Kickoff Weekend: Results and Notes (Startup Series: #2)
What you’re getting into: Short 5 min read. This is going to cover the results of the Daily CSS Images kickoff from a business-like perspective. This is not a tutorial and I will be releasing posts like these for those who are interested in the “behind-the-scenes” of Daily CSS Images.
Affiliate Links: ConvertKit, an email marketing service for bloggers started by a former developer
The Idea for This Series
Codepen Radio is one of my favorite podcasts to listen to as it lets you be a fly on the wall of a modern software startup called Codepen. Right before I really picked up the pace on learning modern web development, I had explored some entrepreneurial endeavors including writing a dieting ebook and video course. Because of this experience, I was incredibly interested listening to Codepen Radio which fit my niche of developers interested in startups.
The other aspect of Codepen Radio that I really enjoyed was the sheer transparency in sharing their story of how they started, bad decisions they made, their thought process for growing, etc.
With this in mind, I decided to make an official “startup series” where I will cover the progress of Daily CSS Images from a business/startup perspective.
If you have not already, you are going to want to read part 1 here.
Kickoff Weekend: Day 1
As soon as my account was accepted by ConvertKit on Friday evening, I had everything prepared for the launch. All my 50 emails for the challenge are 100% automated via ConvertKit, the landing page with the signup form linked to ConvertKit was deployed via AWS, and I had created the Twitter account which I would use for all interaction and promotion.
I was excited. I sent the tweet.
What really helped with this tweet getting circulated was the use of the #100DaysofCode hashtag. 100 days of code is a great idea from Free Code Camp to challenge developers to put in an hour of code each day.
Since Monday, January 2, I have been sticking to this. I have created a portfolio page, a Pomodoro clock mini app, done hours of freeCodeCamp, and created the Daily CSS Images landing page (and everything else).
Yeah, I’ve been kinda busy…
Since I had made this as part of my #100DaysofCode challenge, I included in the tweet which was helpful to also expand the reach of my tweet.
Next, I went over to my Twitter profile and added “creator of @dailycssimages” to my bio.
I then wanted to write down the moment and that is when I composed the first post of this series describing the background leading up to the launch and how the idea came about.
After writing, editing, and sharing that, I sat back and waited to see the feedback.
Overall, Friday night ended with 21 subscriptions to the email challenge. While that might not sound like a lot, the initial feedback was extremely positive and enthusiastic.
Day 2
With a day under my belt, I decided to use my time on Saturday to do some extra promotion.
The first thing I did was create a Medium publication for Daily CSS Images. I ported over a few of my personal writings, the first post of this series and an already successful post called A Beginner’s Guide to Pure CSS Images.
Honestly, I had only done this for the sake of organization, especially for future plans of bringing more writers on board, but it actually made quite a bit impact on Twitter.
After launching the publication, there were several accounts that were sharing the articles over Saturday and Sunday.
After writing the publication, I created a promoted Tweet. Having a background in SEO and marketing is helpful here, I was able to include good keywords and really narrow down a good audience by including accounts that had a very similar audience as I was trying to reach.
Now, I kept the budget extremely low at $25 because I thought that I could get a lot of my traffic organically.
After setting up the promoted Tweet, I decided to release the Daily CSS Images landing page source code via Codepen. I was a bit nervous of possible critiques, but it helped promote the challenge (thanks to a lot of Twitter interaction) and showed some pure CSS images that were a part of the landing page.
Just when I thought I was going to just sit back and watch for the rest of the weekend, I thought it would be a great idea to write a follow-up to “A Beginner’s Guide to Pure CSS Images” titled “An Intermediate Guide to Pure CSS Images”.
In this article, I wanted to break down a bit more of a complex pure CSS image that would help people along the challenge and be included as a resource in the first email of the sequence. I decided to make the banner image of the Daily CSS Images website as a pure CSS image which I first posted on Codepen and then began writing the post.
I already had the pure CSS image code, so I only had to add an overlay. This also got some good interaction, but the 4 hours of writing a post on it were what really helped the most.
I first published the post on Codepen which was then retweeted by Codepen which gave it some reach. I then copied the markdown and pasted it into Medium and added the guide to the Daily CSS Images publication.
The night ended with 52 more subscribers.
Day 3
I did absolutely no work on Sunday, but because of all the work on the previous day, 53 more subscribers were added to the list.
The Totals
With all the talk of subscribers, I don’t want it to come off as if I’m just trying to tally up subscribers. I genuinely am excited to see people come together to make pure CSS images, have fun, and become better developers.
However, I’m sure people might still be interested in the logistics from a business perspective:
Subscribers from Friday — Sunday: 126
Conversion Rates: 2.6%
Open Rate: 48.5%
Click Through Rate: 23.3%
Unsubscribers: 7
Future
For now, I am going to sit back and watch with Tweetdeck to see how things progress.
I also plan on releasing example code for the beginning challenges and some throughout the challenge in case people get stuck.
I am not currently monetizing this in any way, but am interested in making this a bigger community/platform. I am also considering bringing on additional contributors given my schedule of full-time work and freelancing.
Any feedback is much appreciated!
Cheers,
Mike Mangialardi
