Weekly growth notes - what have you been doing this past week?
Weekly growth notes is the chance to share what you've been up to recently with a focus on growing your product.
- what have you been doing recently related to growth?
- anything interesting to report on?
- any specific wins or losses?
By sharing openly we can not only support each other but we also have the opportunity to learn and be inspired.
For us at https://travlyng.com/, being in YC Startup School has been helpful. We have a tendency to forget simple advice. When we started asking the critical questions about our strategy we figured out we need to talk more to people who would pay.
Result was that we created a smaller, more refined product within the broad idea of Travlyng. It is an influencer marketing platform, and we started reaching out to businesses. We got multiple responses back and now have demos scheduled up.
To sum up:
The project is called "Hire a Traveler". We were already connected to many well-known travelers though, in case you have not followed our milestones.
Landing page for this will be up shortly and we will publish our Milestones.
This past week I've been launching earlybird enrollment for the Sales for Founders course!
A lot of work to do (and it's just getting started), but things are going pretty well. I'm on track to make my target of $20k in presales before the course goes live in just over 2 weeks time.
Something interesting I've noticed is that I feel weirdly very arrogant and very insecure about the course's performance so far...
For example when someone buys, I get this feeling of "why would someone buy this?"
But, at the same time, I also catch myself getting frustrated when I send an email to my waitlist, asking "why hasn't everyone bought this already?"
This never really affected me with software/physical products, but apparently I'm a lot more self-critical when I'm selling my 'knowledge'.
Fun times.
Last week was good! I was researching where my target audience is hanging out. I found a handful of Slack Groups and posted messages about designremotely.co. Even saw a few subscriptions off the back of that which has been great!
The next step is to tease out some information from these audiences in order to take DesignRemotely in a direction where it remains hyper relevant and high in value to remote designers across the world.
Much of my past week has been focused on the IH new groups feature which has slowed down my activities elsewhere.
I'm finding that they are being used, but often they are not. So I'm having to review each post that comes in to see if it's in the right location. Posting in groups does not stop posts appearing on the homepage, though I'm kind of guessing some people think it does.
It's also been great to see the Milestones grow in terms of comments, upvotes and number of milestones. It's clearly something people are loving at the moment, the most obvious challenge for it right now is to try to figure out how to improve the content of them. Quality is just as important as quantity.
Great stuff! I was only vaguely aware that groups existed. I will check them out.
The main problem I've found with milestones so far is that it's easy for new ones to just sit on the bottom of the list with no upvotes and not get discovered - even interesting ones.
I've started reading them from the bottom of the list so that I can help upvote the more interesting ones.