2 weeks in, what I've done:

It's easy to feel like I'm not going anywhere when just getting started, but the truth is I've accomplished a lot in the first two weeks. It helps to document that here:

⭐ Hired a web designer to design the website

⭐ Finished business plan & budget — had some real break-throughs on monetization

⭐ Hired an assistant reporter who's already researching deals

⭐ Got set up in a new project management tool (ClickUp)

⭐ Started reaching out to my network one-by-one to tell them what I'm working on and ask for recommendations for deals we should cover

⭐ Created a sample deal page so we know what we're working toward

⭐ Set goals for our first 6.5 months, which I'm referring to as Phase 1: 12,000 email subs and 200 deals published (includes short summaries and longer profiles)

That subscriber goal felt like a shot in the dark. It might be a complete slog to get to that 12K number through lots of little efforts that add up, or we might get lucky with some of our tactics and blow up well beyond that goal. I ended up choosing that number (with 20K as our reach goal) because I would feel good about the growth of the brand if we hit it.

While we're taking baby steps toward building the product, I see my most important job even at this early stage as audience growth — and our top metric for that is email subscribers. I think this will be the top challenge for us in the first year, and so I want to do everything I can from day one to get people on our email list, even while we're still building the product.