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Community and The Power of an Influencer

Really interesting day today on the signup/growth front. Valuable lessons on planting seeds and playing the long game in startup land.

Almost a year ago I reached out to a guy who writes a blog in the financial literacy/FIRE community (Financial Independence Retire Early) and told him about what we were building and asked for his opinion. Turned into lunch. I've kept him up-to-date a few times in-between.

A month ago, I invited him to an ad hoc AMA and along with six other folks, I gave an updated product tour and talked about where we are going with the product overall.

Today he released a wonderful blog post, pro bono, to his blog and Twitterverse. A really great article with hugely positive things to say.

Here we are 18 hours later. 51 new signups to my service. A couple of paying customers. Just a genuine cubic ton of goodwill based on the time and energy that he has invested in his community - paying it forward.

Contrast that with $1000 spent on Reddit, Facebook and LinkedIn ads and a handful of signups.

We released on Product Hunt two weeks ago and I was feeling fantastic about the 120+ people that signed up. But in comparison (and I am grateful for those signups) the affinity and the trust that this community has placed in one of their own is an incredibly powerful thing.

We just wrapped up a gruelling two month fintech competition. Long hours. Pitch practices. Noodling every word of a slide deck. Room full of fintech thought leaders and VCs and stakeholders. One signup, great lessons and guidance, and a few followups from fintech accelerators (again grateful but a bit underwhelming).

To put a bow on it.

Start early. Reach out. Be genuine. Do good and make good. The one hour lunch and the one hour ask-me-anything has evolved into a great cohort of potential early adopters.

Expecting Facebook or Instagram or a pitch competition to make you a star is short sighted. Community, even when it is not your own community, is far more powerful and rewarding. Start there.

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    We released on Product Hunt two weeks ago and I was feeling fantastic about the 120+ people that signed up. But in comparison (and I am grateful for those signups) the affinity and the trust that this community has placed in one of their own is an incredibly powerful thing.

    This is what most people don't see, they are too focused on short term results. They give up on building because they haven't hung around and built trust with people. And once people are ready to hear what they have to say, or are ready to use their product, they've moved onto another project that probably won't gain traction either. 🤷

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      I just updated all of that with godaddy two nights ago... stripping out the SSL certificate because it was throwing errors when forwarding,.

      Did you try just typing in www.whatifi.io? Works for me.

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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