Headlamp

Yesterday, I started promoting a 9,600-word lead magnet, The Manager's Guide to Engaging Remote Workers.

https://headlamp.team/engaging-remote-employees-managers-guide/

I had 129 uniques and 30 downloads for a 23% conversion rate.

The visitor can read the entire thing on the page without giving me their email; the PDF is strictly for convenience and quite a few folks are taking me up on it!

It's very early, but at least in terms of getting folks into the top of the funnel, this piece is working.

To stand out, you really do have to go big.

This wouldn't be valuable to my target customer if it were just another "8 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Remote Work" post.

Those'll have value later, but to get the flywheel going, I had to create a cornerstone piece.

What I'm doing next:

My plan is to follow up and ask for their advice. A tip Steli suggested in the IH podcast. "People love to give advice. Ask for advice rather than asking to schedule a demo."

The reason for my email is I've built a new employee engagement tool for remote managers and I'd like to ask for some advice and learn from your experiences.

If we could find 10-15 minutes, I'd love to hear what's working for you and what isn't. What are the most frustrating things you deal with on a daily basis? If I can make those frustrations go away with code, I'll do it in a heartbeat.

To keep the leads coming, I need to get this post to rank for a few of my target keyword phrases. I'm researching and reaching out to posts that link to the top pages for my target keywords.

Kind of a funny thing to celebrate because (hopefully) one of these days this will be common enough as to get on my nerves, but I got my first customer support issue last night.

Customer emailed me with a screenshot of a problem they were having in Headlamp and I deployed a fix before sitting down for dinner.

Similar to the gratification of getting $49 from a stranger on the internet, the feeling of being able to respond to "Hey, this is broken" with, "On it! And fixed!" is such a refreshing change from my consulting work.

Surprisingly, I got my first paying customer through a random visit to my Twitter profile and they followed the link to Headlamp and signed up!

The hard work is ahead in getting them activated and retained, of course!

That $49 felt more exhilarating than closing a $15,000 consulting deal.

After some months of flailing around, I finally got a sense for what the initial version of the product should do.

I started hammering it out and resisted the urge to worry about design in the early stages. Just getting functionality together.

After the pieces were in place, I layered in TailwindCSS/UI and kept grinding.

Nothing pretty. Just a placeholder with some ideas and a general sense of where the product was going.

Placed a "interested in hearing when we launch" email form on the site and started collecting email addresses.

Ultimately, it wasn't very successful, but at least had something in place.