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Road to $1000 in 2 weeks Day 4

Hey folks this is an on-going part of documenting my journey on validating, testing, building and marketing a product in 2 weeks time and try to earn $1000 while at it.

Previous discussions here:
Day 3: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-day-3-a67f06e159
Day 2: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-day-2-2381dd37d9
Day 1: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/shash7s-road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-c642a2f991

So turns out, this whole schedule has been delayed by 3 days.

This is why:

  • Chrome extension took too long to update, had to push back the beta by a day
  • More time spent on bug fixing than anticipated.

If you're from a product management background, you'll be laughing to yourself right now.

Anyways, 4 days to go, lets's gooo!

20th July, this is the day I made some course corrections.

The problem with this deadline is not sales, its that it does not give me enough time to market. I'm not a very popular online person nor do I have a large internet clout.

So these are my conjectures:

  • Cold approach is the key, build momentum through this
  • Go for a big launch. The Launch will be the key to success

Note that I'm working on calculated guesses. What I mentioned in the points above could very well lead me to doom.

As the great philosopher J Cole once said:

"You came a long way, you just went the wrong way"

Anyhow, To market this:

  • I started planning my next move. For this, I spent a few hours on doing a deeper dive on my competitors and trying to understand their day 1 strategy. An even deeper dive than my previous day 1 research. This helped me make a lot of micro decisions marketing wise as well as get a better understanding of getting to my target audience.
  • I went and make a list of people who I assumed would be the ideal market. Note that even though I got pre-orders I won't count them to be an indicator of product-market fit simply because they haven't tested the product yet.
  • If marketing was war then twitter was my HDR Sniper rifle. Apart from that list of users, I also started following hashtags that were relevant to my user base as well as using the advanced search option.
  • I'm basically treating the next 4 days as a hackathon. Official strategy is to Go big or Go home. I'm reaching out to people everywhere, even on Linkedin. I signed up for the 1 month trial which should give me enough time to get traction from there.

Anyhow, here's a summary of the next few days leading up to this post.

20th July

  • Made some course corrections marketing wise
  • Work on fixing bugs.
  • Reach out to potential beta users
  • Push update live

21th July

  • Reach out to more testers

22nd July (I made some course corrections here)

  • Reach out to to completely random audience(food bloggers, psy academics, etc)
  • Setup underlinemeapp twitter account.
  • Set a goal for everyday, do 10 twitter interactions

23th July (another course correction)

  • Slight change to the UX of the loading/unloading interaction as well as list view changes.
  • Push another big update with mostly all bugs fixed and added a cool new feature where you can select multiple notes and copy formatted text
  • Do another 10 interactions
  • Iterate on feedback from the testers

24th July

  • Work on the last update. Feature lock on this one, just housekeeping changes and bugfixes.
  • Work on getting reviews and testimonials
  • Last minute try on linkedin for marketing(I'm getting desperate lol)
  • Ask around for promotions
  • Do another 10 interactions

25th July

  • Made a big list of startup directors, subreddits, forums and other sites for a big content dump
  • Spent at least 4 hours on creating targeted content
  • Keep all assets ready for launch
  • Do another 10 interactions
  • Launch the complete website
  • Push the update

26th July

  • Pray

The launch date is 26th of July. The actual launch is on Product Hunt. I'll update this post with the PH link once it goes live - which is a few hours from now. After that I'll do another writeup finalizing this whole journey.

I'll see ya'll on the other side.

on July 25, 2020