Nothing happens overnight, unless it’s what you don’t want.
Not sure what this is, start here with our README, or catch up on last week, Initial Marketing | Week II.
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Showed up at Nicks place after taking two wrong trains into Brooklyn, and we both jumped right in. We’ll talk about what he’s working on later, I’m going to let him run with it for now. Never interrupt the flow.
We’re two weeks out from our October 16, prototype date and we need to start getting users who will test it once deployed. All we’ve had is this splash page which I’ve showed to a few friends and a few sign ups have trickled in from people we know. Need to make a push at getting more people onboard up front. Which is where some of our paid marketing is going to come into play.
From everything that I’ve read BetaList is the best place to get initial user sign ups before you have a live product. We’re going to pay for the startup listing due to our timeline. For $129 I’m hoping we can get 100 email sign ups. Which would give us a good base to test the prototype with as we further develop the MVP.
There are a number of other sites similar to BetaList that don’t make you pay to be listed. These have less control about when the listing goes up, and those sites do bring less traffic but as you can repurpose the description for BetaList so it makes sense to do those as well.
This list is made up of others that I’ve found online that still have validity:
http://Betapage.co
http://Betabound.com
http://Launchingnext.com
http://launching.io
http://Killerstartups.com
http://Launchlister.com ($39 for one day, $99 for three)
Another channel to use is Reddit and Quora — each would take more involvement from our side, but there are actively engaged people on both of those platforms. One hesitation is that I’m not much of a redditor and they take your reputation on the site pretty seriously. Meaning it’d be a bad move to just show up peddling our wares.
Here’s the five part draft getting to the final write up for BetaList:
Verbatim is a content approval platform that streamlines the review, feedback, and approval process. Each approval is legally binding and managed in a secure dashboard. Once you send content verbatim, you and your client are notified instantly any action is taken. Ultimately saving you time and making both sides accountable for any changes to the deliverables.
Nick pulled me in as he set up the email notifications, and we were able to fire off the first one. So exciting to see things working. Nothing was in the body of the email other than a TODO for me.
We’re using SendGrid to manage our emails and they make it really easy to style the templates which I’m going to do while Nick continues connecting everything else. Personally I’m happy to be jumping back into some production work as much of that’s been on Nick the past couple weeks as I develop the roll-out plan. I don’t think he thinks this, but it feels that Nick’s doing more work than I am and that I need to step it up. As we go forward however, I expect everything will even out as once there’s a prototype/MVP it’s my job to get people using it.
Eight email templates out of the way, and things are starting to look like a real thing.
Nick and I went through all that we’ve done against our timeline and we’re ahead of schedule. Which is going to give us a few extra days to put some added polish on everything before we release the prototype. We discussed if our prototype will be public or private, and while most prototypes are private we’re going to make ours public. This was decided due to the nature of the platform and that the only way it’s used is by sharing content (verbatims) to other people.
Monday, October 3, 2016
Nothing happens overnight. Well, nothing good anyway. Heading into the week expecting a number of beta list sign ups only to wake up to this first thing today is not what I was anticipating.
Even though we got the language right, and what I thought was a refined design — essentially only typography to let the message (and ultimately the content) speak for itself, it doesn’t hold up to the community this would be reaching. Understandable enough, though not without disappointment. People want to see something tangible with personality and emotion.
BetaList let’s you resubmit once after you’re denied so back to the drawing board on this one. Need to do a deep dive on landing pages to get someting that is more universal and status quo.
Read the other half of this week with Nicks VRBTM.CO Development Stream | Week III.
We’d love to hear from you…
Get in touch at Founders@vrbtm.co, talk with us on twitter @vrbtmco, and read our story on medium.
Wes Jones is on Twitter @WesJonesCo
Nick Dandakis is on Twitter @Dandakis
