Change, Evolution, Announcements, and Updates
It's been a really busy 2 weeks. Here's what's coming.
Ok, so first of all, I’ve made the decision to turn this back into a free newsletter. The idea of a paid newsletter was interesting, but it didn’t end up working out the way I thought it would. So making it free simplifies some things for me, which gives me some capacity to pick up other things. I just ended up comping everyone who subscribed and didn’t pick up any paid subscribers. But I do enjoy writing this newsletter, so making it free will just lead to more people reading it! (At least, I hope so… :) )
The overall goal of this newsletter does remain though: my goal is to make it to the point where I can launch a new microsaas every week.
Week(s) in Review
I did end up launching something 2 weekends ago that ended up being more impactful than I thought. But it’s not quite a SaaS. It’s the Build In Public Toolkit. And it’s really just a landing page and an email sequence on ConvertKit. I do plan on offering some of the tools I’m planning on building to subscribers, but I realized something interesting: I could help people who wanted to build in public by giving them a way to share the stuff that makes them unique. One of the things I’ve seen is that there is too much cookie-cutter crap being shared, content-wise. Someone is successful, so others copy their methods or what they’ve done and simply become a clone. At best, they slightly differentiate themselves. Now, it’s definitely possible to find success that way. And a lot of success.
But I don’t like it. I think it’s terribly inefficient, we’re flooding the internet with stuff that doesn’t matter, and it muddies the water for everyone trying to learn. So I put together a series of 4 prompts that people can use to tap into the pieces that make them unique: their story, their experiences, their networks. Then I answered them in the emails that I set up for the sequence.
And I was amazed. By answering the prompts, I was able to tap into my story on a deeper level. Even for things I’ve previously shared quite a bit, I realized there were parts of the story I avoided telling. I didn’t really share some of the deeper feelings that I experienced when I was at my lowest points.
Then this week hit hard. I struggled a bit with the code I was working on for my day job. I ran into some issues with the library that I was dealing with tweeted a couple of things in frustration. And one of those frustrated tweets was of course my best performing tweet in a long time, engagement- and impression-wise. Go figure.
But as usual, in terms of audience and relationship building, it did nothing. But by the end of the week, I was starting to pick up some momentum. Then I had a couple of interviews for podcasts, one for someone else’s podcast and one for mine. And a coffee chat and strategy meeting with a couple of friends/creators. All within about 5 hours, because I’m really bad at scheduling things and somehow everything ends up on the same day.
But those conversations really sparked some ideas and on Friday, I decided to just launch something else:
Initially, I was going to just make it a course. But then I started talking to other creators, and I think it’s going to be more than that. It’s going to be a full-fledged university. But it’s an online university. There aren’t semesters or a campus, there aren’t courses (as such). It’s more a community that has seminars with various ways to get access to professors. Still working on the details now, but it’s an idea that has a lot of buy-in from a number of people and could end up being the launchpad I need for a number of initiatives that are coming down the line.
Sign up for the Build In Public University Waitlist here.
Ok, so back to the SaaS stuff.
Ok, so all that was written at the beginning of the week and then SaaS stuff started taking off for me. I started the week by tweeting out a test of the Who Should I Unfollow app:
It attracted a good bit of buzz for several days and had people responding to it. I ended up setting a process to watch it and for every response from someone who hadn’t previously responded, ran the analysis of their account and sent a tweet at them telling them how many dormant accounts they followed.
This had a really interesting effect. People would see my tweets to people and ask what it meant. Then I told them to respond to the original tweet, they would do so, and then a little bit later they would get a notification. It was a 90% automated marketing effort. I’m also planning on capitalizing by using those who responded (and the folks who responded to an earlier test of that automated response system) as beta testers.
This should give me a total of about 50 beta testers, and I’m planning on giving them invite codes that they can share with 4 other people. The goal here is to build a decent start to a mailing list and get users. I didn’t do a good job of that when I started out with Feather so I’m making a slight change to the way I’m doing that now.
I also joined a contest to get 100 paying users in 100 days:
It doesn’t kick off for a few days yet, so I’m going to work on building up some momentum that I can use at the beginning of the contest. Then within the first week or two, I’ll do a Product Hunt launch, which might actually be a bit more successful this time. It’s a Twitter app, people seem interested in it, it’s cheap, and I’ll be able to send out marketing emails to 50-250 people (hopefully) to help boost it on there.
Something You Might Be Interested In
There’s something else I wanted to tell you about. Twitter is having a hackathon/development contest leading up to their Chirp conference in November. If you’ve got an idea that you want to build, I’m happy to offer feedback/advice/whatever you need! I might submit a project, I’ve just got to figure out one that fits their categories they’ve set up.
If you’ve got ideas for things you want to see, but don’t want to build them, feel free to share the idea! You might get a bonus if I win by building something you suggest. :)
If you’re interested in a beta code, let me know, and I’ll send you one! Not super easy to send out individual codes to a Substack, but happy to send you one if you request it.
Until next time, keep building!
~Leo