Documenting every failure in my business in the first 14 days (part-2)
Part two of my series. Week 2-4 of building a business from my bedroom. I document every step of my business. Every failure and how I overcome them.
Day-15: My reddit post about my first 14 days got a lot of great responses. 64 comments and 58 shares. Some really clever people made me doubt my strategy and for good reason. They could be right and I could be going about this the wrong way. I need to have a re-think.
What direction should I go in? I got advice from someone who has built a location based social media following. He said the key is to get yourself out there in person and spread the word. At least in the initial stage. There are others who say this is a bad idea as Tinder and Bumble offer a 'Sober' filter. I sign up to Bumble and Tinder to check this out.
I get a notification from Google Ads. It claims I should optimise my campaign by increasing my budget. I click ok. This increases my daily budget from £7.00 to £16.00. That would be £480 a month. I can’t afford that long-term. I’ll keep it for two weeks and then drop it back down. A colleague of mine who does the google ads campaign at the company I work at advised against this. It might be a bad idea but I’ll try it anyway. I post the last 14 days to Substack. It’s a platform for newsletters.
Day-16: My post on Reddit the previous day got a bit of traction. I got 8 subscribers to my newsletter. I go to sleep I put on a podcast and listen to stories of some founders who found success with ‘non-scalable’ marketing in the beginning. A lot of the feedback I’ve got has entered around not knowing my user-base well enough. Where can I find my users? Where do people who are single and sober hang out? I go on Bumble after reading a report that 60% are interested in sober dates. I pay £20 for the upgrade to Bumble premium. I select only 'Sober' people and people who drink 'Rarely'. I explain what my app is about and ask them what they find hard about dating. A few of them like the idea and I get their emails to add to my list. I get 3 sign ups.
Day-17: I try and find events as people have said to turn up in person. Only seems to be a few festivals that aren’t until late summer. The other events seem to only allow women. Will my girlfriend be interested in going? I get a response from someone on Bumble saying It’s mis-leading to match then talk about my app. She’s right. I change my bio to explain I’m building an app for sober people, swipe right if you're interested. This reduces my matches but those that do match are more interested in the idea. Google are starting to advertise non-alcoholic beer brands at me. One of them is Lucky Saint. I’ve tried the beer before and liked it. They have a pub in London. I email them about working together.
At night I listen to a podcast on niche dating apps that Sarah from Bumble recommended. It cites most failures are down to not be able to get enough saturation in the market. The user base needed is too large and costs too much to acquire. The founder of one of the dating apps explains it would cost 10s of millions to market to get the kind of user base needed for most dating apps. His app was also on Shark Tank and other big publications, this worries me a lot. If he has all that press exposure and thousands of people on his app why did it still not work for him? I write a note to look into this the next morning.
Day-18: Can we get around needing a large user base to launch by limiting the amount of swiping? Or taking it out all together?
When getting my morning coffee I see a QR code advertising a neighbourhood political movement. Should I create my own small poster/label? I spend a while thinking about a good hook. I settle on something simple. The word ‘SOBER?’ in capital letters with a QR code under it. It costs me £50.00 exactly for 100 stickers. This would equate to 12 new users via google ads so let’s see how this does in comparison. I embed a tracking code in the QR code so I can see how many people come from it. Where should I put it? Locations where sober people hang out? Where’s that? Can I look up sober events and add it to where they are the day before? I send a message to Shaan of MyFirstMillion podcast on instagram. I want to show him what I’ve been working on. He might find it interesting. I do some research on apps and user-base acquisition.
Day-19: I read an article on indieHackers that links to the book: “Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth”. I order the book. It’s £20. In the meantime, I ask ChatGPT to summarise the main actionable takeaways. I print this off and post it in my office (read bedroom). I divide the 100 stickers in 10 packs of 10 each. I take the dog for a walk and put up the first 10 stickers. I put them near tennis courts and yoga studios.
Day-20: I’m listening to a podcast and hear them talk about writing blog posts and the Hemingway writing app. I will use this going forward to improve my writing. They also mention you should start SEO as soon as possible, as it can take 3-6 months to take effect. Should I start writing some blog posts to the site now? I post to indieHackers about 14 days of failure. I get 2 likes. I post to instagram. I get 4 likes and 0 new followers.
Day-21: Traction (the book I ordered) comes in the mail. I spend my lunch break reading it. My girlfriend's brother recommends I join Trends. It’s a community build by the guys at MyFirstMillion, a podcast I sometimes listen to. I sign up. There is a section called Signals which highlights upcoming trends. It mentions the term sober curious is on the rise. I send an email to the woman who wrote the article. I want to see if her audience might find the app interesting. I also ask her for any advice she might have.
Day-22: I have a meeting with an influencers brand I reached out to the week before. 10 minutes before the internet goes down in the flat. I check Three (my internet provider) and it turns out they’re working on a masts in the area. I buy a sim plan on my phone and connect to the meeting through the phone. Have to balance the phone on my laptop . Very professional set-up. The meeting is to touch base on who I am and what I want to achieve with their influencer. They agree to send me over their rates. I get a response from the email I sent last week about advertising in a newsletter for non-alcoholic drinks brand. They have agreed to my negotiated rate for advertising in their newsletter. I pay the £179.00 invoice. I write them a pitch to include in their newsletter.
Day-23: I speak to Lucy on Bumble. She’s a product manager so I ask her for some ideas. She suggests events for sober people and partnering with event-brite. I love this idea. I read more of Traction (the book I ordered). I decide to try other marketing channels (as the book suggests). I decide on blogs as the book suggests looking in areas other apps are not targeting. I compile a list of blogs to reach out. I want to contact 50. I contact 5 and the internet goes down again. They are working on masts in the area. Again. I go to an internet cafe and send out hand crafted emails to bloggers who write about dating in the UK and London. I send 20, it takes me 2 hours and 10 minutes and costs me £3.80 in coffee.
Day-24: I get an email from Global Dating Insights, a platform I reached out to the day before. They’re interested in writing an article on the app. They ask me if I would be up for talking at a conference they have in London later in the year. This scares me. I’ve never spoken in public before. How many people will be there? I post about my newsletter to Reddit.
Day-25: Internet went down. Will have to do everything from my phone. I realise I’ve not clearly identified the problem yet. Sure I can build a dating app for sober and sober curious people but what would that look like? I don’t want to copy Tinder or Bumble. I look to Reddit to crowd-source the best experience for the user. Which features do people hate most about online dating? I post to three different subreddits. r/tinder, r/bumble and r/onlinedating. I get a lot of interesting responses. I compile them into a spreadsheet, to see which come up most and which are most upvoted.
Day-26: Internet still down. Will have to continue using my phone. Someone messages me on facebook who is part of the Trends group. She gives me helpful advice on how to build a better avatar and user profile to better market my app. I've never heard of the term avatar before.
Day-27: Internet still down. This annoys me quite a lot. There is only so much I can do on my phone. I create 10 more instagram posts in photoshop. Don't need the internet for that.
Day-28: I get an email response from someone I spoke to on instagram. They are creating an online magazine about sobriety. They want to feature a short story on our app. I write a 350 word introduction to the app and send it to them. I post this to Reddit and my Substack newsletter.
I check back at what I’ve achieved in the last two weeks. 93 email subscribers to the app launch, 34 instagram followers, 58 subscribers to my newsletter ’14 days of failure’. Spent £432.80.
If you’ve enjoyed this read I’d like to ask you two things.
1. Please share this with your collegues and anyone else you think might enjoy it.
2. Your advice. Do you think I shoud add some relevant images to some of the sections going forward? Or do you prefer the plain text?
Keep the plain text please :)
I agree on plain text.