Socialwise

And goodness there has been a lot of work and progress since my last update.

Tech stack wise - spent a good deal of time (far more than ever planned) on devops and making sure the stability is bang on. That's sorted now. Tidied up a lot of code and added a lot of logic for new customer types. Added Stripe integration and the ability to generate a custom monitoring dashboard via the redesigned sign up process.

Biz wise - making a slight adjustment to the biz model which has been totally focused on custom dashboards for bigger businesses, which is a slower moving and more difficult journey to establish true product market fit. I'm adding a basic tier to the product which you can sign up for without speaking to a human. I'll do another post with details on that. But the main aim is to get the product in more hands and then focus on the sectors that show most promise. Hopefully get a bit of traction and then start entering some pitch comps and apply for a few accelerators.

Personal wise - this founder stuff is hard. Currently working with a few part time folk who combined are contributing to more of a co-founder role, which is helping.

Anyway, just wanted to throw some words down on paper. Need to do a proper blog post soon. But got some deadlines to hit first!

What a fantastic feeling! It's been 3 months since the official founding of Socialwise and we now have the first monthly subscribed business on board.

The past couple weeks I will admit I felt some vulnerability behind the concept and maybe that I'd built something that no one had asked for/needed, but this is some great market validation.

The customer is a legitimate, well thought of and established business and the monthly fee is a good amount too. In the hundreds.

First sale is always the hardest sale. Can't wait to take this momentum into more deals and continue the growth of Socialwise!

Absolutely brilliant.

Even learned from this process about additional offerings I could potentially include in further packages to really build out our service too.

But damn... built something someone wants to pay for! What a feeling.

First off... glad I woke up before the launch... caught the server acting funny last minute! Phew...

Yesterday I decided to release a special 24-hour-only Black Friday deal hunter Socialwise account on Product Hunt today. Truthfully, I wish I had thought of doing it a bit earlier than midday yesterday but it was an insane rush getting everything I needed to do built and prepped and ready for launch.

What is a Black Friday deal hunter account? Well to demonstrate some of the search skills at play at Socialwise I wanted to target our searches on the latest Black Friday deals as they hit Twitter. The account is free to use (just join the mailing list) and will only exist for 24 hours before self-destructing!

So instead of the columns being full of customer leads or competitor intelligence for b2b, today it's b2c to show off what it can do! The content is actually pretty good too. Found a legitimate Xbox One S deal for $99 on Ebay haha.

Anyway, I'd love for you guys at Indie Hackers to give it a try too and possibly an upvote on Product Hunt, link here:

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/find-black-friday-deals-on-twitter

Did some research and realised that we needed to focus on our SEO game a bit more versus social. Having seen where the majority of competitors get their traffic. So here's an excerpt from our first foray into the content sphere:

"We’ve all been there.

Your friends have finally decided on a night that works for everyone to go out to eat. As the date draws closer, no one has made a decision where to go, and you, wanting to take the opportunity to try something new, Google “best places to eat”.
Commence immediate bombardment of the retinas.

An army of food industry marketing teams have anticipated this search eagerly and have used every trick in the book to make sure they turn up in your results.

As for you, it’s hard to know where to start — do you want the top ten, top twenty or top fifty best restaurants to choose from? And isn’t it weird that the results are basically the same as when you Googled this query on the other side of the country last week? And on your European vacation from three months ago?

The usual suspects pop up no matter where you are in the world. Undoubtedly, you’ll have your Timeout, your TripAdvisor, and your Yelp all promising to bring you the best experience..."

Check it out and applaud it if you like it! https://medium.com/@socialwiseio/why-i-stopped-googling-places-to-eat-e821f266906f

This milestone is a bit more on the personal side rather than purely business. But having made the transition from journalism into the tech world via learning to code I was asked for an interview by one of the major bootcamp review websites Course Report.

I struggle watching myself on video but I think the text interview came off quite well. Hopefully a few people on the edge of making a decision to do something similar will stumble on this article and follow their dreams like I did myself.

If you're interested in the article - https://www.coursereport.com/blog/from-journalist-to-tech-entrepreneur-with-digitalcrafts

Language changed from early access and pre-release all over. Gradually posting about socialwise on all my networks and leverage my friends of friends for contacts and connections.

Signed up for LinkedIn Sales Navigator and plan to go through all of my own connections first.

I've honed in on the messaging surrounding the product after some user feedback about what features they find most valuable (competition monitoring more prominent than I thought!) and freshened up the landing page to better show the product.

Really pleased with how it all looks at the moment. Hopefully this will lead to a few more leads. Going to plan for a product hunt launch soon too.

Check out the landing page if you like - https://www.socialwise.io/

Or follow us on any of the social networks @socialwiseio.

Let's do this!!!

Don't you just love it when you hit save, watch the localhost window refresh itself and then see everything you hoped for just work?

In fairness it's probably taken a good few hundred command + s, to get to that point today. But massive breakthrough in using some of the public instagram api to get through content that'll be great for clients.

Means that I'm able to take Socialwise from a Twitter-only platform to Instagram too.

Awesome.

Small win but given how as an Indie hacker you constantly undervalue your own product it feels good and validating.

I initially demo'd the earliest non-scalable MVP of socialwise by at the demo day of my bootcamp and managed to get a couple dozen emails that day.

Followed up with a fairly personalised note with each business that next morning. Now a couple months on I've started with the soft rollout on social and followed back up with the original businesses.

Had 2 of them explicitly say they want to join the beta and another couple follow on social accounts.

Glad to see they weren't just paying me lip service!

...now to just make sure it's all running good still!

I've been naughty in missing the past few of these. Had a lot of crazy going-on with moving homes and some other outside of work challenges but that's all sorted now.

Good news is the web application is successfully deployed. And I've gotta say, deploying is SO MUCH HARDER than it looks and sounds in every guide you follow. Spent way too many days on this part but fortunately you learn through doing right?

I've had the web server running with a few test accounts for the past 10 days and zero crashes so that's a good sign.

Next up I need to tidy up the test version a bit but also need to make sure I keep another foot firmly in the promotional camp too.

Posted the landing page on the appropriate section here for a bit of feedback. Invited all the fam/friends to like the page on FB. Scaling up the content production for Twitter and Insta and will soon start going forward with approaching people over LinkedIn.

Fun and busy, busy times ahead.

Hope y'all are doing well.

• Jack

The brunt of my application was built a month ago (did some traveling/moving and life happened) and there have been some areas of my back and front end that worked fine for a single demo account but had zero capability of scalability. Monday I mapped out everything that needed doing, got started and realised there was a bunch of other stuff than I needed to do before I could even get to what I thought I could do. But yesterday with a fresh head, I managed to make some serious progress and really get the app into a much better place.

After a month away from code I was worried I'd forget everything, but fortunately its much of the remembering how to ride a bike mantra! Anyway... time to bug hunt!