the pages for me
https://twitter.com/ChilangoEnglish
Love it. So nice to see something that's not a conventional saas product :)
I'm working on https://tamuhq.com marketing and growth. The tool I'm using right now is a rails app with Amazon SES to send cold email to business owners.
I plan to hire SEO expert to improve the site on search engine.
All the fun buzzwords - gamification, monetization, growth.
What's the plan to get it in front of more people?
Good question.
Immediate:
Near-term:
Long-term:
How come you decided to friday/saturday :), traffic is normally less. You will want the guys mid week and boom they see you.
Wow you have some nice followers :), any tips?
Partnerships have been hard to get for us. Hopefully things are different for you.
Built in virality is great.
Well, there's gonna be less competition Friday/Saturday. Maybe we could postpone it to Sunday, but the main thing we want is to get a couple dozen new users to see and perhaps test the product.
Twitter tips: provide value, not just links. Have a point with every tweet. Also doesn't hurt if you have a personal account with a couple thousand followers to retweet from :)
Partnerships - I think the incentives are aligned pretty well for us, but we'll see.
You could have the incentives all in their favour and its still hard :)
Hopefully you crack it and let us know how you done it.
We've got this on our radar for the next few months, and it's really fascinating as an idea. It's not "core functionality" stuff, but makes such a huge difference to the user experience.
What sort of thing are you looking to add?
Just added levels and re-designed point system (you can check it out if you install our extension - https://www.deprocrastination.co/home).
Next up:
I'm looking to add gamification as well to my product. Probably not this month, but soon. I was also thinking badges and a monthly leaderboard.
Do you have any good reads on the topic?
I like Gamification by Design by Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham.
It's a short manual on gamification.
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Interesting. What's the monetization strategy, other than the affiliate links?