CampMate

I was dreading doing cold outreach because of how awkward and "salesy" it feels, but I know how important it is for validating this idea. The worst thing would be building out a whole app to solve a problem that doesn't exist. With that in mind, I'm pretty much solely focusing on talking to people that work at camps right now. All the traditional advice is right--I wish I'd done this earlier!

The good news is that I haven't been completely ignored! Thanks to some @lauralopuch wisdom via @louisswiss podcast, the first three emails I sent got responses, and one turned into a phone call. Thanks, Laura!

The phone call was very informative, even though the person I talked to didn't squarely fit what I see as the main value-add of what I'm building. I'm learning something I already somewhat knew, which is that no two camps operate exactly alike.

This is such an interesting industry! To reiterate a point from past milestones, I feel that even if this project "fails," I'll still end up learning a ton. Nothing to lose! 🤗

I felt I needed a landing page before signing up for social accounts, so I threw together a quick one last week using nothing but my own skills and some unDraw.co SVGs.

The problem is, it looked like garbage.

I was so motivated to start reaching out to folks that I neglected putting together a decent-looking landing page. I feel I'm getting better at design, but this thing needed some serious work.

I still wanted to get something out fairly quickly so I opted for a template from HTML5up.net (thanks @ajlkn!). I ended up tweaking it to my needs, and I think what I launched looks pretty good.

My big takeaway is that I'll need to parse the balance between "ship it" and perfectionism. As I shared on the CampMate Instagram, it's a process. I consider this whole endeavor to be one big learning experiment for me that I hope will result in solving a real-world problem and providing value. Even if it fails, the learnings will be invaluable.

Onward!

Today, I sent my first cold email to try and validate my product with a potential user.

I'm not expecting to hear back and plan on just having to grind it out to get people to take this seriously. Re-listening to Lynne Tye's Indie Hackers podcast episode is getting me inspired though--especially the part where she talks about emailing the same person 5 times and showing up onsite to write company profiles for free.

I locked myself out of my apartment while I was listening to the episode, but eventually got in. A nice little reminder that sometimes all we need is to persist.

They say the most important step when you're starting out is to validate your idea with potential users or customers. I've been building in the dark for a while, but I'm ready to start discussing my idea.

As such, I attended a meeting of people that work in the camp industry and interacted with some folks that I feel could benefit from what I'm building. Onward!