#TheCommitals: Weekly Check In (Week 38)
How did you fare last week?
What's on deck for this week?
What's your goal for the month?
[Optional] Still on target for end of year goal?
[Optional] Brief description of project with link (if applicable)
@louisswiss, @helengriffinjr, @vimalin, @jpusateri, @Guidione_Machava, @natejcho, @DF_V, @davey, @VisionIsScary
@breedaddy, @janice
LAST WEEK
💥Finished first drafts for all content comprising the MVP. 💥Also made my first pitch to a company to purchase "seats". No response as yet. Finally incorporated advice from @Davey re comfrotable reading widths and adjusted the layouts on my marketing site.
THIS WEEK
Polish all content.
Setup presence on LinkedIn.
Create workbooks.
THIS MONTH
Website [Completed]
Blog Post [Completed]
Onboarding
Module 1
Module 2
Market
Research best approaches to maximize LinkedIn.
Create presence on LinkedIn.
Schedule posts.
THIS YEAR
30K MRR. What the hell. Might as well go big or go home. To achieve that revenue, I must provide value for 1000 subscribers.
$90 of $30K MRR
PROJECT
Name. Diversity Decoded
Tagline: Refactor your tech team for diversity.
Elevator Pitch: A daily newsletter of short, actionable insights for tech leadership to build and retain diverse talent.
A lot going on this week! Good luck Janice :)
How did you fare last week?
Not a lot of time for Vimalin, but did just release an update. Trying to release regular updates to get new features out fast.
Changed the price from the macOS product to be the same as for Windows. Not sure what the side effects are, but we'll see.
I do believe it was too cheap as the macOS variant gives me most work, but was almost half the price.
Apple came through and moved my account to the company. Seems that the change was just a fix on casing of my name, at least my first name is no longer starting with a lower case character.
What's on deck for this week?
Consulting, infrastructure changes at the datacenter.
Hopefully a bit of time for Vimalin, but not sure.
Last Week
This Week
Goal for the month
Take a simple software product idea through initial planning and into prototype stage
## How did you fare last week?
Not a lot of visible progress, but getting desktop apps going is a big step in getting closer to the MVP
Started posting daily stand up blog posts, to get used to writing more consistantly.
## What's on deck for this week?
Video/screen sharing.
Reworking the process for managing an organization of people before we go live.
What's your goal for the month?
Start eating my own dogfood, and using the app.
## Brief description of project with link (if applicable)
tengable.com
Always on virtual office to help make remote work feel less... remote.
Hi Eric! Good luck this week, getting used to posting more content is super tough. What did you go with for the video conferencing? I've been looking at different tech for my own, will kick off with just Zoom.
Checked out the landing page. It's a team/org oriented product, so your messaging needs to instill confidence and positive outlook. Most if not all teams by now have at least tinkered with a competitive solution, and experienced problems, cost issues, or stability issues. So you probably want to avoid saying things in your blog post headlines that show you're having anything BUT technical control and stability in releases/code signing, etc. especially in this early stage. Otherwise, you're putting the wrong foot forward and increasing the perceived switch risk. Customers aren't going to give you that feedback, they're just going to bounce (if it applies)
I was looking at hosting jitsi, and using the iframe api. For now, i'm going to just use webrtc and stitch together some basic solutions myself. Since I already have audio working, adding video is not going to be too bad.
I get what your saying here, but I'm still very much in stealth mode. I don't have any paid plans setup or anything. If the peek behind the curtain scares you off, at this point, then it's probably best that you go with a more stable competitor for now. At this point, the product is for extremely early adopters who are more interested in trying something new than anything else.
Once I have the product running, with actual customers, I'll reconsider the posts, and depths of the posts.
For now, the daily blog posts have actually been great at getting attention from people who want to see behind the curtain. Lots of old friends, and a handful of other entrepreneurs have being following along, giving me some feedback on the product, etc... For now, thats exactly the kind of attention i am looking for.
I really love your rebuttal, and that you know exactly what you want!
Thanks! I also really appreciate the feedback.
The hypothesis is that an always on connection to your co-workers, will better connections for remote co-workers.
I feel like this app has been kind of an intense to start, because the MVP is so much more complex than any other MVP I have tried. There isn't really any way to fake it, just gotta build the product. It would be great to validate the hypothesis somehow, but I haven't really been able to find a way.
I looked at your profile, it looks like your working on an eventing system of some kind? Is there a landing page anywhere?
That’s messaging for ya! Mine is awful and it’s always easier to give feedback on someone else’s! It’s supposed to be a community for kids, which has classes/Live events/buddy matching. Started as an online assessment engine for homeschoolers ;)
https://lift.academy
Nice! your site is looking great. Love the logo
This week I decided to publish my first newsletter on product management and fitness (https://leanfitness.substack.com/). I'll work on my second issue and try to get as much feedback as possible!
Nice! Where are you finding your audience?
Thx Davey for your comment! I find that indie hackers is great so far. But if you have any tips, I'm very interested :)
[Last Week]
I did a lot of things, but lost the focus a bit.
I ideated and setup/scheduled 2 paid class events using Eventbrite/FB Ticketing. Then I made a couple video ads to generate interest. I was trying various marketing messages out for courses/classes to see which resonated.
They drew some visits to the site but no signups yet after about 1k visits. However, the Lift Squad (community) grew to 6 members, using the free account option. I'm having a good time getting feedback from them and scrambled to implement some unfinished major features:
I got the buddy matching done, and the first friend request was made and accepted.. YAY!! This was from an 11yo boy who found the Lift Squad because he has trouble making friends and was Googling. My class list had something about making friends so he signed up. Absolutely perfect use case.
My onboarding system really works well. You can tell the kids enjoy making the interview videos!! And it works really well to keep non-kids out.
I started to implement chat but saw it was going to be limited. So I took an entire day to spin up and lock down a Discord server so it can have its own separate app.
Through the course of the week I started to really get the message that I needed a mobile app version of the Lift Squad (community). 100% of the users were on mobile web, and 2 had asked if there was an app. It's kind of critical in a messaging-centric app to get push notifications for friend requests, chat mentions, and events to attend, so this was a big miss on my part.
So, I am further refined. The demand for classes is not yet there for what I wanted to offer, and indeed I got a ton of Extreme Conservative pushback on the course topics. Which was hella unexpected.
The community is already serving a useful purpose but needs to have more function ASAP. Will focus on this project being the modernized online version of Scouting for kids, with a strong moral compass.And focus on creating things for the community itself.
[This Week]
I've started today on figuring out if I want to learn + go React Native for this app. My site right now is in React and I'm getting pretty good with it. So I will put a day or so into it, otherwise I may decide to use Unity again. I hope not though, React Native will give me a bit of a speed boost it seems.
[Project]
Lift Academy
Safe online community for kids with classes/events/friend matching
[Year End Goal]
$10k MRR. Not on target, will need to rescope the path to $10k