Let's Talk Marketing (+ Demo Day!)
Let’s venture into the territory that technical founders rarely dare to tread: Marketing.
As much as I’ve tried, I just can’t avoid the need to start marketing my products, especially since I’m now racking up charges from OpenAI with a few of my ideas.
For the first couple of weeks in January, I went through a 10K Challenge for creators, and that had me think a lot about what I was doing and who I was doing it for. Around the same time, I also saw a 1000 Subscriber Speedrun put on by Indie Worldwide. So I decided to put everything together and put together a newsletter.
This Newsletter vs The New One
This newsletter is mostly a place for me to dump all of my thoughts without worrying about a specific audience. It’s very much the nuts and bolts of what I’m thinking, where I can dig into specifics that most people probably don’t care as much about. On the other hand, I’m trying to stay particularly focused for the new newsletter, The AI Augmented Creator.
In that newsletter, I have a specific target: creators. Specifically, creators who might be curious about AI but don’t have a ton of knowledge. Or they might be worried about AI replacing them. As you can see, I could probably narrow that down even more, but for now, I’m pretty happy with that.
As it turns out, I wasn’t happy with that. After I wrote this part, I ended up thinking about it and going back to reconsider things. For the newsletter it’s ok, but not for the landing page. The more I looked at it, the less happy I was with it. So I redid the landing page to focus on a more specific demographic: podcasters. It became a lot easier to speak to their specific problems/needs. Now, I feel like it’s a much stronger landing page.
Why a Newsletter?
The goal for the newsletter: be the “top of funnel” for Effortless Reach. As part of Buildspace’s Nights and Weekends, I’ve been working on everything for that. If you read the last issue of this newsletter, you got a glimpse of everything I’ve been thinking about. Effortless Reach is a landing page geared toward creators where I try to demonstrate that. Just a waiting list hooked up to that page for now as I try to find leads through cold outreach and the newsletter.
I’m focusing on specific ways that I use AI in my creative process. I started by putting together a 5-day email course on the ways creators can use AI. Here are the 5 lessons included:
Generating images for blog posts
Moving between formats
Summarization
Scaling your voice
Content Distribution
My thinking with this approach is that it starts out fairly simple and gets a little more complicated as the days go on, with the final day really being an outline of what I’m building at Effortless Reach.
I want creators to be able to envision what’s possible and then ideally respond with interest in being in the early group of users, but we’ll see. I did get some feedback that my emails were a bit on the “wall of text” side of things, so I’m going to be revamping them with a nicer template and try to add some things to break up the flow a bit.
I’ve also reached out to 4 different creators. I’ve got a good friend who is going to be my first guinea pig and then I finally sent DMs on Twitter to the other 3. I’m cautiously optimistic, although I realized I had a lot of anxiety about reaching out, because these creators are three of my favorites, and being rejected by them is a bit worse that being rejected by a random creator. But I overcame that anxiety and sent the messages today.
Nights & Weekends Update
Now let’s talk Nights and Weekends a little bit. It’s a big weekend for me: Demo Day is on Saturday. That’s the culmination of everything that I’ve worked on for the past six weeks. I’ve really enjoyed the fact that these sessions have been forcing functions for me to do certain things and it’s definitely helped me move the needle.
And it’s making me step out of my comfort zone a little bit, like with the thing I had to do for this week’s submission: a YouTube Short.
That’s a quick video that outlines the current functionality and I’ve gotten mostly positive responses to it so far. If I can before demo day, I’m going to try to hook up a bit of a skeleton app the landing page that gives some basic functionality to podcasters. Nothing like furiously dropping code in the hours before the demo!
Now I’m off to finish my prep for Demo Day.
If you want to check out Nights & Weekends Demo Day, you can do that here.
Until next time!
~Leo