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Tuesday Edition: #Daily-Stand-Up

Why?

That extra nudge of accountability to achieve even a small step on your IH journey each day.

To join in:

01 Share your epic (a big chunk of work with a meaty objective) you'd like to complete by the end of March.

02 Share what you accomplished yesterday.

03 Share what you commit to accomplishing today.

04 Comment on at least one fellow hacker's progress and give them an IH Point for their check in.

Optional:

05 Share your Work In Progress to underscore your accomplishments.

Then tune in the tomorrow to share how you did on your own tasks!

#daily-stand-up

  1. 4

    EPIC

    By end of 2019:

    Get 100 paying customers. 0/100 so far

    By end of April:

    Release Brooklet Pro (any ideas for a better name?)

    Get 5 paid users: 0/5 so far

    (I might amend this goal as I continue to support free users and give them the best experience)

    YESTERDAY

    Add field reordering
    Add field description UI
    Spent $20 on Facebook marketing as an experiment, lots of views, very little click throughs

    TODAY

    Monitor feedback and address it as it comes up.
    Get another release out this week.
    Retention isn't as strong as I'd like, so I'm thinking about an email campaign to get people back in the app and to show them a few things they can do.

    WIP - Brooklet

    1. 1

      What was your conversion rate for FB marketing? Care to share the ad and CTA? Can certainly help to troubleshoot...

      1. 1

        https://imgur.com/a/cZPLW1G
        ^ this is a video showing the app. I haven't gotten time to make a fancy image or video so I just used a video of the app I had.

        People Reached - 255
        Post Engagements - 223

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

      1. 1

        I have a little over 40 test users. I've talked to some, I've gotten feedback and feature requests (which I've been addressing this week). I'm going to send out an email to users with:

        1. Some content supporting building the habit of tracking every day (there's evidence to show it's valuable)
        2. A survey about the app with the option for follow up

        The video I made does show the most basic flow, people watch the ad all the way through but don't seem to be clicking on it.

        I've taken the ad down for now since it isn't converting.

  2. 4

    EPIC

    By end of March:

    YESTERDAY:

    TODAY:

    • Start writing our 4th post in our blog on how we used our product to make our product better
    • Continue working on our Zendesk integration
    • Tweak our Slack notification system

    As always, we are accepting early access requests

    KUDOS: @marianneciara for being passionate and inspiring others!!

    1. 1

      Thanks for the shout-out! So lovely to hear.

      Looks like we're both in the customer experience arena! Do you or members of the team come from that background originally?

      One of my pet peeves from having worked in the industry for years was how little businesses invested in their customer support — it was often an after-thought instead of being woven into how the business operates and plans for the future, as I think it should be. Have you come across that and if so, how are you going to persuade businesses that they need your product?

  3. 4

    01: EPIC

    Design, build and deploy a small, free web app which helps business owners craft better customer support emails. The goal is to build a real-world, useful product while honing my JavaScript skills.

    02: YESTERDAY

    Ironed out a bunch of things: implemented a polyfill specifically for IE11 (yay IE), removed HTML tags from copy to clipboard text, updated copy to clipboard functionality so it works on iOS devices, added open graph meta data, cleaned up code.

    03: TODAY

    Continue adding content snippets for each combination of options (this is a much bigger job than I planned, so many combinations!), check site speed and see if any additional optimizations need to be carried out, if I have the time I'll add a bit more animation because after initial load it's a bit static.

    05: WIP

    https://www.marianneciara.com/marshmellow/
    Lots of content still missing but the infrastructure is in place. Feedback SO welcome!

    KUDOS: @Harlem working v hard for launch, excited to see what you've been working on.

    1. 2

      Thanks, @marianneciara! Keeping it under wraps until I complete the experiments. But promise to share during the end of month retro!

    2. 2

      What's your plan for the app? Letting people fill in the blanks? Saving templates?

      You can do a lot with pretty simple tools like localStorage (and indexeddb, but it can be a pain haha). Cool stuff where the browser saves the data and doesn't require an account :)

      1. 2

        Thanks for your note! Yes I was going for a product which wouldn't require user authentication or a complex back-end, just a simple tool where users can get quick wording inspiration when responding to customer emails. I worked in customer service for a long time and would have loved something like this to support/coach new team members!

        In terms of next steps, I did think about the ability to save favourite snippets but I feel that I would need a more reliable/permanent solution that localStorage. I'd also like the user to edit the email in the browser directly but I wonder if that might have data privacy implications, for example if the user inputs customer-specific data. So with all that in mind my plan is to wrap up all the content combinations today, then let the product breathe a little, and see if it actually helps anyone before investing more time in it. Sorry for the long response haha!

        1. 2

          No problem. Just curious :)

          I also worked in support (tech support in web hosting) for quite a while (ugh, almost 18 years ago :-P). All of us support reps had our own text file with canned responses of various quality haha. I noticed I never used mine because I always wanted to tailor the response a bit too much.

          Having a tool that would allow plugging in additional pieces of information would've helped a lot!

          Also, the tool that ended up getting me noticed and out of support was semi-related. Since our developers were understaffed and dedicated 0 time to helping support, a coworker and I built an app that made walk-throughs of common tasks (adding e-mail addresses, setting up databases, uploading your site, etc) and organized them, so support reps could link to the walk-throughs instead of pasting in the steps manually.

          Oh man the designs at the time! http://web.archive.org/web/20040630052317/http://ipwhelp.com/index.php?id=1

          1. 2

            Wow! That's so cool!! Not surprised that got you noticed, must have shown you were a real self-starter. Yeah we all had our emails saved in files too, in fact a lot of my colleagues who still work in CX say things haven't changed much. They've got all these cool expensive AI and analytics tools that are very good at gathering data but not good at combining that data with the human element, which is so very needed for good CX. As you said, the best emails are those we tailor to the specific customer!

  4. 3

    EPIC

    1. 2019
      • $50K annual revenue
    2. March
      • Get a remote job.
      • Get 20 people to say this is not a real problem & reject my value proposition.
      • Get 10 customers to confirm a real problem.
      • Schedule customer interviews/calls.

    YESTERDAY

    • Level up on my programming.
    • Reply back to a few founders/recruiters' sales job application inquiries.
    • Schedule job interviews.

    TODAY

    • More sales/keyword research to find niches.
    • Level up on my programming.

    WIP Mindful

    side note
    Done w/ job hunting/errands for the day. Grab something to eat and then see what I can get done in 2hrs.

    1. 1

      Sales/keyword research is addictive fun. The nuances can be game changers! Have you found anything tasty?

  5. 3

    EPIC

    By end of 2019:

    5K MR

    By end of March:

    • Launch 12 March 2019.
    • Publish 18 articles. (18/18 determined, 6/18 written, 0/18 published)
    • Conduct 3 landing page experiments with a minimum CTR of 2.69%.
    • Increase organic growth from 0 to 11 persons.
    • Persuade an additional 15 influencers to contribute posts. (9/15)

    YESTERDAY

    • Optimized About page for mobile.
    • Lots of back and forth with retouchers and illustrators.
    • Followed up with 4 influencers.

    TODAY

    • Optimize remaining pages for mobile.
    • Timebox polishing How To post.
    • Add illustrations to How To post.
    • Continue to build algorithm to assess different scenarios.
    • Automate social.
    • Schedule first post for launch tomorrow.

    KUDOS: @rob_race! Congrats on the new release! Look forward to a new MVP.

    1. 2

      How do you find and approach influencers?

      1. 1

        Stone, cold emails to folks who've included their email in their social profiles. I've now 4 variations of the email template, but for all of 'em, conversion is low. But, thus far, it's sufficient to meet the editorial goals.

        I suspect that once I have something to show, conversion should increase.

    2. 2

      Sounds like a busy day ahead! So looking forward to your launch, will keep my eyes peeled tomorrow.

      1. 2

        The side hustle struggle is real. Especially when the day gig is greedy!

    3. 2

      Awww shucks.

      I was all excited for your big launch.

      :)

      1. 2

        (Laughing!) You can still be excited! I'd like to keep my experiments clean this month. But as mentioned, I'll definitely share during end of month retro!

  6. 2

    01 By the end of March:

    Register a company
    Start a personal brand that will be used to cross-sell other products, (website + facebook page)
    Launch landing page for DevsCollective - software development leads exchange, send 150 invites on LinkedIn.
    Launch landing page for DesignToWordpress and evaluate Google Ads conversion
    I'm thinking about other ideas I have... I need to establish some time for indiehacking every day.

    02 Yesterday:

    I read entire BAMF Bible, notes taken!

    03 Today:

    Get GDPR compliant in Polish first

    I have a suggestion, could we setup the topic a day before? i.e. for Wednesday, late Tuesday? - I really wanted to join several times already but this topic is not EMEA timezones friendly. At best, I'm already in the middle of the workday when this topic is created :(

    1. 2

      I have done that previously... (grinning) and it failed miserably. But feel free to use the stand up to talk about what you've done TODAY. And what you'll do TOMORROW.

      How did you find the BAMF Bible? Worth the read?

      1. 1

        Thanks for the reply! Looks like US-time indiehackers are still way more abundant :>

        Definitely worth reading - I won't actually do things by the book but it got me plenty of ideas. In addition it reminded me about times when I always tried to do things smarter - the last few years in coporate environment made my rusty!

  7. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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