February 2020: Bug Prevented Checkouts
by Karl HughesA friend of mine reached out last week saying he was trying to check out on CFP Land and was running up against an API error. Fortunately, I was home and available, so I started looking into it. Turns out I released a bug in the middle of January that was preventing a majority of new users from checking out. 🤦♂️
I probably only would have had a couple of new paying members, but it's still frustrating when stuff like this happens. I emailed everyone who had tried to sign up telling them I fixed the issue, but nobody went through the checkout process, so I think the moment had passed for most of them.
Needless to say, my revenue numbers didn't increase this month:
- 3559 Twitter Followers 🐦
- 1970 Free Email Subscribers 💌
- $320.50 in Pro Subscriber Revenue 💳
- $0 in other revenue 💵
My Focus in February
I actually did really well in new email subscribers, but I manually unsubscribed about 190 people who had not opened an email in 6+ months. So, I continue to pack on 100-200 new subscribers every month. 🎉
Here are some of the things I worked on this month:
Podcast Marketing Campaign
I have now appeared on 4 published podcasts to promote CFP Land, and recorded appearances on 4 more. I'm not actively pitching the project anymore, but I'll know more about how well this strategy works in a couple months when I go back to check my Google Analytics.
Search Engine Optimization
I invested some time building new pages and optimizing some existing ones that should help get more search visibility to CFP Land. I added individual conference pages, so users can see the pages from CFPs in previous years.
Hired a freelance writer
I want to spend more time on product and business development, so I hired a freelance writer to build up my library of content. It ended up being more expensive than I would like (~$200/article), but it's a long-term investment, and it's definitely saving me time.
What's Next?
I'm planning to spend the next 3 months working on a major revamp to the CFP Land Pro platform. I will continue to post updates here for CFP Land, but this will be a pretty significant pivot of the project, so stay tuned! 📺
