Learning From a Failed Launch - Founders Update #20

Well that happened.

We made a launch post on Hacker News and it promptly slid off the "new" page without generating any comments or traffic 😅

Bit of a let down after the crunch to get it all ready, but (cliche alert!)  reflecting on it at the end of the week, it's actually turned out to be a really good thing for us...

Post Mortem

The morning after the fizzle, Joel and I had a really deep postmortem and ended up with a bunch of learnings:

• We can't rely on luck - for future posts we need to be better prepared, for example having a few folks aware in advance that we're going to post
• We need a proper plan - we both agreed we'd need a sustained marketing campaign, rather than relying one offs and hoping for the best
• We need to offer more value - to get readers to engage we need to offer them something useful, rather than "here's our new service, come visit our website"
• We should think outside the box - explore what marketing side projects (micro-development) could help us generate traffic  ie- standalone micro development projects
• We need to shift our time to focus on this - we agreed to target at lest 50% on marketing and 50% on the rest (coaching and product development)

The Plan

Then we drafted a calendar of planned activities for the next 6-8 weeks.  Basically we're going to try 3 approaches first-

1. Interesting content posts that are catchy and useful, as an indirect way to gain some awareness about us and what we're working on.  For example Joel's planning one about what he learned from time-tracking 23 out of 24 hours of each day in the last 12 months.
2. Marketing side projects that offer something for free and are related to our field.  For example micro apps related to procrastination or goalsetting.  We brainstormed and came up with several we think might have potential...
3. Aim to start a blog and/or podcast interviewing highly productive founders and doers, to learn and share their experiences...also hopefully as a good way to get our name out through the startup community.

Feeling pretty excited to jump in to these...the week ended up much better than it started 😺

Simon & Joel
Co-founders, GoalsWon