Documenting every failure in my business in the first 14 days

Day by day...

Day-1: Created a simple landing page. I want to validate my app. I start a google ads campaign. I share it with my friends. After a few hours I get 20 new sign-ups. I think this is great and my google ads must be working. Turns out they have not even started. It’s actually because someone shared my app on Reddit and it gained some traction. Go to check the post and it’s been deleted by the moderators. Once it’s been deleted I get 2 more sign ups for the rest of the day.

Day: 2: Start an Instagram page to try drive traffic to the sign up page. I think of how I can bring value to people in my niche. The niche is sobriety/sober dating. Each day I’ll post something with some info about how sobriety can positively affect your neurology. If this does not work I at least get to read about something I’m interested in. I get ChatGPT to find me quotes from studies for the posts and I use photoshop to make the posts a bit more visually appealing. I get 3 likes on my first post.

Day-3: I start following and interacting with people in my niche. I follow around 300 interesting accounts related to sobriety and dating. I start interacting with the community. I post another photo. This time 5 likes. Hmm.

Day-4: I notice some people are using the term sober curious. Can I build a tool to help people that are sober curious make the push to go sober? I start building an AI tool that helps calculate how much money they can save if they quit. It’s not just the amount of alcohol but also all the things that go with that, takeaways, taxis, headache tablets etc. Takes me till the end of the day to build this. I push it out to my instagram which now has 60 followers. 3 people click the link.

Day-5: Decide to post the tool to LinkedIn. I get three likes and 0 shares.

Day-6: I’m not happy with the lack of traction my instagram posts are getting. Maybe I should pay for some advertising? I set up the add on the web version of instagram and go through to the payment section. “Cannot process payment”. Weird. Maybe there’s no money on my card? I try a different card and same issue. Try girlfriends card and same issue. Ok will try on my phone not on the web version. On the phone I try to pay and it declines the payment and immediately says: “Account restricted”. It says appeal restriction so I click to appeal the restriction. When I submit the form it says “Your request couldn’t be processed”. Nice. It keeps doing this so I decide to sort this later.

Day-7: I decide to keep ignoring the instagram issue for now. I look back at my email subscriber amount and there have been no new sign ups for the last few days. Hmm. I was getting a steady two or three. I then get a message from someone at work who tells me the email sign up form on my site is broken. That must be it. I look back at the code I pushed. I see the bug was introduced when I added the AI savings calculator two days ago. I wonder how many sign ups I lost? It takes me 25 minutes to track down the bug, I find it and push a fix. I feel embarrassed. I have 4 years of experience as a software engineer, I shouldn’t have missed something so simple. I learn two important technical lessons. 1. If your API calls could make you money back up the logs with something like Datadog so you keep the data of the user who was trying to do something. 2. If it could cost you money if it breaks write a test for it, no matter how simple you think it is.

Day-8: I decide to reach out to some press to see if I can get any traction for my savings calculator. I use ChatGPT to find what it thinks are relevant publications. It comes back with some pretty bad ideas. Including a furniture company. I decide to compile my own list of about 100 emails, from general newspapers to money saving and tech. I start crafting emails to the editors of each paper. It takes me about 4 hours to send out around 45 emails.

Day-9: I half expect to wake up to an email from one of them, but nothing. I reached out to an around 7 people with large followings in the sober space over the last week. None of them have responded either. I decide to start building some images for my instagram. I download photoshop which has a free 7 day trial. I use the brand colours of my website for some brand consistency and create some neurologically based snippets with citations with the help of chatGPT.

Day-10: I sign up to 10 facebook groups relating to sobriety. Think about creating my own group. Dating for sober peeps? There don’t seem to be any pages for that? I post twice in existing groups. First post asking about dating in the sober world and the second I post an image I get from my instagram. It’s just a purple background with some white text that highlights the benefits of quitting drinking after 30 days. I get a lot of likes on this post, as it seems like this group (42k members) has mostly people trying to quit, a lot of them are stuck at the first step so short little visual messages like this seem to motivate them. I read some comments about how it’s helped motivate a few users to stay on track for their health and I feel a warm feeling of happiness.

Day-11: A sober drinks company reach out to me on instagram. They want £1000 for outreach on their email list of 22,000 and social media. I do some maths and calculate what google ads are currently charging me so I reach back out to them and explain I’m willing to pay for fewer ads at a cost of 0.30 per click, working out to £175 for a single email if they say yes.

Day-12: Listened to a podcast the day before where the podcaster was interviewing someone about Pinterest. I wonder if this could be good for the kind of posts I post on instagram. Can I crosspost? Or is it a waste of time? To diverse having instagram and Pinterest and Facebook? Would be spreading myself too thin. I get one new subscriber today.

Day-13: I receive an email from someone I reached out to. It’s from an agency that represents them. An ‘influencer’ agency. I’m 31 but finding out there are influencer agencies makes me feel old for some reason.

Day-14: I have a meeting with a YouTube content creator with a small following. She also does one to one coaching with people trying to quit. Would be interesting to see if she has any ideas on how to better reach out to the sober community. I post my AI tool to Hacker-news. Should I post this somewhere? Would it help people? I guess if this business is successful then it might help people to look back at each step. I post this to reddit. I get some interesting responses that make me think quite a bit. Is this the right direction to go in terms of an app? Is there actually a market for sober dating? Can people not just use that part of bumble?

I check back at what I’ve achieved in the first two weeks. 44 Mailchimp subscribers to the app launch, 84 instagram followers. Spent £54 in total.