Month 3 Summary: Code Cave
by Josh HowarthThis month I scuttled back into my code cave 🦀. This was with the view to making Trennd more robust and sustainable for the long term. That's important, and I’ve definitely made a lot of progress on the backend towards that goal.
But at the same time, I’ve done zero marketing this month 🤦♂️. The hype last month around the Hacker News launch and Twittersphere has naturally died down, along with the web traffic.
The mailing list count is still ticking up everyday though despite this, and we’ve reached a good new equilibrium of 100-300 visitors to the site everyday. Both are green flags to me. (I’m not sure if green flags are actually a real thing. Emojipedia doesn’t think so… 🚩)
- Subscribers: 2,334 🎉
- Users: 5,065 🕵️♀️
- Pageviews: 28,016 👀
- Trends: 1,847 📈
It’s way too easy for me to put marketing on the backburner and keep building in general. That’s where I’m most comfortable. Yet, I know full well marketing should be an ongoing crusade, alongside product improvement.
The most successful indie hackers I see around - they have systemized routines that enable them to continually output valuable content.
So my new goal is to figure out my own process to enforce continual, ongoing marketing and stay disciplined. If I have a weekly process that I have to stick to, this should slowly yield results and compound over time.
For instance, writing 1 quality report about a trend and sharing to Reddit/Twitter/etc each week/month could be a good start. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on this front too, I’m all ears?! 👂
There’s also a more detailed write-up of the month here: trennd.co/blog/august-19-update
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I read your interview for starterstory a few days ago. Asking Pat to add your trennd's link coul help a bit and you could do other interviews for relevant audiences.
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Aha that’s awesome you found my Starter Story interview about WheelySales!
Honestly didn’t think about asking Pat to add Trennd link to the bottom of that, but definitely will do that! Seems so obvious now you say it - thanks Luqa ☺️
Yeah interviews are a great way to get in front of new audiences. Part of me feels like since Trennd is making $0 right now, nobody will want to listen. But at the same time, I know I shouldn’t let that hold me back!
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Rhetorical q: Why is 'Popeye's Chicken sandwiches' trending?
When I heard about that a few days ago, I was enamored with it. It's so interesting to me. Like, HOW did it all of a sudden just blow up? I watched YT videos and did a bunch of googling.
I would love to learn more about that the why from these trends, from a "hacker" perspective. Kinda like Marketing examples.
Could be an easy way to create content. You have the data.
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Yeah Popeye's went HUGE last month. One of the craziest search trend graphs I've ever seen: https://trennd.co/trend/popeyes-chicken-sandwich
This content idea is gold, thanks Pat! As long as I can figure it out from googling etc. everyone wants to know the why so they can try to reproduce it.
Really want to try a Popeye's sandwich now too 😛
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Great idea. Any plans to add a "Politics" category?
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Potentially in the future, but not right now. Some categories, like politics, can start to look like a news and current affairs feed rather than trends.
Of course, this isn't always true. Like there can be growing political movements and broader political trends. But I want to keep the signal to noise ratio high.
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You are on the right track trying to come up with a weekly content marketing strategy.
Now comes the difficult part: what kind of content should you create?
Ideally you should write something that has both the potential to resonate with people on social networks AND ranks on search engines in the long term. Good luck!
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Thanks Andrea!
Yeah the what is the tricky part for sure...
I might experiment with a few different kinds of content at first and see what resonates. Plus try to tailor that to some long-tail keywords.
Let me know if you have any ideas!
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