I only play games on the hardest difficulty.
I prefer games that punish me brutally when I lose. I always check iron/hardcore mode.
I started on arch linux btw.
For my tech stack, I went with pure IaC on AWS. I can redeploy my entire production architecture anywhere in the world withe a few strokes on my split keyboard from my headless desktop workstation.
I just didn't make since to focus on trivial marketing or idea validation stuff, that even monke do. I await the product was fire.
Goes live... the product not instantly validated.
... What do you it takes work to VALIDATE MY IDEA. These peasants should be throwing their money at me!
... I am really tired guys. I hope someone smiled.
I'm actually taking this more seriously and iterating on what I'm learning; just taking the L today. I was really hoping to get ONE paid customer today but nope, oh well! I did get some feedback on price, which is great.
---
For the real post:
Q: When do you give up? Once you hit that deadline, how do you determine what is "validated" or not "validated" ?
I got my MVP up last week, which felt great. But moving onto validation has been draining.
It's been a whole week of writing sales copy, two versions of longform copy which I didn't properly split test, changing (simplifying) my funnel, trying different versions of stuff, making ads, running ads, testing ads, changing my user registration flow (to something more simple).
Really just trying to just get one conversion...but not ONE yet. I did give away a couple of trials, and I have gotten some conversations/emails with people, so at-least people have used the app and I'm getting some data there and I am talking to people about it. But ouch, this is a lot of work.
I feel like a proper newbie again.
I got some good feedback from my ads today though, there was some pushback comments about the price. "You had me until the price.... yikes", "Cool Platform but not for $34.99". This is good progress!
I ran another campaign with a new price/offer but it wasn't peak traffic anymore and I'm getting close to my ad budget so I'm calling it for the day.
I've got a deadline for Feburary.
So I guess validated for me, today, is if I can get 10 sales at$19.99 $4.99. Otherwise, it's not validated.
How am I going to try to get those?
I blew through my $100 (+$200 welcome) reddit ads. . . I really don't want to spend anymore. As much as I really don't want to do cold outreach; but that's likely going to be the next step.
I had a small victory -- I'm happy with my average CTR of ~0.45%. ( ) Though I realize in isolation that metric isn't particularly useful, since you could technically have a really low CTR with really high conversions. but, it's all I can measure rn and at-least my ads arent entirely abysmal and people are getting to see the page.
Uggh... This is hard. Forreal. I thought the 3 months of learning AWS/terraform was hard. It was trivial compared this!
I'm really not ready to thrown down $500 for google ads to get their intro offer (+$500). I'm okay with another $100-$250 though so some recommendations would be alright.
Q: Anyone happy with Linkedin Sales navigator?
... I realize the answer is likely to just to go find (I don't have to find, I have a list) of communities and people (I also have a list) to message and try to start a conversation about the problem (with no mention of my solution... ). Idk why I have such a hard time with this... I don't really. It's just exhausting I guess...
It's not like I'm not doing it... it's just exhausting. I have a few conversations going but I haven't mentioned that I have a product that solves their problem yet. Idk I guess I'm just irrationally scared.
Obviously, just talk to people. It's funny because every single night the last week I've reflected and had the same realization, "Oh yeah, that's obvious" and I am doing it again after writing this post.
... Anyway, I'll probably tune some obscure feature on my product tomorrow instead. gn guys.
I prefer games that punish me brutally when I lose. I always check iron/hardcore mode.
I started on arch linux btw.
For my tech stack, I went with pure IaC on AWS. I can redeploy my entire production architecture anywhere in the world withe a few strokes on my split keyboard from my headless desktop workstation.
I just didn't make since to focus on trivial marketing or idea validation stuff, that even monke do. I await the product was fire.
Goes live... the product not instantly validated.
... What do you it takes work to VALIDATE MY IDEA. These peasants should be throwing their money at me!
... I am really tired guys. I hope someone smiled.
I'm actually taking this more seriously and iterating on what I'm learning; just taking the L today. I was really hoping to get ONE paid customer today but nope, oh well! I did get some feedback on price, which is great.
---
For the real post:
Q: When do you give up? Once you hit that deadline, how do you determine what is "validated" or not "validated" ?
I got my MVP up last week, which felt great. But moving onto validation has been draining.
It's been a whole week of writing sales copy, two versions of longform copy which I didn't properly split test, changing (simplifying) my funnel, trying different versions of stuff, making ads, running ads, testing ads, changing my user registration flow (to something more simple).
Really just trying to just get one conversion...but not ONE yet. I did give away a couple of trials, and I have gotten some conversations/emails with people, so at-least people have used the app and I'm getting some data there and I am talking to people about it. But ouch, this is a lot of work.
I feel like a proper newbie again.
I got some good feedback from my ads today though, there was some pushback comments about the price. "You had me until the price.... yikes", "Cool Platform but not for $34.99". This is good progress!
I ran another campaign with a new price/offer but it wasn't peak traffic anymore and I'm getting close to my ad budget so I'm calling it for the day.
I've got a deadline for Feburary.
So I guess validated for me, today, is if I can get 10 sales at
How am I going to try to get those?
I blew through my $100 (+$200 welcome) reddit ads. . . I really don't want to spend anymore. As much as I really don't want to do cold outreach; but that's likely going to be the next step.
I had a small victory -- I'm happy with my average CTR of ~0.45%. ( ) Though I realize in isolation that metric isn't particularly useful, since you could technically have a really low CTR with really high conversions. but, it's all I can measure rn and at-least my ads arent entirely abysmal and people are getting to see the page.
Uggh... This is hard. Forreal. I thought the 3 months of learning AWS/terraform was hard. It was trivial compared this!
I'm really not ready to thrown down $500 for google ads to get their intro offer (+$500). I'm okay with another $100-$250 though so some recommendations would be alright.
Q: Anyone happy with Linkedin Sales navigator?
... I realize the answer is likely to just to go find (I don't have to find, I have a list) of communities and people (I also have a list) to message and try to start a conversation about the problem (with no mention of my solution... ). Idk why I have such a hard time with this... I don't really. It's just exhausting I guess...
It's not like I'm not doing it... it's just exhausting. I have a few conversations going but I haven't mentioned that I have a product that solves their problem yet. Idk I guess I'm just irrationally scared.
Obviously, just talk to people. It's funny because every single night the last week I've reflected and had the same realization, "Oh yeah, that's obvious" and I am doing it again after writing this post.
... Anyway, I'll probably tune some obscure feature on my product tomorrow instead. gn guys.
I built it because I experienced this exact same pain and felt there had to be a better way to approach this stage of a startup. Like you said, take tomorrow to tune some obscure feature haha (this honestly helps when you need a mental break) and get back at it in next day. You got this dude