CommunityTycoon

Last couple of weeks I spend time on rebranding the community software from SocialSaaS to its new new CommunityTycoon. Reason is the target audience of the software. With the name SocialSaaS I was limiting myself to only SaaS companies using the software. The name CommunityTycoon is more in line with our other SaaS project ReviewTycoon.

Happy to make the decision pre-launch. It took some time to re-brand, but I think the new name suits the software better. Of course all links to the old domain are now 301 redirected to the new domain.

It feels like setting up really specific goals for myself is not really working out. The fun of building SocialSaaS.io is a lot less than a couple of weeks and the launch date of December 7th is coming closer and closer. This does not feel right for me.

Could be that a lot of the stuff I had to do this week I had postponed doing for weeks. So to be fair, without the deadlines and planning I would just have postponed those tasks to further down the road and I would probably just have been creating new features instead of working on the MVP.

Having said that, I did make some progress on parts of the MVP that are really essential (uploading images, sending out email notifications).

Hopefully next week has some easier tasks for me :)

After a miserable week last week, it was time for some positivity in my life :)

This week I planned some technical stuff for SocialSaaS.io. When a customer subscribes you want to have community.saasdomain.com getting the content from my server. It's not really complicated to have a whole domain getting your content, but I didn't manage to get it working a couple of weeks ago when I last tried.

As you can imagine having this part working is kind of a make or break deal for the whole project. Without the subdomains working the whole idea is worthless.

As the procrastinator that I am, I booked today (Friday) to make it happen. This morning all my tries were fruitless. But right after lunch I tried some other settings on the server and you wouldn't believe it but it works.

Not only does it work, it works so good that when a new customer signs up, I don't have to change anything in my backend.

I don't have a degree in computer science, I'm all auto didact, don't know shit about servers, but after hours and hours of trying and research I made it happen. I'm so proud of myself!

The rest of the week was a mixed bunch. Some things went well, some not so well.

Got another Twitter ban, but still got about 100 extra followers. And I spoke with some great people.

In the meantime I found a website where I could advertise when SocialSaaS has launched.

This was not the greatest week of SocialSaaS.

Monday started with a Twitter ban, probably because I was following too many people in a short time. This resulted in only 120 new followers. Still almost 20 per day, so I shouldn't complain.

Planning was to integrate Stripe payments. But when I started I found out it would be better to focus on onboarding new users first. So I postponed Stripe and moved some things around.

But somehow all items on the to do list took way longer than expected. And in the Netherlands the schools are out for holiday. Having two kids running around doesn't help either.

But there's good news as well. Yesterday was my first podcast. I hate public speaking so I always said no to podcast interviews during the years. But somehow I said yes to this podcast (I know the guy for a long time). The interview went very well and I was even enjoying it. I still can't listen to it, so I hope the final result is any good.

Hope next week will be better :)

This week was as good as last week. While last week it became clear that I suck at writing long form blogs, it turns out I'm not half bad a Twitter. I managed to increase my Twitter following within a week from 227 to 392. I made some great connections and I learned a lot from fellow IH'ers and builders.

To prevent the mistake of adding to many features to the MVP of SocialSaaS I decided on a hard deadline. Folks, put December 7 in your agendas. This will be de day I launch.

With a launch date in mind, I was able to plan all weeks until December 7th. I noticed it's very good to have a clear plan in mind and I can concentrate on my daily/weekly tasks instead of just building what's fun.

This week was about finishing up the forum, making sure everything's built modular and creating the Q&A part of the software. Almost everything on the list has been done. Some minor things are left out of the MVP, so I have some things to build after the launch.

If you want to test the software, reach out on Twitter or send me a DM on IH.

This was a great week. Made lots of progress on developing SocialSaaS. Finetuned the forum, created the Knowledge Base system and the DM system. Worked on the design. Material Design icons are looking awesome!

Besides the developing I started with Twitter. I created my Twitter account almost a decade ago but haven't done anything with it since. It was great interacting with like minded people. Got some followers (around 200 at the moment) and even had some people reaching out about SocialSaaS. This is great!

This week was supposed to be the start of my Blog. Content creation is the best SEO, blah blah blah. Turns out, I'm just not a writer. I'm good at some things, average at other things and flat out bad at the rest. Know your weaknesses. Instead I decided to skip blogging from my marketing channel overview and concentrate on other forms of marketing.

This week had its ups and downs.

Today was great with lots of progress. Forum is coming along great. Built a whole blog system today. Works perfectly, needs some details in the design and some extra functionality.

Decided to write a weekly blog post every Wednesday. I hate writing so we'll see how it goes.

For the IH'ers who want to read it, check it out on https://community.socialsaas.io/blog/

Please keep in mind it's work in progress ;)

This week was great!

I've set aside a lot of time to continue developing SocialSaaS. Made real good progress on some of the essential parts of the MVP (forum, knowledge base, FAQ).

Really happy with the results and progress.

Got a new subscriber for the waiting list. Not even through IH, but through a directory I had send SocialSaaS to some time ago.

Did some extra research on competition and great to see that some of them are doing tons of revenue per month with an inferior product.

I have decided to have a weekly update about IH about SocialSaaS. Not only to keep the followers in the loop but also to keep myself accountable for progress.

With multiple projects I'm working on at the same time it can be dangerous that some projects don't have any progress at all.

Last week was a good week for SocialSaaS. Lots of time has been spent on product development. The more I work on the project the more I feel this software is useful for companies. Not the big companies that have the money and manpower to build an inhouse solution for their community needs, but more the smaller, starting SaaS businesses who want to have a community but don't want to spend to much time and hassle on it.

Development of the forum part is coming along as well as the Q&A part.

I always have to keep in mind I'm working on the MVP, so I need to leave the balls & whistles out of it. But it's to much fun to build a great product instead of a half ass product.

Building the Community software is coming along very well. It's great to see that the 20 years of experience in building communities is paying off. Also the things we learned from our previous SaaS company speeds up the building process a lot.

Today we opened up the opt in form on the Landing Page for people to pre-register for SocialSaaS. If you leave your email address now we will keep you posted on all updates and you will get the first 6 months for free.

So if you own a SaaS and would like to have a Community within your SaaS website, sign up at https://www.socialsaas.io/