Monthly Tags, Content Marketing Learning, Lessons from Building Features No One Uses— Startup Week 11
This week was about learning and startup lessons. Features you’ve built turns out to be a complete flop. That’s a tough pill to swallow for any startup. This week has been that.
Feature Development: Monthly Tags
This is based on the feedback received from a journalist. He was a recent graduate from Ryerson journalism program who was starting a company. I asked how he does his referencing. And what he said was going back into the history by a month to find what he’s read. That is very outdated. So I added the retrieval tags by months.
Featurewise, it was a simple implementation. But since I received positive feedback from publisher breakdown last time, it might be a valuable feature for some users. It also gives a sense of continuation just like how blog platform adds published counts by month (I believe it’s called archive).
Content Marketing Tip at a Startup School
I went to Ryerson event of content marketing. The speaker was Braveen Kumar from Shopify. It covered from blogging to Redditting. It was so dense in information that I’d like to share some learnings from that time.
- Give ducation, inspiration, entertainment.
- Keep consistency in your account. They follow for what they expect to see. Instead of what to see.
- Compete in creativity with the brand you build in your platform, not in individual content.
- Template: Every ___, I will (provide value) for (audience). The more specific the better. Ex) Every Sunday, I will post a funny poem for people who are tired of micro poetry.
- Think always about distribution before creation.
- Own your channel. If you have large followers in SN, great. Email subscription is perfect.
- Install Keyword Surfer extension to check for search volume and popular topics.
- 300 search volume a month is a decent niche to target for. It’s the bottom of the tunnel. In the early stage startup, start from the bottom funnel. Don’t get fooled by a large search volume.
- Stock all posts in the given week in Later (or Buffer).
- Attention is small. Show exactly what you are.
- Reuse content (ex: slice podcast into tweets).
- Ask yourself “If you stopped tomorrow, how easy would it be for your audience to replace you?”
- Think of starting content marketing as starting a brand new business.
- Focus on sales before building content marketing for early-stage startups (This was his answer to my question about pivoting your content marketing strategy).
The last part is probably the most relevant at the stage of Kaffae now. Even though it is a consumer app and setting a 1–1 meeting with a corporate person doesn’t make sense, it can certainly benefit from talking to gain insights. The better way to think of sales is asking for feedback and gain insights.
PS: I also went to TechTO. That was more a fun event with lots of beer than an information session. The event’s grown much bigger than 5 years when I first went. Kodo!
Suggestion Feature Failure
This was disappointing news for me.
I was analyzing user statistics. In the past 6 months, the goal was to increase usage of the app. But lots of features I added over the past 2 months have been rarely used. Suggestions especially were dead. It’s been a tough moment mentally.
So far, very few people have clicked on the suggestions last week and they are my personal friends.
Favoriting feature wasn’t used either.
I looked back and wondered about the cause. I think I was first influenced by an incubator who suggested the feature even though he was not the target user. I don’t mean to blame on someone else, but when you are desperate for getting feedback, you will listen to whatever that comes. It’s the theme that constantly comes up in Y Combinator that you should listen to the customer’s problems, not their feature suggestions.
My main takeaway is don’t build a feature that takes more than 2 weeks. I wasn’t a fan of this concept looking at how rockets are being built — through careful planning. But 2 weeks is practical advice given the limited resource I have — 1 man shop with a very tight budget. It naturally puts a constraint on what kind of business you can build.
One thing that’s worth mentioning is a video by David Rusenko at Startup School. He said it may take 20 feature-build-trials until you build something people find useful. Even if I failed in article suggestions and favoriting, that’s just 2 feature experiments that failed. There are 18 more to go.
We just need to keep a head-up high.
Oh well, I need a beer tonight to replenish my motivation.
