Now is the time to plant seeds for your business. #startup #marketing #growth
2023-01-30
Planting seeds
Yesterday I said that now is the time to plant seeds for your business. I had a couple of replies that questioned my logic and wanted to explain it more.
Some of todays biggest businesses were born of the 2008 recession. They rode the wave back up.
The recession also meant they rode the wave with less competition.
Like a fire the economy cleared the playing feild by taking out bad businesses, made good employees available for hire, and reset the market.
A reset means it gave businesses and people a forced opportunity to reevaluate the how, why, and whats of their operations.
So… what do I mean by planting seeds? There are lots of ways to think about it.
Expand your market. If you already have a product consider expanding the reach into a new segment or vertical. Your existing base is going to be converting at a lower rate so you may need to think wider and not deeper.
Build wider on demand. We recently launched 20!!! new contest templates at KickoffLabs. But we launched a lot of them without dedicated contest designs. Why? We wanted to see where the demand was first so we could save money and build them out later. The results have been surprising and saved me time. :)
If fewer people are making demo requests and you have more time… invest it to make your product 5% better for existing customers. Fix annoying bugs and improve onboarding. Just take the breath, walk through your product and fix what feels off.
Test pricing. Maybe the way you’ve been doing it doesn’t work anymore.
Start a new business. The economy doesn’t mean people stop needing solutions to problems. In fact… because a team may have ditched a costly incumbent means they may be looking for the newcomer. Someone thinking about the same problem in a different way.
Try new marketing channels. For you it could mean trying ads while the prices are low. Or it could mean figuring out if TikTok works for your growth. Or see if Mastadon takes off. It all means a chance to engage new audiences while things start growing again if you start planting content now.
Test new markets with a waitlist or trial balloons. Of course KickoffLabs makes it easy for people to test a new business, but you can also test demand for expansions of your existing business. See if you can fill a waitlist for a new feature as one way to test demand. If you can’t… maybe don’t build it.
So I maybe wrote this as a pep talk to myself, but maybe you found it useful. The next year won’t be easy, but you can make it worthwhile.
The “Upside Down” is actually in Ballard?
Nighttime train crossing.
I’ve been trying to live January with the mantra
“Create. Don’t consume.”
It’s hard, but gets easier if you celebrate little wins. Not everything has to be a masterpiece.
If you are on twitter I’m not sure you’ll be able to read my posts anymore after Feb 9th.
It’s a good time to remind people.
- You can easily own your own online presence.
- You can follow and subscribe to me at https://blog.joshledgard.com
- Mastadon is a much friendlier place.
Took a pass at making the KickoffLabs referral program more obvious in the dash. We gave away a couple thousand dollars last year and I'd like to see that grow this year.
Also this week: After a couple of iterations I'm putting down the KickoffLabs dashboard simplifications. It looks a LOT cleaner IMO & hopefully feels simpler for our customers. Now I just have to re-record some getting-started videos. :)
ui #startuplife #kickofflabs
I don't even want to show you the before version of this page. This is a huge improvement for the KickoffLabs integration UI.
It's important to dedicate some time to things that just bug you in your app. I was never thrilled with the video insert experience within the KickoffLabs editor. So I fixed it. Now you can more easily select videos to replace/edit without having them play on you. :)
ui #ux
Me: Apple Music. Play this song.
AM: Here's a totally different song.
Me Clicking: I want this song to play.
AM: How about I just make it look like I'm playing it instead?
Me:
AM: Nah. We've got something else in mind.
SPOTIFY: I got you!
2023-02-03
What does everyone use for rewarding customer referrals/affiliate software these days?
2023-02-03
Just shipped a few Mugs out to contest winners for KickoffLabs. Also gave away one in a big group demo this morning using KickoffLabs. That was fun. :)
Who doesn't want to be a BOSS marketer?
*The death of search engine marketing. *
Prediction: within 3 years google will start seeing ad revenue truly decline. Eaten away by apple, Amazon, and anyone with the budget to train their own AI systems.
Business will struggle since this will cut ad effectiveness in a similar way to the Apple “privacy” changes.
They will have to replace paying google with referral based word of mouth and more algorithmic based longshots like Tik Tok.
This resets the cycle back much closer to old school TV ad models.
I keep coming back to this line. So funny. “There’s always money in the banana stand!”
Don’t burn down your banana stand.
Can you sell it?
100% this tweet:
It's a big reason we started KickoffLabs.
a. It was the idea we proved we could sign people up for. b. To help others validate the same.
Don't rush to build an idea YOU can't sell.
Yup. Went through all 6 stages today and I'm still not sure how it ever worked.
Been playing Overcooked 2 this weekend with my kids and it’s a blast.
All of you have to work together and strategize how to get orders out. Then the game starts throwing curveballs at you and it gets crazy. Great co-op fun.
Twitter is getting desperate. They've started using the "notifications" part of the app to spread right-wing propaganda since people ignore what they've stuffed into "for you"
Check out what they are "notifying" our business account about. Really?
