Top 5 things I learned from launching
Well the launch has been kind of tough so far.
I’ve realized a couple things this week
1: Audience building is key.
I used to laugh at the LinkedIn Influencer crowd but I’ve slowly realized every type of creator has a clear pattern and there’s nothing stopping me from joining in an contributing what I can to similarly generate engaging content. I’m big on goals, so I want to build an audience of at least 5,000. Thats my new goal. I think at first I will just do youtube and LinkedIn. I honestly started to study creators.
2. Everyone has a free pdf
I realized basically every single person out there doing social selling is basically hijacking the Tony Robbins model. Not that I’m going to do that, but its an observation. Its crazy how well that works, but it also sort of implies a structure to my next product or relaunch or launch etc.
3. I need to do what I do best.
And crazily, that is sell myself and my products. I have been trying to drive traffic pretty passively with reddit and other things but I need to try more direct methods. My agency is all about value so what I was thinking was looking at Upwork, looking at job postings for web developers at non web developer companies and trying to directly sell to them, among others. They have money set aside to hire people, they could hire me, its likely they dont know or haven’t considered contracting like this.
4. I need to at least test paid advertising
I always use it to benchmark things. I do it for every business, I’m going to take some money make a budget and see the results I get. If I can get one client it’ll be easy to justify rolling that over into more advertising. I don’t love to rely on it, it concerns me, but everyone buys advertising. The movie failure to launch spent on ads, and I’m no Sarah Jessica Parker.
5. Whether this falls flat or not I feel like I have accomplished something
For the first time in many years I have launched some product on my own, without stopping and changing to some other new new project to work on, only to then stop and move on to a new new new project a week later and so on. I’ve actually launched something. It has been a mess so far and I have 0 users and 19 site visits but hey action begets action. I could be playing Call of Duty right now or 3 beers into a 6 beer afternoon.
Next Steps
First, I’m going to make it more a niche site. I’m going to focus not on “any tech problem” but the specific problems I have first hand experience solving with data. Talking to a couple people I feel like a lot of companies have data problems, and at 202Works that was something I solved.
I’m going to supplement this with AI implementation. I feel like we solved data problems to get insights and in 2023 thats the natural progression. AI is a bandwagon-early-web-pets.com-y thing right now but its here to stay.
Secondly, I’m going to drop the price disruption. It was a cool idea in the shower but the more I think about it, if I have something more straight forward “this is what we do, this is our cost” it’ll be something I can have someone pick up the phone and sell. I can look at other companies and see who they serve and how they sell and work off of that. Maybe later I can do Service as a Saas but not now.
It’s entirely possible my solution totally works for some people right now and I’ll test that, but I think I need to rework something.
