QUOKA

I hit 50 users the other day. I can't remember how it felt day of. I had opened this blog post because I was excited, and after jotting down a few paragraphs I moved on to something else and now I'm back to finish the job.

Anyway, how are you? First of all I want to say thank you if you're reading this post. I'm a lot more motivated when I know I'm helping others. What kinds of posts do you want me to write here?

There were a few things that I did to get to this point.

1. Once I had decided on my "niche" I started posting about it on my social media. Loosely. That definitely worked.

I figure that most of these people were probably just my friends and supporters. Remember QUOKA is anonymous so tracking names is moot. I know if someone subscribes to my email list, but I have no idea if that person becomes a member of the text message club, unless they disclose it.

2. I started talking about it on various audio apps. Participating in pitch rooms, just in regular conversation when talking with people.

3. I updated my bio. In as many places as I remembered, I started to include QUOKA and if possible a link to the website.

4. I presented at 1MC chapters. I posted about this in more detail a few posts back. Highly suggest. My chapter is accepting applications virtually for now: 1millioncups.com/miami

5. I did some podcasts, livestreams and got interviewed for some blogs.

6. I talked to users and potential users. Referral links were given out.

7. I participated in the Pioneer challenge for 35+ consecutive weeks

Those are all the things I did that I can remember. I also tweaked my onboarding process multiple times while on my way from 0 to 50 members. I mean changed everything. From how people signed up and got onto QUOKA, to the experience they had once they made it.

• I started with a Substack page where it was free, and had information on how to become a member. I figured I would drive all traffic there. This was because the landing page has technical limitations with getting people onto the text platform.

• I changed to having the phone number on the landing page and just skipped the blog. I decided people can find the blog by other means, and I linked it from the landing page. I wanted to streamline getting people into text making it easy and focus on privacy. This made it really hard to keep in touch with people if they did not follow through with the text prompts. It was completely untraceable.

• I went back to the blog so that I could test a monetization model. This was a hack using Substack to charge a subscription, and they would then get an email with instructions on how to join the texting club. Problem- there was a drop off from email to text conversion. More on that below.

• I switched to an email address signup on landing page, which connects to a Google sheet, and set up a Zapier integration with an automatic email with instructions on how to start texting. Still experience a drop off with email to text conversion, but it is free, and I am able to capture emails. I do have to manually port those over to the Substack list though.

Just as an example I have 147 subscribers, and only 50 members. So this switching has been a lot. I've learned a lot. I don't really know if it was good that I switched a bunch or not, but again, I've learned a lot.

I would have hit 50 earlier if at one point I did not do a "free trial". Here are the reasons I got rid of my free trial and just went completely free:

The conversion rate was high, but there were those issues from a tech perspective, and it was completely unsustainable. I know they say "do things that don't scale." But literally everything that I'm doing is not scalable at this point LOL. I want to choose some of my battles.

I gain a lot of great information and experience from having members on the platform. I am not trying to understand if they will pay for it right now. I want to know if they will find it useful and WHAT exactly they find useful about it.

I don't want to sell a product that I don't even know what it might be. But literally as I'm writing this I feel like that is crazy and I need to start charging,

I also have this whole business revenue model that is B2B.

It also felt 100% out of alignment to turn people away from QUOKA after the had opted in for support. I had to unsubscribe people from the club that did not convert. It was AWFUL.

For those reasons I got rid of the free trial and made it free.

Anyway, engagement is up. I recorded the highest number of responses to a founder asking a question through QUOKA this past weekend.

The founder asked: "I have serious anxiety at the thought of doing cold-calling. How do you overcome this fear?"

A record 8 members chimed in offering a range of advice, feedback, and encouragement.

I'm excited to get to 100 members. I'm excited to keep trying things. I have a ton of ideas and even a lot more has happened that I just haven't even updated here! So much.
Thanks again for reading!

It's team building time over here! Huge welcome to the latest crop of interns! This is a milestone because for the first time in my companies history I have hired paid interns.

Bringing on talent is a moment for a startup founder. The experience makes me think of the quote "every next level of your life will demand a different version of you."

I'm on the organizing committee for 1 Million Cups Miami a nationwide organization powered by the Kauffman Foundation. Its a place for entrepreneurs, and the ecosystem that supports them, to connect regularly over cups of coffee.

Note* entrepreneurs that present at 1 Million Cups are not pitching, it is categorized as a presentation, it's not a platform for selling. Instead you get feedback from the community on what you are working on, you answer questions, and connect with others.

It's 100% free to apply and a lot of chapters are meeting remotely right now due to the pandemic. Just google 1 Million Cups.

Anyway, it got me thinking, that I should present at some chapters! I went ahead and applied and got accepted! I then had to create my presentation deck.

I used Canva to create my presentation deck. They have templates that makes it easy to create something professional and consistent with fonts, colors, icons, images etc. They even have a free version which I highly recommend. Upgrading to the paid is worth it too if you create a lot of content.

Since I did my first presentation I have applied and presented at multiple chapters and am continuing to apply to chapters all over the USA.

I have met many people who want to support QUOKA, gotten great feedback and inspiration. Synchronously, one of the accelerators that I was looking at I applied to pitch at a chapter and one of the organizers leads the accelerator. Each chapter is its own ecosystem of supports of founders.

Some chapters broadcast your presentation live, and it lives on YouTube or Facebook which is great for SEO, getting the word out about your product and you can send it as a link to someone who wants to watch a video about what you're working on.

My presentation gets better each time, I get more confident talking about QUOKA and the value it provides. I'm getting clearer with my messaging and know that this will pay off when it comes time to PITCH to investors.

Hope all of you are finding your own small wins on this journey.
Until next time!
besos,
M

In addition to securing the social media handles for QUOKA, the brand guide got finalized. I know this is probably not a big deal to most, but being non-technical, and not a designer having this was an important organizational component for me. This way anyone that I work with in the future has the important info. Shout out to Sara from the team for helping get this done!

I had been playing around with various new email and blogging products out there. I was approaching my limited with Mailchimp, and I was facing bugs there, needing support and not able to get any since I was on the free plan.

When looking at Substack I thought, this would be a cool platform to collect email addresses for QUOKA and keep people updated on the progress at the same time. All in one central place!

As I'm writing this update for Indiehackers I'm literally using my substack posts as a guide for going back in time.

After learning a lot about the onboarding experience, scalability, and no code options, I felt it was time to take Project IB to the next level! I had brought on an intern with a tech background, Sebastien, and gotten a logo designed with designed.co in exchange for giving them feedback about their new product!

During my Cluttered Clarity phase as an artist, I spent a lot of time thinking about how technology is designed. My Cluttered Clarity series explores how technology affects our memory as people. Some of my conclusions were:

• that technology typically is not built to support our humanity
• that legislation has not caught up with technology
• that technology should be designed to support the human experience and our mental health

QUOKA is built with those conclusions in mind. On November 12th, 2018, I launched Project IB, which would eventually become QUOKA.

The first landing page is long gone, but haha, it took me a while to build it and I was proud of it. I got a total of 2 signups from that and over the next month, I went out and tabled, talked about the project with people, and got more signups. Special shout out to Courtney for joining me. We actually got kicked off of the UM campus at one point while signing people up. 😛

The tech build behind it was VERY MVP. Basically, as people signed up I would add them to a broadcast list on WhatsApp. I had to do some heavy lifting with sending text messages and emails to make sure they downloaded WhatsApp and added me as a contact to their phone so that they would get my messages.

Once they were set up it was a little easier. They would send messages to me, I would remove them from the broadcast list, and send their message out to the group. Then add them back into the list. This was to prevent them from getting their own messages.

I quickly realized how unscalable this whole experience was, especially given my bandwidth. I ended up redesigning the webpage to make it more clear that you had to have WhatsApp installed, and completely eliminated the email steps, collecting only their phone number to get started.

I was having a normal day, the only thing that was different was that for some reason my DND (do not disturb) was set to “off'“. This, is highly abnormal. A call came through. It was an unknown number. Very unusual, I answered my phone. To this day, I can’t explain why I did that, but what happened during that call would change me forever.

On the line was a former colleague. It was clear they were not in a good place. I snapped into my training from the Constructive Space Suicide Prevention event. I ended up inviting them down to Miami. They didn’t end up showing up but the whole experience got me thinking about “random” life experiences.

I have had many experiences with synchronicity. I believe that not everything is random. That if you think of a person “randomly” you should call or text them!

It was these seemingly random occurrences, that got me thinking that maybe they’re not random. Maybe they are “meant to be.” Although that might seem unusual, who cares!? Why not think they are meant to be?

I like thinking like this! It makes life more meaningful.