We have launched the U.S. Surname Ranking Tool.
The data behind the tool comes from public files provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The tool provides a simple interface to quickly check how a surname ranks across two full censuses.
The tool provides both the rank and the total number of bearers of the name in the United States that year.
This will be useful for genealogy enthusiasts – and everybody else who wants to know if their surname is rare or common.
https://www.dataminingdna.com/united-states-surname-ranking-tool/.
Published an article about how Illumina, the DNA chip giant, was founded back in the late nineties.
It was fascinating to delve into the early days of biotech, when a company could be formed out of a single piece of technical innovation grabbed from a university.
3 paid orders
10 trial signups, 3 converted
1 chapter in the blog tutorial series
Adding the salesy element to the on-boarding trial video is definitely working on converting to paid.
One potential customer sent me feedback from his trial that some functionality doesn't work in his preferred browser - Microsoft Edge. I've never even bothered opening Edge, let alone testing with it. He has Chrome, so hopefully it won't be a deal-breaker. I'll take a brief look into it, it'll be some javascript, but I sure don't want to waste hours on Edge.
I would have completed the video-editing of the course, if it wasn't for those pesky orders :-) Has to be done this week.
4 trial signups, which is the most I've had in one week since early March.
1 converted to a paid order, which I'm in the process of fulfilling.
For the first time I upped the "selling" in the on-boarding video for the trial. It may have contributed to the sale, who knows. But my stomach test (does it make me feel sleazy) is okay, so I'll keep doing it in future.
I had hoped to complete the videos for the first mini-course, but real life intervened with a brief medical scare. So they carry over to this week.
Now that I'm publishing a weekly newsletter + tutorial, I'd been wondering what to do with the trial signups to my product - which has no mention of subscribing to a newsletter.
This week, I imported the trial signup emails into a mailerlite group. I only imported emails who had engaged with the on-boardng process. I was pretty nervous about p*ssing people off, and getting spam reported.
I composed an email specifically for this group - saying "last time we were in touch I sent you blah blah. You may be interested in our weekly guide." And I specifically asked them to hit unsubscribe if they weren't interested. The open rate is at 44%, but only one person has unsubscribed. I'm both relieved and pleased.
So that's added 32 subscribers to my list, for a total of 55 in all.
And the best part? One of my trial signups posted my latest tutorial link into a FB group at the weekend. I only realized he'd done so when I saw the spike in traffic. Which reminds me, I must drop him an email to thank him.
The mini-course has expanded into two. The draft content is completed.
Pushed post #5 of the tutorial series out the door:
https://www.dataminingdna.com/in-depth-guide-part-5-the-ancestry-search-engine/
- 2 trial sign-ups
- 2 new subscribers
- 1 tutorial blog post
Some coding this week for additional error handling, but spent most of the week drafting the premium content for a paid mini-course. My aim is to finish it this week.
Got post #4 of the tutorial blog post out the door:
https://www.dataminingdna.com/in-depth-guide-part-4-ancestry-location-guidelines/
Put a big push into delivering two orders, so that I could receive payment before end of April. Both customers paid promptly, so that means April is not zero revenue.
One customer is a repeat order which is good, but is turning into quite "high-maintenance" in terms of sending general queries on theoretical stuff that my product isn't about. Not sure what to do about that.
Email woes continue. Another hour wait to "chat" with my hosting provider, but this time they fixed the DMARC record issue. Separate from that, my emails are bouncing from Yahoo - a more general problem that they said they were working on. I had to email a customer from my old business account.
With the customer orders out of the way, I pushed out tutorial blog post #3. My subscribers ticked upward to 21.
https://www.dataminingdna.com/in-depth-guide-part-3-ancestry-name-guidelines/
MVP product has one trial sign-up and one repeat customer order. I aim to complete the paid order within the next few days - if only to log some revenue for April.
Other tasks completed:
Completed a review of social media WP plugins, and deployed Shareaholic as a lightweight option.
Set up a MailerLite subscriber sign-up form.
Published two tutorial blog posts as part of a four-part series.
MAIN MILESTONE:
Created my first mail campaign to notify subscribers of the 2nd blog post in my tutorial series. MailerLite has a very nice easy-to use interface. The unexpected signups (see below) mean I'm not looking at a depression zero figure.
A whopping 16 subscribers with 81% open-rate and 56% clicked.
But I've got to start somewhere. As the first 10 subscribers is often cited as a milestone, I'll take this as a win.
NOTEWORTHY:
I'm not doing any marketing of my tutorial blog posts until I've published a set of four. So I was very surprised on Monday this week to see 15 subscribers to the blog series, all seemingly Australia/New Zealand folk on Facebook. I searched fruitlessly on Facebook for any link to the blog that would explain this.
So when I sent out the email notification that the second part of the tutorial was ready, I asked subscribers how they found the content. I specifically asked for a FB group name. Two replied just that it was FB, and thankfully one gave me the name of the group. As I suspected, it's a private genealogy group for Australia & NZ, hence why my search didn't throw it up. 11K members which isn't bad, but my usual more focused target group has 94K so this is heartening.
AARGH:
Still having problems with bl**dy email getting to customers since I switched hosting. The SiteGround support told me my DMARC record wasn't set up correctly (my fault) and said he fixed the issue. 60 hours later, and still not found in MXToolbox. I'm checking it at least twice a day :-)
Four trial signups this week and two completed the on-boarding process. That's without any focus on customer acquisition so its kind of heartening.
But I couldn't understand why one of these signups went to the trouble of tracking down an old email for me to send another request for the trial. And then didn't respond to any of my emails from the "right" domain, and hasn't logged in to the application.
The answer dawned on me in bed last night. Boy, do I feel stupid. Two weeks ago I moved the site hosting for better performance. But I didn't go through the hoops of DMARC records etc. So I checked the site in mxtoolbox this morning - yep, its got the red warning. Damn! I bet the trial delivery emails are sitting in spam folders. So that's my priority task for today.
On a happier note, I've completed the first tutorial and have the PDF ready as a lead magnet. Just got to hook it up to mailerlite, and get it out the door.
I stated last week that my main goals for April are:
- write a long indepth tutorial for SEO
- create a lead magnet to build my email list
- start a newsletter to build my email list
And I stated confidently that I could complete these this month. Last week's output means I have to rethink this timeline. The outline is 10 topics, and it took me a week to complete drafts of two out of the ten topics. With that kind of effort, I also need to try to monetize my time.
It doesn't make sense to focus on three tasks that don't monetize: free tutorial + lead magnet + newsletter. So I'm gonna ditch the newsletter idea for now. Here's my rejig of April goals:
- double down on Topic 1 as a self-contained tutorial
- create a downloadable PDF as a lead magnet to collect emails
- create a pre-order sales page for a 10 topic course
So I guess that makes me a course creator now as a side hustle. While trying to upsell my SAAS MVP. Is that a pivot?