3outcomes.app | April
Startup hardships #2. How to fail the productivity app’s early marketing strategy.
TLDR: Growth hacking time 🎩. Twitter experiment 🦆. Email campaign went wrong 😳. Domain troubles 😰. Bugs all the time 🐞. Stuck on implementing the design in code 🛑.
Numbers in a nutshell:
3outcomes.app
Productivity tool from unorganized procrastinators to help you achieve and focus on things that matter to youLeads: 453 → 429 (I described this shame below 🤦🏻♂️)
Active Accounts: 0
Team size: 2
Spendings: $120
MRR: $0
Previous story:
April was extra busy for me and Cyril. Despite the growing workload at our day jobs during the lockdown period, we were still pushing our side project forward with that very little free time remaining thanks to our mad time management skills.
Since I don’t take part in the development process of our productivity app, I started to think about marketing to have a growing base of warm leads interested in productivity hacking before we launch. I’ve experienced publishing previous product in the void — vastly demotivating I should say!
First of all, I took a handy framework of prioritizing growth ideas from the book called Hacking the Growth by Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis.
How it works: you come up with growth ideas and rate them from 1 to 10 according to the criteria of impact (how big the impact will be from this particular idea), confidence (how sure you are in the result) and ease (how easy it is to implement the idea). The last column will be the average number that defines the priority level.
I also added some smiles to better navigate in ideas:
- pizza — I like the idea,
- robot — we are already working on it,
- brain — learn more about it.
Further in the story, I’m describing why I’ve chosen each marketing channel, how new tactics worked for me and which troubles I faced.
Growth hacking time
I decided to focus on a friend referral program, content marketing and community building.
Then I needed to answer the following questions:
- Which type of referral program to choose?
- How to create valuable content if I never did it before?
- On which platform should I build community?
For a friend referral program, I googled and defined several tactics that can presumably work with productivity apps:
- Invite a friend to join 3outcomes and we’ll give you both 50 more outcomes. A good example is getslash.co.
- $ credit for doing the desired action: import tasks from Trello or Todoist, install web plugin, download the mobile app, etc. — the best example is notion.so.
- VIP club — get an upgrade to a higher tiered plan at no extra cost with dedicated customer support. I can create the top 5, top 10, top 50 exclusive programs to spice up members to get excited about the next reward type they can enjoy.
I decided to give a go to the 1st one. It matches really well with our business model and I think will provide value to people wanting productivity increase.
But you know, without users there won’t be any referrals — chicken/egg problem. We need a source of traffic. Where can we get it dirt cheap?
Content marketing is the king among all traffic drivers when you are on a budget with your side project.
There are several types of content that we can create to drive traffic to the website: infographics, blogs, videos.
Infographics were turned away instantly as I’m not the kind of a person who is really into digging the data. I don’t want to mislead anyone.
Secondly, I like watching YouTube videos more than reading blogs. At the same time, my phone is the only gear I have for making video content. Obviously today YouTube audience cares a lot more about image and sound quality.
The last option, blogging is the way to start. I can try to amuse you with my honest story of starting up the company, you can educate from my failures. This is something I wish I had read 10 years ago.
Additionally, writing helps to structurize the thoughts and crystalize the ideas to better communicate about them — a major skill for every founder. And what is more, afterward I can use my articles as scripts for future videos.
For those who are also starting content marketing, here is an awesome guide that inspired me as well.
Twitter experiment
A community of like-minded people is the best thing that can happen with any business.
It is the launchpad and laboratory for new ideas. Having a community allows you to give all ideas a try with your target audience before going big into the market.
But how to start and which platform to choose?
First of all, we need to answer who is our target audience.
We are making a productivity tool. Our users are students, freelancers and startup owners. I imagine a guy aged 18–40 who is on the track of building his career, consumes huge amounts of educational content on time management and productivity tips, uses Notion, Todoist or Trello and desperately wants to do something great in life.
Wait, am I describing myself?
Trust me, I googled and found out that the Twitter audience is the smartest and tech-savvy in comparison with Facebook or Instagram users. Yes, it is much smaller but, as well as Reddit, Twitter is focused on communication and sharing valuable and helpful content.
Also, Medium is the place where my people live. Publications about startups and productivity tips have a huge following here.
All of the above led me to register a twitter account and take blogging on Medium as a much more serious affair.
Of course, I read those guides on how to succeed on Twitter: you just need to post interesting content with 1–2 hashtags 7 times a day and people will come to you.
One of my very first tweets was liked 9 times and retweeted a couple of times with 0 following.
I thought to myself, WOW, I went viral!
Instantly I planned 30 tweets for a week on Hootsuite and started to wait for my first 1k followers. Easy!
Several days passed, I have several bots followed me. My sparkling tweets about productivity and procrastination don’t even get a single like. I don’t understand, my first tweet with 8 likes is much worse. What’s going on? Ok, let’s wait.
The week passed and I had only 5 followers. Obviously, posting tweets to the void strategy failed. I turned to the second strategy: engage with tweets of others.
Gary Vaynerchuk says you need to engage in 90 tweets a day formally giving your 2 cents in every tweet like paying attention to the work of others thus investing $1.80 every day. He calls it a $1.80 rule.
It worked. I got 5 more followers for 2 days just having fun and communicating with other people. I didn’t make 90 tweets though.
In May I’ll try doing exactly 90 tweets per day and update you on the results of my experiment.
Email campaign went wrong
I’m now getting used to natural churn rate from my email campaigns but I still can’t take it easy.
Each subscriber from my waitlist is like my family — I want to provide them with the best I can and make them happy.
In reality, it is just the same situation as in families with teenagers, when parents do something cool in their opinion and kids just shut the door in the face. I’m the parent and email subscribers are teenagers, you got it.
This time I sent an email updating people on the latest state of the project:
As you see links got the terrible scammy look after pushing the SEND button in Mailchimp. I wouldn’t be surprised if people thought they will lose their money pressing on those links. I even got an email request from one person to send normal links. Oops!
In total, I received only 60 link clicks and huge 24 unsubs from my 453 subscribers. It is a fail but a good lesson not to send Plain Emails with links in Mailchimp.
Technical issues time
Domain troubles
To cut the long story short, we couldn’t make 3outcomes.app work correctly — it was showing 404 error.
It was super important, as without the working domain I couldn’t send my poor email campaign as well post here or on twitter.
We spent 2 weeks, playing with the domain DNS settings. It took so long because when you do a change there you need to wait for 24–48 hours for it to take place.
The problem got solved by installing the SSL certificate. It turned out today browsers don’t like to work with new websites without security protocol installed, even if we have only a simple landing there.
Bugs all the time
The development of our productivity project is moving at a very moderate pace.
Cyril managed to build the core functionality and database for now and we were facing bugs and troubles on every step. But one issue was very challenging and put the entire project in front of the abyss.
Stuck on implementing the design in code
Madre, that was a scary message from Cyril.
He argued that my design doesn’t have logic in one aspect. He couldn’t find a way to code the hierarchy of categories without adding an additional parameter. It meant a radical design change.
I wanted the user to have the ability to see his productivity journey of making things happen in a hierarchical way so it could look like a tree or a Gantt chart.
If we can’t code such a handy basic feature, we will lose the only competitive thing we can have in our MVP.
I couldn’t sleep — all my thoughts were about solving the issue as I didn’t want to overcomplicate UX adding there more actions for the user so we could receive more parameters.
I don’t know how but I had an aha-moment.
Visually we have only 3 categories a user can set for an outcome. It is impossible to build hierarchy knowing so little.
But what if we predefine every category state (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily) as a separate category totaling 12 states. And visually it will still be the same 3 colorful dots.
It worked!
I wish you could imagine how proud of myself I was.
By the end of April, I’d say we managed to build 45% of the project. I’d be happy to launch beta testing in May but I have doubts now for this deadline. Anyways, no matter when it happens, I’ll be happy as working on this productivity app is pure fun.
I set as a mission for my company: help people fulfill their dreams. I think it is worth trying to launch such a project. What do you think?
We do mistakes — you learn:
- Start building the audience as early as possible — I wish I had started with twitter at least as soon as I had the idea — a year ago.
- Expose yourself and your work as much as possible — it creates unexpected opportunities and luck. Blogging/vlogging about your project is a way to go!
- Never be afraid of making a mistake: act as nobody is watching.
In the next part, I‘ll share a May update 🧭 and show you how my 90 tweets a day experiment went 🧪.
🐌 Be invited to check out our magic personal productivity increase app when we finally launch the product in this or the next decade: https://3outcomes.app/
🦆 Procrastinate with us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/3outcomes
