How makers stay productive

I'm doing a month of non-stop growth, since Automations.io went live last month after reaching $6k MRR in 10 months of private beta.

You can find original day #1 post here.

It's my 2nd update and will cover previous 3 days.

# Product Video (done ✅)

Yesterday I realised, I now loathe doing product tour videos.

It took me almost 2 days to record the new 5min landing page video, and I hated every minute of it. I had to record it in chunks, stitch it, try different apps, fix audio issues, and it's still meh (there are even some goofs there).

However, it's better than nothing!

I went through so many rookie mistakes and pain, I think this experience deserves a separate blog post on how to record product tour videos to avoid anyone else going through this suffering. I'll write it down and mention it in the future.

👇 Product Tour Video

# Start personally emailing all historic leads (in progress⏳)

Ok, so we're using Close.com CRM (no affiliation, but Steli Efti behind this is a rockstar and had interviews at IndieHackers. I highly recommend everyone to watch his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55z5yl_naco)

I was doing some housekeeping with leads - we have a Mailchimp list from our old landing page, plus newer leads in Close.com. So historically, we have:

• 43 emails in pre-beta Mailchimp list
• 46 leads in CMR who requested a demo during beta leaving their email AND NOT booked a call
• 19 Leads in CRM who requested a demo during beta leaving their email AND booked a call (our beta signup flow was -> leave email -> get presented with Calendly schedule to book a 15 min call)

I have already emailed 8 leads that previously booked a call (some of them I previously already spoke with, some didn't show up on the call).

Had 1 reply and had a call with them already. I'd say they're a serious "business/enterprise" level customer, so it's a more hands-on approach and we'll be catching up again next week.

Other 7 will be followed up :)

I'll also be personally emailing the rest from Mailchimp list and others already in the CRM.

8 emails sent is nowhere near where I need to be. This was done on the first day and no new emails were sent for 3 days. Thankfully the time-sink that was product tour video is now done and these outbound email numbers need to go up.

# Get back into being pro-active on LinkedIn (in progress⏳)

Already posted the new video on LinkedIn, and as you can see it's getting some exposure via likes and a comment already with a person interested in it.

I'll also be re-posting this tomorrow or early next week from personal account for more exposure. (company page updates normally have less organic exposure on LinkedIn compared to personal updates)

# Get a blog up and running (not started ❌ )

It's still my goal to complete this week, but haven't started it yet.

# Others things done in this period

• I'll be emailing a lot, hence I've added DMARC DNS entry, to improve email delivery rates and avoid hitting spam. Check your own domain with Google's Check MX tool
• Posted on reddit.com/r/SaaS story about reaching $6k MRR in private beta. Probably should've posted this AFTER putting a product tour video on the landing page. Got some traffic to the site from this post, 0 signups. However, I don't really expect any customers from there, since it's not our target market. I'm doing this to share the story and experience. Received some personal messages on reddit asking about how you pitch to people you used to work with.
• Created a new YouTube channel and posted the video to our Facebook page

# Questions/Requests From Readers

@bethkcarter asked 2 questions:

> How and when you decide a growth experiment is 'finished' and to call the results

It's a good question, but I don't believe I can answer this unfortunately. I don't think we'll be doing "growth experiments" as such during these 28 days. I'd say my focus is what I believe are more proven and direct methods - cold outbound (e.g. LinkedIn for B2B), speaking with groups/people whose problems we can solve, writing and sharing valuable content, driving traffic.

Sorry, hope this answer helps!

> How you choose to prioritise down from the 394876 different things you could be doing to pick what you focus on each day/week.

I'm forcing myself to stop working and the product and focus on tasks that can have the biggest impact to new customers and MRR. (hence these 28 days of "non-stop growth")

You reminded me of a screenshot I took from a Y Combinator video (I'll try to find the original video for next update)

TLDR of this, as an early stage startup, focus on most impactful tasks. E.g. finding 10 people and doing a demo of your product will have much higher impact to your business compared to updating some text on your site, refactoring your code or "coding for big feature X" that none of your customers asked for.

@ConsoleFreak asked:

> You have specific tasks to complete, but do you have any specific targets you'd like to hit by the end of this month of growth (e.g. X additional Twitter followers, increase conversions by 0.5%, etc.)?

I'm not setting a target right now, reason being, we just came out of private beta, we don't have any existing conversions to compare to. I'd say what we're doing right now is (ignoring private beta numbers) - we just launched, let's go on a 1 month journey of trying to get this off the ground and acquire paying customers and grow MRR as much as possible.

(This was my original answer ☝️)

Now thinking about it, I need to set a target. I'm thinking about:

Acquire 10 unaffiliated customers

I think this is achievable. What do you think?

This target is inspired by what Jason Lemkin said - "If You Have 10 {Unaffiliated} Customers in SaaS — You Have Something"

# The End

I'll be posting daily updates on Twitter and bigger updates every few days here.

Is there anything you want me to share or keep track of in daily updates?

Thanks for reading!