Focusing on growth - looking back on my first month

A month ago, I decided it was time to stop building, and start promoting SiteGuru. A good moment to look back and reflect on what I tried, and what worked.

First of all: I did add some new features, so I broke my promise to stop building. However, I've dramatically reduced the time I spent coding, in exchange for time promoting my product. I'm really happy about that.

My efforts seem to have paid off: 60 more visitors compared to the previous month, and 182 new users compared to 137 in the month before.

Here's what I tried:

Content

Pro tip: revive your greatest hits! About 18 months ago I launched the Startup Directory List. Now, I spent 2 hours refreshing it, adding new startup directories and updating the content. The result: a successful post on IH and Hacker News, and a 400% increase of visits to that page, as well as some new backlinks

Outreach

To tell more people about SiteGuru, I planned to reach out to professional SEOs and give them a free trial. I spent way too much time searching for the right tool. I tried MailShake and Respona, but both didn't exactly do what I needed.

So I went back to basics, created a list in Excel, and started sending out emails. I've talked to 12 professional SEOs and got them to try the tool. The result: valuable feedback, shares on LinkedIn and a guest post. This is definitely something I'll ramp up in the coming months.

Twitter

If there's one place where professional SEOs hang out, it's Twitter. I've been lurking on Twitter for years but was never very active. That's changed: I think I have a lot of useful info to share, so I started chiming in on SEO discussions, and share useful articles from my personal account (with a link to SiteGuru). I'm also using Buffer to tweet regularly from the SiteGuru account.

The result is modest growth in followers, both on my personal and business Twitter accounts. It's going to take time, but I'm confident I can keep growing my audience if I share valuable stuff. Also, it's a lot of fun!

So what's next?

The best thing: after focusing on promoting for a month, it feels like adding no features is no longer my default work mode. It seems like I've built a habit. I'm currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and learned this is a good first step. I just need to continue doing this: the first signs are modestly positive but I realize every overnight success is years in the making.