March 9th, 2020 | Quarantined in Milan!
Shit is crazy right now in Milan. I’m basically living in a ghost town. Yesterday they announced that the city is quarantined, which basically means there is control for entering and exiting the city. In the beginning I got flashbacks of Chernobyl, the mini TV series, but after looking it up I saw that it’s not like the army is guarding the city, but that you have to be checked for a fever maybe and explicitly give the reason as to why you are leaving or entering. Medical and work reasons are valid, they said. The quarantine will last until the 3rd of April, and from today I am working remotely. Today is the 9th of March. Right now I am in my bedroom and getting ready to start working. My “trial” period with the company ends on April the 6th, and although I really enjoy it, this corona thing has started getting on my nerves and this city does nothing for me. You can’t go out anywhere, you can’t see anything. Anyway, this month will be crazy for me. That’s it. I'll go crazy with my projects. No gym. No going to and back from work. No going out with colleagues. Nothing. All I have to do is grow Cyberleads and launch Angelstep. Possibly launch another one or two as well. I'm all about doing things that don't scale right now. This is where I’m at right now. Cyberleads -> $232 MRR GitGardener -> $154 MRR Total -> $386 MRR GitGardener is growing at it’s own pace. I know that and I have stopped trying to force it grow faster. Let it be himself, we love you GG. Cyberleads on the other hand has great potential in my eyes. Here are a few ways I could grow it. Also Angelstep, which is the same as Cyberleads but to find investors. But let's focus on Cyberleads, how we can grow it from here: 1. Content marketing I fucking hate this with a passion, honestly. This is mostly playing the long game, and I only have a month. 2. Quora This is the lowest hanging fruit. There are many many questions on Quora on how to find funded startups and how to find investors. I think this is good and I could probably answer every single question on Quora in a week. Good ROI of my time, I think. 3. Side project marketing I had high hopes for this one and tried it this week. Since it was international women’s day, I built a small website and report: www.womenintech.today Launched on PH and came in at number 6, but got no customers for Cyberleads or Angelstep. I spent a whole week doing that, and I think the ROI was total crap. Nada. On the other hand, you can’t judge something after trying it only once, it’s like launching a product once on PH and if your product doesn’t go well, say “well, ProductHunt sucks” 4. Scratch and claw aka Direct Sales This is another option that is good enough for me now. Until you get 100 customers, I’ve read many times that you should scratch and claw. Cold outreach, on LinkedIn, Twitter, posting on forums or wherever and try to get new customers. Do anything you can, the equivalent of making a fight ugly in order to win, instead of playing technically. Don’t love this approach, but you can’t always do what you want. The best thing about this approach is that the feedback loop would be INSTANT. It might suck, but it’s reality, and reality sucks some times. Conclusion: In a perfect world, if I could choose, I wish "Side project marketing" worked. However, in a pretty good scenario, it didn’t work at all. I think for this week I should focus on Quora and direct sales. Quora because it’s easy and it will stick around, direct sales because I know that it’s my best chance to get to 100 customers fast. On quora I'll also answer for Angelstep and also get it ready for launch at the end of the month. I am planning to launch Angelstep on ProductHunt on Friday
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