PostPilot

We officially made the existence of PostPilot public to the world!

Here's the "pre-announcement" stuff we wanted to do first:

• Coming soon page with the right messaging and visuals.
• A beta list signup field that integrated into MailChimp
• An autoresponse email from MailChimp thanking them for the signup.
• A couple blog posts introducing why we're working on PostPilot and some thought leadership content.
• Set up the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Started posting a couple weeks back and got a handful of followers. (so it doesn't look empty when people check us out).
• Got our Product Hunt Ship page set up and then officially opened it up for promotion today.
• Set up some slack triggers to get notified when new beta list signups occur.

Now I'll be putting my focus on content marketing, market feedback, and product development.

I mentioned in one of my previous PostPilot updates that we were experimenting with a way to get attention to PostPilot.io prelaunch by connecting with Product Hunt users on social.

We've only been starting to roll this strategy out over the past 2 or 3 days but I'm happy to report that today we received our first beta signup from our efforts!

At first I was shocked to see a signup come through because we haven't publicized the Coming Soon page yet.

But when I added their email into our Product Hunt Ship campaign, it populated their info which I could directly connect back to somebody we followed from our social efforts.

It's only 1 signup so far but we broke the ice on the campaign with very little effort. The next milestone would be to get at least 1 signup per day from these efforts.

I'll report back with updates.

Stay awesome. 🤘

I run a content agency and PostPilot is the separate product child that is spawning from the agency under a different name.

But, at first, we thought we would call the product (what is now PostPilot) by a subset of the agency’s name. Why not, right?

So we had the name, but now we needed a new shiny logo we could brand around this new agency product of ours.

Attempt #1: I tried creating it myself. After endless hours in failed Photoshop attempts and tears of frustration we moved on...

Attempt #2: Outsourced to a a guy who’s done logo design work for me in the past. While the designs were great, they weren’t as layered as the Amazon logo and yet as simple as the Apple logo. Since I kept telling myself that the logo needed to be just that. (Ugh)

Attempt #3: We used 99Designs. It was my first time with them and I was SUPER pleased with the system they have in place. We did a campaign for $400 because the site said we’d get maybe 60 designs. We ended up getting over 1,000 logo variations after all was said and done. Yes. Over 1,000.

We finally picked a logo that we were all super jazzed about. It was layered like Amazon’s logo yet just as simple as Apple’s logo. Brilliant!

Well, we ended up changing the name of the product a week later and now that entire process was a waste of time and money.

Measure twice, cut once.

Being the product guy AND the marketing guy has its benefits but sometimes can also have its real detriments.

For example, every time I conceptualize a new feature I get the seed of the idea and then automatically want to jump to how I will market it. Sometimes even tweaking website copy to reflect this mini pivot in feature or business model.

I get TOO excited about it before I’ve really stress tested it fully and fleshed it out.

For example, I had the features and benefits of PostPilot conceptualized to translate into its Coming Soon page - but didn’t fully give them their fare share of stress testing.

I got too excited, though. I needed to have a website up to show to the world. So, for the sake of having a website, I invested time and money into a landing page full of features and benefits.

I was happy with it! Until I wasn’t.

As the few days past after I had my first draft I had more and more realizations of what the MVP would truly provide our users. And then just today I had a great call with my co-founder about the 3 key takeaways we want every website visitor to know about our product. I think maybe 1 of the 3 existed in my current draft.

So my eagerness to jump to marketing costed us time and money and now I need to revisit our coming soon page talking points which will be more time and money.

I guess the lesson learned is to measure twice, cut once. If you’re going to invest time and money into something, make sure you give it the proper stress test first.

There will always be V1s and V2/3/4/5s of everything. But save a few versions by taking the extra day or two on something important to make sure it’s really the way you need to do it.

We’re putting the final touches on some public-facing marketing pages for PostPilot to spark some pre-launch buzz/interest including a Product Hunt Ship campaign and our own coming soon page.

We have Product Hunt as a large part of our G2M strategy for many obvious reasons but also because our target demo is the typical Maker on PH.

With that in mind, we’re trying a marketing tactic that I believe will be valuable for our Product Hunt launch.

I have an employee going onto Product Hunt and looking for businesses that fit our ideal demo. I.e. Great product. Probably has some backing. But is most likely a small team of product folks and doesn’t have any resources on content marketing.

He’s scraping that company’s homepage and social profiles and organizing them into a sheet.

He’s doing the same process for Makers who expressed interest on products that are in the same ballpark or complimentary to our product. The thinking is, if they found that product valuable, they’ll find ours valuable as well.

Next phase of the marketing strategy is to follow these companies and makers on social and occasionally engaging with them when there’s a chance to add value.

I repeat... when there’s a chance to ADD VALUE!

This isn’t a spam campaign. We’re a content marketing platform built on the core belief of creating content for the purposes of adding value to your customer’s and potential customer’s lives.

Our goal is to have an arsenal of valuable content, insights, and support for these companies and Makers that we can provide to them when it makes sense.

We want these Makers to associate value and trust with our brand name and logo even before we release a product.

Goal #1: They see the engagement, check out our website, and sign up for our pre-launch beta program.

Goal #2: These Makers see our product name and logo, recognize it when we launch on PH, and engage with us on launch day.

It’s all theory right now. We’ll know more on its effectiveness in a couple weeks as we begin engaging with Makers.