Feb 9th, 2020 | A clear plan

I think this week has been the best week yet. I may not have the numbers to back that claim, but my brain seems more calm, disciplined and optimistic.

The reason for that is that my priorities are straight. Firstly, I made up my mind that I should focus on growing GitGardener. There is no reason building new products when I could have GG growing at the same time. 1.5 hours per day will go to GG, the other 1.5 hours on new ones. It makes $200/mo and it requires 0% of my time. Literally 0%. Imagine if it made $1k/mo, it would be like hacking the system. A salary without doing anything what so ever. Plus, users tend to stick around for a long time. Guess how long it takes to make your GitHub green? Yes.. a whole year. I have customers that are paying for nearly two years. So if I could grow this, it is actually a pretty solid business.

At the moment I have a big assumption I want to test. We know that the market is huge (people looking for an entry level dev job) and I think that they hang out on Instagram, checking out programming memes.

So far I have DMed or emailed about twenty Instagram accounts for an affiliate deal and many were interested. It's mostly accounts like "programming_memes" or "programming_world" that upload funny memes about PHP or anything related to programming. They have many thousands of followers and likes and millions of impressions.

I believe GG is a very good fit for Instagram, it could be advertised with funny memes and truly believe many potential customers will see it.

I scored both a 50/50 affiliate deal with an account with 50k followers and a crazy ad deal with a 25k followers account. 

Listen to this deal. $10 for a whole month of advertisement. 10 posts, 10 stories and link in bio for the whole month. Each post has around one thousand likes.

I'm going with the $10/mo deal in order to validate my assumption.

To make the affiliate deal a reality, I would have to code, and those days are long gone, the days were I would code without knowing if the code will be ever useful.

If my assumption is right, this could get very interesting, I might have found the marketing channel for GG...

Apart from GG, I have started to identify products that are easy to build.

It's B2B products, intended for startups, focused on lead generation, where you send them leads in their inbox, like once per month. It is sort of validated, as I've seen different products that do it and are actual businesses. Also, you can even launch without a product if you want to get crazy. If anyone subscribes ($50/mo), you build the thing before the month ends or even do it manually. Do things that don't scale.

However, I am struggling to decide if I should just launch and build a parashute while falling, or go the validation route, collect emails, talk to them about what they want and then launch.

I have launched so many times blindly, that I feel it's my duty to try something else. If you want something you never had, do something you have never done.

One thing I am doing differently is building something that I don't even have to code before launching.

A second thing I'm doing differently is that I am not building something new, but something validated already.

So what do I do? Launch and close my eyes and hope for the best? Or talk to potential customers for an already validated idea?

🐦 Twitter/X💼 LinkedIn🎥 YouTube

✉️ Newsletter🔊 Podcast📸 Instagram