Notazen

Well.. most of them!

Rather, I discovered after talking with the first 3 people that I was probably chasing the wrong audience.

All 3 of them indicated they liked the app and what it represents - but their interest was more superficial, they liked how it looked.

I've now decided to focus on a different audience that has some representation in my user base: and looking at the email engagement numbers, this audience seems to respond more. I will be attempting to reach out to some folks in my network that hold similar positions.

Part of this involves some pretty substantial changes to the squeeze page. I'll be hiring a graphic designer (via UpWork) to make a few of the images that I'll need as I target this new kind of user.

My goal is that for January I will launch on a different beta platform with this new squeeze page in place, and I can compare the results of both launches.

Other than this stuff - I shipped out a few changes last week regarding autogrowing textboxes, and highlighting attributes that currently exist on the active page.

I've put together a list of around 16 different people that I will be interviewing. My overall goal is that I should be getting them to talk about the most frustrating thing they tend to run into within their line of work - my end goal is to just simply understand these people's perspective while they pursue a typical workday.

Towards the end of each interview, I will present them the main squeeze page for Notazen and ask them the following 3 questions:

1. What do you think this app does?

2. If you were to compare this app to others - what sorts of comparisons would you draw?

3. Finish this sentence: "Hmm, I wonder if this app can help me with ____________"

I wasn't able to set up interviews from Notazen's existing users, so instead I've found people within my LinkedIn network that match the profile of the existing users: same job title, similar amount of employees per company, etc.

Based on what I've observed so far in Notazen's stats/surveys, I have a theory on what they would like to see and what their potential use case could be for Notazen. I've made a couple of minor tweaks to the squeeze page since the open beta launch to test against this particular audience and confirm whether or not I should build in a specific direction.

Other than putting together the list of people to contact and coming up with an interview structure, I spent some time reworking workflows in the code:

1. Added a new workflow action for sending data to a linked workspace
2. Added a new workflow action for duplicating the current page
3. Reworked "Create Page w/ Link" workflow to allow more customizability, allowing for even more advanced workflow structures
4. Custom workflow buttons now available on Free plan (yay!)

These changes are slowly being rolled out this week. Some of them are available now, some should be shipped out soon.

Along with these changes, I've released a handful of bugfixes. Busy week!

The story of the past week has been around supporting the product since I launched it on BetaList 2 weeks ago, glean insights around the usage, and to start creating more content for my overall content marketing strategy.

Based on the initial survey data, there's a pretty clear customer profile that seems to be attracted the app. Users are willingly filling out the survey with some very valuable information in regards to what they would ideally like to use Notazen for.

Looking at this data, it became clear that I needed to start creating content tailored towards these specific kinds of users.

I'm in the process of setting up some interviews with some people in my network that are very similar to the users that seem attracted to the app. These are folks that have similar job titles in the same field, work in similarly sized companies/businesses. My goal is to better understand their mindset and figure out exactly what these users are looking for.

In the process of creating some video content last week in an effort to better reach this kind of user: I discovered that a feature I had previously been putting off was pretty much required to make the video's story resonate a lot more. So I wound up implementing part of the workspace syncing idea that is on our roadmap, and it's working really well!

I launched on BetaList on November 7th.

This launch happened about 1 month later than I would’ve liked to: my initial plan was to go open beta in October - but I kept running into so many issues, and realized that I needed to give myself the extra month.

I’m happy to say that so far, the results are extremely promising. Users have engaged with the app far more during this open beta process than the closed beta. The actions and changes I made after the closed beta were paying off, and I’m seeing more organic progress.

And even more important: this high level of engagement is happening without me having to do any explicit selling and hand holding like I was doing during the closed beta process. This is a very positive sign for growth.

My theory on that Reddit audience being the wrong market was validated - and I feel that I’m inching towards having a better understanding of the market that could be interested in paying for a product like Notazen.

I did, however, discover that there is more work for me to do in terms of email engagement. I saw that a number of users didn’t engage with the app beyond signing up - but the moment that I reached out to them with a personalized email, a lot came back and engaged with the app further.

I’m doing some more work there. A few of the apps I see Notazen competing with do an excellent job at engaging users with follow up emails if they don’t succeed at various different levels of actions they want the users to take in their first workspace. I’m looking at setting something up similar.

I spent the majority of October testing the app in every which way possible. It was an extremely grueling process. I spent most of the time testing out the onboarding process, trying to ensure that users see value as soon as possible after signing up. There was a couple of weeks where it felt like I was finding some new blocking bug every day.

Thankfully, around the middle of the month things started to come together.

I spent the latter half of the month implementing some marketing/analytics code to get an accurate picture on what is going on with users when they first arrive on the landing page, after they sign up, etc. A big part of this was implementing surveys where they could easily give feedback from within the app itself. I had previously had issues getting users to engage with surveys sent via email, so I opted to put the surveys directly in the app.

The survey in question asks a few standard questions (role at company, size of company, twitter profile) and gives them several checkboxes they can check describing use cases they’d be interested in.

I also spent a pretty significant amount of time reworking the squeeze page to highlight the pains that this new market more than likely experiences.

I spent the majority of September completely reworking the onboarding process. I introduced a template system to help users get started more easily. There’s still plenty of work here for me to do, but it was a good start. I created 6 different templates based on some of the most popular use cases that were suggested by the closed beta audience.

I reworked the product to instead focus on delivering value for teams. Spent a significant amount of time getting the code to a state where it supported team collaboration.

On Sept 14th, which was when the 14 day trial for the beta users was ending (they got full access for August, then dropped to a trial plan on Aug 31st) - 2 of the users from the closed beta process converted to paying users.

When the trial ends, the “Pro” and above features get automatically removed and you have to upgrade in order to continue using them. For Notazen in particular, this list of Pro features is pretty significant: custom workflow buttons, tasks, charts, etc.

These 2 users were the ones that I spent the most time interacting with via email and Discord. Success! Their use cases are featured on the front page. While a significant amount of the closed beta users dropped off right away - these 2 stuck it out. And they also gave me insights into the type of market I should be moving into.

I learned some tough lessons during this closed beta: namely, the audience was probably not a good fit for the product, and the product was far too complex and assuming. I needed to simplify it.

These users were initially very excited about participating in the closed beta when I sold them on it in the aforementioned Reddit post, but things eventually took a turn.

Unfortunately, a lot of that enthusiasm waned over time. I made the critical mistake of making them wait 3 weeks before they could get their hands on the app – and I also realized some things about this particular audience that made them a difficult one to market to.

• They were more excited about participating in “something fresh” and having the social experience with others, than they were about the actual product itself. A lot of them didn’t even have a problem to solve: a number of them PM’d me and used the literal phrase: “I’m just happy to be here :)”

• Reddit users are generally very pessimistic in nature. Something about the platform just actively wills people into a negative mindset. While pessimistic people can absolutely be sold to (e.g. insurance), certain products are much better marketed towards people who tend to be more optimistic. I quickly realized that the people who made it the furthest into the application were both very creative and seemed to have upbeat, optimistic personalities that embraced a new spin on an old formula (knowledge management applications).

• All of these users were congregating in a subreddit around free software and its plugin ecosystem, and very, very few would be willing to shell out money for Notazen. This was a big realization. There was a significant drop off in interest when they discovered I would be adopting a limited freemium model. This is pretty much when I knew that I had to pivot and spend less time worrying about these particular users.

While these realizations were admittedly slightly disappointing, especially considering the huge initial interest the users had, it was still very useful data that I gathered. I viewed this process as me simply gathering marketing data, and it was time to pivot slightly into something a bit different and try out a new market.

In that regard, the closed beta process was a success.

One of the real beautiful things about Notazen is how flexible it is. So pivoting its focus to a different market was fairly trivial for me to do.

I initially created the app for my own particular use case: stock trading, and needing an effective trading journal to help keep my wits about me in a challenging market environment. I was keeping a journal in ObsidianMD at the time (with the help of Google Sheets for more numerical data), and at a certain point migrated to Notion because I wanted everything in one spot. Unfortunately, none of these particular setups did exactly what I wanted them to do.

The big problem with all of the solutions I tried was that things would quickly get messy - I needed a knowledge management solution that was "search-based" at its core, where instead of trying to navigate a mess of folders to find some very specific information, I could perform a simple search to find what I need.

I initially didn’t even plan on releasing Notazen for anyone other than myself. It was very useful for me and it was helping me to make money and be more consistent in my trades.

In July, I hopped onto Reddit and made a pitch on a particular subreddit, asking if others might be interested in participating in a closed beta. Notazen had brought me so much value that I almost felt like I was withholding something great that others might be able to use. So I made a pitch and asked if some folks were interested.

To my surprise, there was a ton of interest. And some of the use cases suggested to me were actually far better than just using it as a trading journal.

At that point I started to realize that some of these use cases: namely project management / CRM, were actually far better use cases for the app than what I initially developed it for.

It was time to throw some early access users at it.