/u/duckyfuzz Startup Diary Days 1 to 13

[mandymum]

13 days ago I made a post on Reddit asking if people would pay me $30/month to source content for them and drip-publish it to their social media channels. I decided to move ahead with the idea and see if I could make anything out of it.

So far, the progress looks something like this (Keep in mind that I have clients to work for too so it takes a bit longer than it would if I could work on it full time):

Days 1 (Nov 27th) and 2

Reddit customer development (mentioned above) and planning in a Google Doc.

Most of my planning revolved around

1. coming up with a way to test the idea while doing as little coding as possible,
2. coming up with ways I can market the thing.
3. figuring out who the competitors and ecosystem players are.

I finally settled on starting with an app which doesn't actually post any content for you. Instead, it sends you a daily email with a list of suggestions of articles and news that you should share that day.

This lets me encourage people to use Buffer to actually share the content rather than having to build the sharing infrastructure myself.

Day 4 (Nov 30th) to Day 9 (Dec 5th)

Coding the website pretty hard.

Day 5 (Dec 1st)

Register the domain name and a bunch of social accounts (I wouldn't usually bother doing this so early but this is a social media related project so I think it is warranted).

Day 6

Set up hosting etc. I can sign up to the website myself and it starts searching the web for stuff for me to share.

Day 7 (Dec 3rd)

I get my first automated email from the site with sharing suggestions to help market the site itself. Looks ok but obviously needs a lot of improvement.

Day 8 (Dec 4th) to Day 10 (Dec 6th)

More coding to improve relevancy and sorting (I attempt to figure out which suggestions have the best chance of appealing to your audience and being retweeted etc.) of the sharing suggestions.

Also added a controlled sign up flow. At the moment, each new user who signs up requires about 2 hours of manual work from me. Eventually this will be automated but I'm resistant to the idea of coding that now.

Day 11

First user who isn't me signs up. It's a Redditor who was rather enthusiastic in the original customer development posts I made in Reddit. We had stayed in touch via Reddit and email as I was building the initial website.

Day 12 to Day 13 (Dec 10th)

Work on marketing message, home page copy and styling. This takes me a quite a long time because it's not my area of expertise. Pretty happy with what I ended up with.

I think it:

1. describes what the product is,
2. gets across why you need my product and the benefits it will bring,
3. looks decent,
4. facilitates sign ups.

I'm hoping I can keep updating my progress in /r/Entrepreneur. Would love to hear any comments from you guys about what I have done so far.

High on my list of priorities right now are:

1. directly contact a bunch of people who might be interested in this product and ask them for feedback (this comes under the marketing umbrella).
2. writing code so I can charge users. I want to make sure that people will actually pay to use this so I need some way to charge people.
3. check in with the one user I have to see if it is providing value for him

EDIT: I'm getting a lot of messages about this now. Not sure if I can respond to them all. If you're interested in getting early access to this service, stick your email on the list here: http://shareshaper.com

I'll get you in as soon as I can (it takes me an hour or two to sign up each person so you'll have to be patient).

EDIT EDIT: Get the second instalment of this diary here

 

[lee220187]

@mandymum This is really cool and I'm extremely interested in following your progress.

How many times per week do you plan on posting for a paying client?

I was just imagining a tiered pricing layout such that you would post more content for higher paying clients, but I'm not sure if this is the correct route to go. I think your service here is more concerned with quality rather than quantity to a certain degree.

EDIT: Also, have you debated making your own sub kind of like /@spiderkiller007 did with /r/EntrepreneurRideAlong ? Not sure if this is the preferred thing to do or not...

 

[mandymum]

@lee220187 The amount of posts somewhat depends on the type of content that a particular user is interested in. It's proving easy to get 15 high quality articles related to Social Media each day (for me to share on the ShareShaper social accounts). It's probably going to be harder to find that much quality content for a more niche industry.

Some really successful Twitter accounts post very regularly. I don't think there would be a problem posting up to once an hour. More than that and it might get a bit overwhelming.

The secret I think will be the quality. Both the quality of the links that I'm suggesting to share and the context that they are shared in (hashtags, tweet text, attached images etc.) I'm working on a number of ideas to make sure that I'm surfacing the best links and the best contextual info for them.

To start with, I think the deal will simply be one email of up to 15 links per day for $30/month. I'll see how it goes after that.

 

[lee220187]

@mandymum Have you contemplated raising the subscription price? It just sounds low for that much content daily.

 

[mandymum]

@lee220187 That sounds like one of them good problems!

It's just an initial guess. If I can get the quality high and the feedback is good then the price will be higher obviously.

Unless you're confused slightly? I'm not actually writing the content, I'm just finding content that other people publish.

 

[lee220187]

@mandymum No, no - I understand what you're doing. I've just seen and talked to a few others who post for clients on various social media outlets and they charge up to 3x what you are charging on a weekly basis. But, then again these people do more of a "social media management" service which may entail more in-depth work than what you would be performing.

I just don't want to see you get a ton of people on board and then you realize you are way undercharging.

I do truly see the benefit and demand for a service like this.

 

[mandymum]

@lee220187 Yeah those people are probably providing a more bespoke media management service than I am. That said, it will be interesting to see how high I can get the relevancy and quality of the articles I'm suggesting. Perhaps I can get close to the quality of a professional human, not sure yet.

I'll keep your tips on the pricing in mind. Glad you like the idea.

 

[lee220187]

@mandymum Awesome. Best of luck and definitely keep us posted.

 

[toastylife]

@lee220187 I think you're on the right track with the reference to "social media management." What /@mandymum is describing is more in the vein of content curation or content management.

Those who charge larger sums are probably also willing to respond to questions/concerns from followers via mentions, share directly with targeted accounts with the hopes of getting favorites/retweets, or using a service like Tweetdeck to seek out folks who could benefit from the product/service and contact them. That's a much more hands-on approach that would warrant the additional costs.

 

[mandymum]

@toastylife Yep. This is my thinking too.

 

[spiderkiller007]

@mandymum I like the idea. Would be cool to have a preview of the type of content that would good out, but you might be on to something. Maybe a stream of content that people could see before hand, and then deselect anything they don't like. That might be gold!

 

[mandymum]

@spiderkiller007 At the moment you get one email of suggestions per day and you choose what actually gets shared (this is made easier for people with multiple accounts through Buffer support).

What you described is where I eventually see the service going though. It's going to take some time and a lot of user feedback to get there though!

 

[bruce69]

@mandymum I'm in the process of signing up, you haven't asked me for money yet. Is that yet to be implemented? Are you considering this a beta? Am I just not further into the process yet?

 

[mandymum]

@bruce69 Stick your email in the box on this page: http://shareshaper.com/

I'll send you a link to a page where you can sign up for real within a few days. At the moment it's a lot of work to sign people up so I need to throttle it a little.

Right now this is a beta yes. It's free at the moment but that's mostly because I haven't figured out how to charge people yet. Consider it an open trial period I guess.

 

[kelli1234567890]

@mandymum I'll be your first customer. Tell me when it's ready.

 

[mandymum]

@kelli1234567890 Sent you a message.

 

[kelli1234567890]

@mandymum didn't get it

 

[mandymum]

@kelli1234567890 Weird. Ok, just stick your email in the box on this page: http://shareshaper.com/ and I'll get in touch.

 

[kelli1234567890]

@mandymum DONE

 

[skylarward]

@mandymum There is a typo on your website you may want to fix:

"Then we deliver it straignt to your inbox where you can share it in just a few clicks."

AWESOME IDEA!