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Growth is not rocket science 🚀

I've been using a simple system from day one. I write my daily article, then I post it on Hacker News and on Twitter. The first month, four of my articles hit the front page of HN. It brought many visitors to the website, with a fraction of them converting to newsletter subscribers. Some of my most popular articles included the ones about JOMO and Time Anxiety. This got me to about 2,000 subscribers in the first couple of months.

From @anthilemoon's recent interview

When we think about growing and validating our efforts it doesn't have to be rocket science. Anne-Laure is literally writing something, then she's sharing it. That's a concept that is pretty easy to get to grips with.

The difference may be that:

  • she's so damn excited and in love with what she is writing
  • she's not really focused on making money (yet)
  • she's trying to be useful
  • she's not (really) trying to sell you anything
  • she's doing it daily (respect!)
  • she's sharing in communities that she identifies with

Here is what I think are the most important things about what Anne-Laure is doing, she:

  • is building up her network
  • is learning as she is going
  • is trying to figure out what works, what she enjoys and what she wants to offer in the future
  • knows that money right now isn't a priority
  • is building trust and a great reputation
  • she's built a process that works for her

When she comes to launch something she'll (probably):

  • not have to spend any money on marketing
  • would know her audience better than anyone out there
  • have a high chance of having a validated product
  • will have a queue of people naturally there and most likely ready to give her money
  • enjoy the process of launching as her chances of succeeding will be so much higher.

We often feel like we need fancy tools or hacks to make things work. When really what often pushes the needle is working on ourselves, our processes and creating stuff that matters.

Of course, nothing guarantees success, but loving what you do, making weekly or daily progress and working openly sure increases your chances of success.

  1. 3

    I've known the power of writing but this just shifts my perspective. Thanks for sharing!

  2. 2

    This is for content marketing only. A single channel.
    Not every business model responds from content marketing.
    Are you aware that some "personas" do not keyword search on the internet? They do enter a perfectly correct URL in the browser, yet do not search for anything.
    A 55-year-old from Arkansas or Louisiana behaves this way. Yet this age group has more disposable income than millenniums.

  3. 2

    Agree the "daily" part is very important in doing this.

    Doing some simple math, she said 4 articles hit the front page in the first month, and a month is about 30 days, so that means she had to also write about 26 articles that didn't achieve the desired effect.

    If she was doing this weekly for example, she would have only had a hit about once every month and a half.

    I think that's important to know. To make it work she had to persist through all those articles that nobody was super into, in order to find the gold nuggets. That takes tenacity and persistence.

    Thanks for sharing!

    1. 2

      Yes, exactly. It's important to have perspective and to understand that usually we only pay attention to successes of people, not all the ones that weren't successful. I do think the above can be adjusted to weekly writing, or a regular activity of anything.

      e.g. what if you:

      • participated in a community
      • went to meetups
      • did customer research
      • participated on Twitter
      • reached out to x people/customers/potential founders or employees
      • etc

      Daily actions will likely get you to where you want quicker, but weekly will probably get you somewhere too.

  4. 2

    I'm at a point with my side project where it's time to shift focus from feature development (to some degree) and start making some intentional efforts to market our form backend service. But for whatever reason, the content production portion has me paralyzed. Maybe it's because I don't really consider myself an expert in the space that our product exists. Any tips for pushing through that wall?

    1. 1

      I hear ya, I am in the same court. I have been making small steps. Firstly I will make periodic updates on my projects and posts here on IH. I take the things that I have learnt recently or new techy things I am into and put them on LinkedIn at least once a week along with a commentary on why. I also make sure I do at least one simple post on socials a day for my products... doesn’t matter if it’s a huge article, just keep content rolling.

  5. 1

    Profound 😊

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