Weeknotes vol. 2: In the rabbit holes we find marketing goals
I remember when I started seeing weeknotes pop up and thought they were silly, but the accountability alone is worth it. This week I found myself writing out big things I needed to do (not saying that I did them) for the sheer fact that I had to put them on the internet in five days’ time.
- Complete subscription system
- Deep dive on what to do with a thought once you capture it ✔
- Make some headway with the app’s marketing website ✔
- Plan for a good first year (pre- and post-launch) ✔
As we (earthlings) get older, the weeks fly. My wife and I have five kids (with one on the way) and at dinner the other night our nine-year-old was saying how quickly the year is going by. We took out a piece of paper and explained how a year is 25% of our four-year-old’s time on earth, about 10% of his, about 2% of mine, and as those percentages get smaller, the perception of time gets exponentially faster. Their eyes widened!
One of our main areas of focus right now is the marketing website for the app. Designing the details of the marketing website—figuring out the most important use-cases and features—brings major clarity to what we do and do not need to focus on for the app itself. In my experience, when I jump in and start prototyping, I can end up with a bunch of siloed features that may or may not be great. But with the “marketing website first approach”, I can see the main thing that we need to build our features around.
I’m not saying that jumping in and building is wrong. I actually like doing that, whether it’s efficient or not. Who’s to say that’s not how I landed on the thing? But once you get to a certain point, jumping into the marketing website really does clear things up.
So far I have made four working prototypes of the app itself, and once we finish up this marketing website we’ll head into the design and development of the fifth and final. Without the first four we wouldn’t have the raw materials to help us make decisions for number five.
The whole process of creating is funny: you start with this one or two-sentence idea, then go down a bunch of rabbit holes related to that idea. Each of those things could have this feature and that feature, but eventually you realize all these different elements have different weights and priorities to them. Some start dropping off. THEN, you arrive at the one group of features that’s important and begin seeing exactly what would elevate this thing to be what you originally set out to create.
We’re somewhere on the back half of that process, at least for version one.
Other little items that popped up this week:
- Learned a lot about which bots to (and not to) block from trolling our website while getting through some technical SEO issues I found in SEMrush.
- Made a LinkedIn page for Better than good, primarily so I could update the experience section on my personal profile (I know, gross!)
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