Week 19 Blog Post - Operations

Welcome to this week’s operations blog post. We had a great week last week, we pushed the best update yet, we made some big headway on organic content and we have finally got some good dialogues going with users!

The Extension

It’s that time, the categories update was pushed! It solves one of the 2 biggest users issues we had, where when we had more than a few results for a search we weren’t displaying it. Reception has been decent, though we are struggling with our messaging. We had to change our extension permissions, for the last time I hope, so it became inactive for a large chunk of our users. Therefore we don’t know what % have signed up for our free enhanced version. This is one of the last major feature upgrades we will make without more adoption. We want to avoid getting into the game where you are saying “I’m sure once we have X/Y/Z feature then people will come”. I don’t think it works like that, and our idea is too uncertain to invest like that.

In the coming weeks we are adding the ability to charge, referrals, tier 2 (we have tier 1 and tier 3 currently, of our tier 3 system). If we see adoption/traction then we will look into making a website version, or adding a feature to see similar products on a page, or to report a product as being American made, or a more active scrapping function.

Research

I don’t know how many listings we did this week! We have been refreshing our listings and a lot of unavailable listings have been removed. However I have primarily been spending time on other things than research.

The Website

It’s been a great week for other parts of our business. For one we now have email addresses of actual users. We have been reaching out to them and have gotten a huge amount of engagement. There are a lot of passionate people about this problem and speaking to them in large volume should really make a difference in the direction of our project.

Traffic! We’ve made some big headway here, with infographics on Facebook. We tried my blog posts, articles, but neither really worked. The thing with those is that they don’t really appeal to new people who don’t know anything about us, or I didn’t write them well enough to appeal to them. What's great about infographics is I share them to 45 groups, and we get huge engagement. It’s really bottom of the funnel stuff, they have to engage with the infographics, come and follow our page/group, and from there see other content and come to our site, but it is still getting them into our atmosphere, and it’s easy to turn all our knowledge into small informative pictures.