Shanah

[Originally posted on the Shanah Meta Blog: https://medium.com/shanah-blog/ending-the-shanah-experiment-8e215bc1fcb6]

After some consideration, I’ve decided to end production of Shanah. I’ve made this decision for two reasons:

I’m too cluttered on projects. Currently I’m working on my personal blog, Apalla, and Shanah. You add in full-time work to that (which should start in the next two months), and that’s too much. At that point you aren’t making one good product, you’re making several shitty products. I needed to cut down.

I’m not as interested in the problem anymore. The blog will never run out of power, because I only write about what I’m interested in. And for Apalla, I don’t see the issue of education losing interest to me any time soon (maybe once the problem is solved). Longevity is certainly an interesting concept, and I’d love to democratize it, but it was an idea that most came out of this vicious need in me to create a startup. I don’t even believe in startups anymore, focusing instead on the idea of income generators. Once again, makes more sense to work on things that I’m motivated to work on.

That all being said, this does not mean I am done with building. I already said I’m still working on personal brand and Apalla. Really, this change was made because I was building too much! And even then, I don’t intend to kill off Shanah in its entirety. Here’s the plan for now:

Make Shanah free. No one has bought it so far (only free beta testers) and so I intend on getting rid of the payment pages and setting it open source ASAP.

Blog posts have already ended. Newsletters end on 6/2.
Social media stops posting on Instagram and Twitter on 6/2 (the last newsletter).

Website will be taken down last, for financials. I’ll host the course materials on Apalla instead. I will still use the shanah.app domain, mostly for emails — though if this becomes inconvenient I’ll switch everything over to apalla.co.

[A bonus for IH friends: The Apalla meta-blog will be hosted on this site natively. Just wait for me to post it!]

We originally designed Shanah as a $5.99/mo model. After getting feedback from our beta test and also realizing that fulfillment (even in 2021) was surprisingly hard, we decided to split Shanah into three different branches (Physical, Mental, Financial) where you could purchase lifetime access to a single branch for $99. The $5.99/mo model continued to stay up as an "All-Access" pass.

[Originally posted on the Shanah Meta Blog: https://medium.com/shanah-blog/new-courses-going-forward-751fd1abecd6]

Hello there. It’s been awhile.

A lot has changed on the Shanah backend, as I try to figure out the perfect mix of a) what is practical for me, as a solo founder, to design and b) what maximizes the value for people who buy into Shanah. Because of this, some changes have been made.
I initially believed that the next best step for Shanah was a mobile app. Now, while I still see the mobile app in Shanah’s future, I’m beginning to realize that it doesn’t really hit on the core of what Shanah is about.

Put into basic terms, Shanah is educating people about their longevity. So it’s health education. It’s course-based.
And it is extraordinarily to build a course on Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or whatever the hell we’re on now). It’s also a lot more value-driven then a simple cheatsheet. So… could it be the missing link?
I’m going to say yes — which is why at Shanah we’re now taking a pause on the mobile app (for now) to work on infrastructure for courses. This is going to involve a slightly different payment model as well as new build-ins for product, but as always, we’ll figure it out as we go along.

One of the main things that lead me to this decision, besides the “missing link” analogy, is payment structures. As it turns out, making subscription software in 2021 is very difficult. It may seem strange, but it’s actually not a straight-forward process to create an automated fulfilment link between the payment processor and the product itself (via no-code strategies, at least). Courses don’t have this issue, because 1) most course software has payment options built in, and 2) even if you didn’t use course software, its fairly trivial to package up a set of course materials and ship, and still provide limited friction for the user.

Payment and fulfilment is definitely the biggest challenge for Shanah right now — perhaps not the sexiest challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. Our next blog post here might (hopefully) be how we solved this problem, and some tips on how you might be able to do so as well.

[Originally from the Shanah Meta blog: https://medium.com/shanah-blog/incremental-marketing-c7f322c97f28]

Shanah, as a whole, is one big experiment. It’s my first full attempt at an income generator, and as such serves as my first applied business experience.
One such applied business experience is marketing.

An inefficiency I noticed pretty early on is that of the launch. People will take version 1.0, and make a big launch event on all the major platforms, all at once. I think this is dangerous because it creates the same sort of “peak of hope” you see in content writing. In content writing, we try to avoid the peak of hope and instead focus on evergreen marketing strategies.

Your business is evergreen, so why should it be any different?
That’s why I’m instead focusing on incremental marketing. Instead of posting to ProductHunt only once, we’re posting on it (roughly) every month — whether it be for a new guide, or for a major version release. In addition, our marketing never implies a “big event”; just smaller events that add up over time.
To me, the final goal is getting people to buy the product in the first place. That can be by adding value, or it can be by marketing value. When I’m marketing value, I don’t want to expend a lot of effort once a year, then do nothing for the rest — I want to have equal effort across the entire year. Not only is that easier on me, but it gets the ball rolling much more smoothly.

Shanah launched in August 2020 under a "soft launch", meaning we established a full channel for the subscription payment. We intend on using incremental marketing through ads, SEO, startup stories, and more to continue our launch over an extended period of time. As of now, you can try out our Phase 1 product, the cheat sheet.

Shanah started out of a submission to the Stanford Longevity Design challenge. After some time, the product continued to evolve until it became a full-on business opportunity. Around April 2020 we submitted Shanah to our university's entrepreneurial program, and it was accepted. That's when we knew this was going to be a long term thing!