What it’s like to bring on a partner when you’re used to working alone.
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Saturday, September 17, 2016
I’ve really never done this.
Before it has always been just me seeing if I could make something happen. Which usually that meant the execution would get there, but not nearly enough to make a difference.
Now, for the first time I have someone else working with me, and being completely transparent it’s the most confident I’ve felt about the longevity of a project than ever before.
The idea for Verbatim came over a series of emails and situations I was presented with that were becoming increasingly common.
- Trying to get a piece of content approved.
- Having a client approve content and then going back on their decision.
- Multiple 50+ email chains over a piece of content that ended up not answering the business objective as every email added a new person into the mix.
I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better way and in the end I realized the real problem businesses need solved is accountability.
At this point, the idea for Verbatim has been iterated and refined for nearly a year, and I’ve gone through a number of development options to see making this into a reality.
I consulted a friends brother who is studying Computer Science in college, friends who are scaling their own start ups: both on their own and who work for others. I looked into remote developers who could spin up an MVP, but then what would I really be left with other than an unstable code base that would have to be re-written anyway, and a few friends who were interested but had other things they were working on.
I then started to learn to code the MVP myself. I looked into Ruby and Meteor and made a number of attempts at putting the architecture together. With Cloud9 I was able to get the basics set up. I copy/pasted so many pieces out of GitHub repos and hacked together my own code to build out an initial stack.
Each time I always got one piece to work, but never tie it all together before something broke. After doing this a handful of times and not getting anywhere that I knew I needed a true technical partner who knew what they were doing.
Nick Dandakis asked me to drinks one night to talk about a side project he was working on and ended up asking me if I had anything myself. Guardedly I told him about verbatim and where I was at with it. The next day he told me he kept thinking about it after we left the night earlier and wanted to be a part of it.
Later that week we hammered out some details as I knew he would be the perfect person to work with and couldn’t be more happy to have him on board.
We’re going to be documenting the process from each of our perspectives while we work on Verbatim. Everything from development to how it’s marketed, pivoted, and adopted by users.
We want this to be a raw account of what truly goes into making a digital product and getting people to use it.
I have a number of documents that pre-date this post which I’ll bring to light over the coming weeks as we detail what informs our decisions. Along with whether or not the assumptions made previously hold up, or if they were completely off base and need to be re-thought.
When it comes to those decisions, it’s going to be incredibly helpful to have someone on board to ask their opinion who is also invested in the project and it’s ultimate outcome. I think it’s going to make all the difference.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Nick has been cruising through the set up over the last day and a half. We’re going for an MVP at this point to get something out there that we can have people test. From there we’ll take their feedback and iterate. But from what I’ve seen in his log so far it’s already looking better than anticipated.
It’s the best when you work with people who make things better than you first imagined.
With all the progress on the tech front, I need to go back and look at what I put together for the marketing plan I developed in the initial pitch deck and appendix. I imagine some of it will stay the same, but there are a few new things I want to try after learning on another project a month ago that didn’t get the traction I was hoping for.
Our user tests will also inform how we market the product, so each of these has to parallel path the development and sprint timeline we’re working against. This still needs to be formally put together, but loosely the idea is for six month Product Milestone phases, broken out into three, two month iteration phases. Which would look something like: two weeks feature development, one week beta roll-out, one week dev tweaks and alpha roll-out, four weeks of user feedback and biz dev. After which the process would start over. This first six month phase is to have a paid offering (October 16' — March 17').
That was a bit of an aside, but should give some context to the marketing channels I want to look at for this.
Looking back at the marketing strategy I initially put together I don’t think any of it will make it through to the initial roll-out. There were some good ideas, and ones that might make sense later on, but they were too high level and not focused enough on specific user growth. Quickly, it was a email referral campaign modeling Harry’s which I no longer think would work for this due to the type of product, an email drip campaign once we had those emails, and outreach to blogs and industry publications.
A few months ago I read the book ‘Traction’ which goes through 19 different marketing channels and how to leverage them to get more users engaged with your product. The philosophy is to pick a few marketing channels which you think will make the most sense and then test to find what sticks and then iterate upon those to increase the growth rate. Implementing that alongside the ‘Lean Start Up’ method and I think we’ll have a strong game plan to move forward.
As we start to push this out there I want to try three different approaches: organic, paid, and strategic. From Traction, I think these three channels will be where we can spend our time most efficiently: Content Marketing, Social and Display Ads, and Business Development.
Organic / Content Marketing
This channel is actually my favorite of the three, and you’re currently experiencing it. With these logs that both Nick and I are writing I think other people in start up, tech, creative development, and business communities will be intrigued to see behind-the-scenes as two people work together to bring something to the public. Currently these are being written as long streams of copy, but I think we’ll parse them out by week and then release them along with a weeks recap Q&A between Nick and I talking about what’s going well, what we want to improve on, and anything we foresee coming up that we should address. I can see it being a bit Forty Days of Dating style giving both the tech and business side of things separately, showing how the different skill sets work and compliment each other.
Paid / Social Media and Display Ads
We have a number of options here. We could run ads on Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. in hopes that people will click through and start utilizing the product. However, before doing that we have to consider the objective of putting money behind an ad, and in this instance it’s to get people to use the product so we can get feedback. For that, we need to target a community that is open to trying new products and providing feedback. Which is why we’re going to put money behind a Featured Listing on BetaList ($129). The thing about BetaList is that your product can’t be public yet, private beta’s are ok, but all you can submit is a splash page with a sign up form. You can also submit to be on BetaList for free but with the paid version you have more control over when it goes up and don’t have to wait the typical month it takes to get featured. For $129, I’d be happy if we get 150 sign ups from people who are interested and likely willing to test the product.
Strategic / Business Development
Of the three, this one will require the most leg work on my end for this to make sense and I’m not totally sure the success we’ll be able to generate at this early stage. Never the less, I think it’s a worthwhile avenue as the intention is to get in front of agencies and content shops / creators who would benefit from using a product like Verbatim to really understand their pain points. The key takeaway then is to perfect the selling narrative and be able to remove as many hesitations in our documentation one may have about using the product.
Viral / Kind of
Noted above about utilizing an email campaign in hopes that it would provide a ‘viral’ growth engine as a marketing channel. I don’t necessarily include this as that, but sharing is built into the product itself through the peer-to-peer nature of the approval system. Therefore, if someone were to send a Verbatim to a recipient who isn’t yet aware of the platform and they find value in it. It may then be likely that they will then use the platform for their own work / business, thus organically expanding the reach of the platform solely through it’s own use. This could be a major channel for us, but not one to rely on.
Monday, September 19, 2016
Have been thinking more on these dev logs were writing and how they’ll live…
Set Up
There’s really no sense in self hosting a blog anymore, so we’re going to go the Medium route due to the built in social and community aspects of the platform. Specifically setting up a publication so both Nick and I can write on our own by-lines and then port things over. Admins and Editors get to proof and edit stories submitted to publications before they go live, so even though it’s the two of us we can cross check our work to make things are good before they’re published.
Setting up a publication is super straightforward on Medium. Two pages: one with details and the second the layout. Shouldn’t take more than five minutes, unless you need to open up photoshop to make the avatar logo you’ve been meaning to for some time now. Going with the capital ‘V’ for the avatar to keep things clean.
Adding Nick as an editor, linking our Twitter, contact email, and five tags for when people search on Medium we’re in relevant stories. Now we’re on to the styling.
@ verbatim is already taken, going to try @ vrbtm. Which works. We’ll probably set up a custom sub-domain on vrbtm.co later on, but for now I don’t have a problem with this.
Content
We already know we’re going to be writing these stream of consciousness logs tracking our progress and that we’ll be publishing weekly. The nice part is that these are freeform and can take on any shape however, they are getting to be quite long so we’ll need to implement a structure. Likely something like this:
- Development Sprints
Long form stream of consciousness tracking the actual development process. - One off process details
These should be a bit more structured with an intention and resolution and can put the spotlight on specific processes we’re implementing. - Q&A’s / Partnership discussions
In order to break up the content types we’ll make these week-in-review discussions between Nick and I audio recordings. I don’t want to say podcast as they will just be the raw conversation we have, but a podcast wouldn’t be a wrong description.
Timing
As I said, weekly feels like a good cadence to get into at this point. As far as what day content goes live, I’m thinking either Tuesdays, Thursdays, or Fridays. I want it to be a part of people’s weeks and something they’ll go to when they have a few extra minutes at work which leads me to thinking Thursday is the best day. We’ll have to test that though. Also need to consider the amount of content: two text posts and an audio post — whether or not those all go live on the same day, or staggered. It could be that the text posts go live on Thursdays and the audio post goes live on the following Tuesday.
That feels nice, but I don’t know how long we’ll sustain that volume. In the beginning though I don’t think it will be a problem.
Need to put together a ‘READ.ME’ article describing the project for anyone who lands on the publication page so they know what they’re getting into as these consciousness posts need an introduction.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Need to switch focus a bit.
Realized there were a few missing pages out of the Invision Mockup that I need to create content for so Nick has something for the remaining pages.
They are the: Contact, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, and the How This Works pages.
The first three being very straightforward at this point, but the How This Works page needs some thinking.
Initially it was going to be a page that were instructions on how the platform worked. However, there are already instructions right next to the upload form, so having a separate page for this no longer made sense. Then I thought it could be a Feature Request or Feedback page, as at this point that is the most important thing we can get from users other than them sharing verbatim with their friends. A page like this makes sense as I wouldn’t expect someone to put the effort into emailing us their feedback.
I ran this by Nick as I could see benefits to both but wanted his opinion. He said that he liked how How It Works sounded, and I completely agree. Which pushed me to the third option I was entertaining which is a page detailing the features of Verbatim along with what’s in the pipeline for our paid offering, which would also be accompanied by a form asking for feedback / feature requests. I feel putting these two things together is strong. One, it gives transparency into our product pipeline and where the platform will go. And two, these features will act as a prompt for the feature request /feedback form as people will either see things there they like, or they don’t and subsequently have a form to provide their opinion.
Opening up photoshop and going to crank this one out. I took care of the contact page this morning, and I’ll draft the T&C’s and Privacy Policy tomorrow.
Obviously this is not anywhere near final design (the icons are too big for my liking, heirarchy is non-existent, etc.), and the features are not solidified, but this shows the layout we could work with. Likely to change, but good enough for now to get something out there.
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Knocked out some legal docs we should have in place: Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, etc. and a few other admin things over the past couple days to get us into the weekend.
Planning for next week to be focused more on setting up some of the initial marketing efforts so they can run parallel with us getting a closed beta / prototype up.
Read the other half of this week with Nicks VRBTM.CO Development Stream | Week I. Then continue onto Initial Marketing| Week II
We’d love to hear from you…
Get in touch at Founders@vrbtm.co, talk with us on twitter @vrbtm.co, and read our story on medium.
Wes Jones is on Twitter @WesJonesCo
Nick Dandakis is on Twitter @Dandakis
