Q4 2022
Existing Product Discovery+Changes
I introduced a new Guidebook based on feedback that people needed more process and details on how to solve their challenges. I now upgraded the cards to include this as a PDF I email after purchase. I considered offering this as a printed booklet but I wanted to test if there was increased demand afterwards.
I received good feedback with this book that it is probably enough content to be a micro-book, and some earlier customers who I sent this to told me they indeed wanted. Despite this I’m not sure it was an effective addition, my sample size might be too small or possibly I haven’t given enough time for them to use it.
This lead to my next project which was to run workshops with the cards as a way to show how to use the cards in practice.
Business Numbers
Financial
Sales were only 60% of Q3’s results. This is a mix of cards and workshops.
Expenses were only 30% of Q3’s expenses.
Media / Marketing (establishing benchmarking this Q, I don’t have accurate Q3 numbers)
Linkedin business page now has 64 followers, however, many new people have followed me specifically.
Personal LinkedIn page has 1258 followers
Youtube page has 25 subscribers
Unaware of the actual hours but I suspect I’ve put less hours into the business this quarter (details below in “Life” section).
Failed to Scale through Ads
Attempted to grow the business via advertising on Linkedin and Reddit. Both were a major failure IMO. While it did generate reasonable traffic, none of it converted a sale. Advertisements received 5% CTR which I heard was good but really I have no baseline here,
Overall I spent weeks working on Ads, improving landing pages, getting the right demographic criteria for the search tools, and there were no real results from this. I hadn’t closed a single sale from advertising.
A typical ad that I would run
2 weeks @ Startup Incubator Berlin
I applied for a 2 week program at “Startup Incubator Berlin“ which was really helpful in that it provided me with a short term community of other people looking to build their businesses. That re-energized me and also they gave me interesting perspectives that helped me a lot with my own thinking.
One of the major takeaways from the SIB was to improve my landing pages for sales, as well as more formally outline the goals on a Lean Business Canvas. I had previously been using the 1PMP canvas, but Lean Canvas also provided a different perspective which helped me form better marketing content and customer strategies.
Workshops & Coaching
The road to having sellable, reputable products is a very long one. You can’t simply have a good product, it needs to be marketed and grow. I attempted to accelerate this with Ads which really was a mistake.
In order to increase short-term revenues I’m pivoting from purely products and the video courses (sill in development) towards interactive workshops and direct 1:1 coaching. I also think this will improve my overall products and build the brand reputation, so it’s a good alternative way to go.
Presently I’m still working on setting up the infrastructure to get coaching clients. Part of this will come from marketing, but it’s still a work in progress. I reached out to another coach who is more established for guidance and they were more than gracious to give me a call and walk me through some things I could improve on, and invite me to larger communities to improve my reach. (Thanks, Anton!)
In addition to the coaching topic, I’ve also started designing and hosting workshops. I successfully launched a new workshop with paying customers focused on “Strategic Problem Solving“ for engineering leaders.
I’m presently building the Alpha version of a new workshop: “team decoupling”. This makes sense to m e as it’s both a popular topic, and it would fit into my original goal of a course focused on team performance. I hope to run the first Alpha workshop in January.
Marketing
I shifted video formats from ones where I narrate over an image to one where I’m walking around Museum Island (in Berlin). I’m extremely unexcited about putting my face out there, “being a youtuber”, or walking around with my phone in selfie-video pose in public places… but… it seems to work better than the voice-over stuff I was trying, and it works really well. I even got some minor engagement on youtube. I will double down on this format in Q1 2023.
In addition to this I’ve been creating canvases in Miro’s Miroverse marketplace where others can search and browse for templates. So far I’ve created templates for development processes, change management, and negotiations.
They’ve been warmly received on LinkedIn and are doing relatively OK-ish on Miroverse with numbers slowly increasing over time.
This was an extreme case, the average case was closer to 1-5 likes. In all cases however views were closer to 500+. I think this one did well because I was celebrating “woohoo” instead of sharing “hey here’s a tool“, like I did with the others.
The Miro templates in general are high effort, so I’m trying to keep them limited to extractions from my workshops, and not stand-alone inventions.
I also participated in a podcast where we discussed recruitment and recruiters. The key relevance to me here was related to my Hiring Pipeline offering.
What it was interesting in its own right, it did not generate additional interest or business inquiries for me.
If you’re a recruiter: I give some tips on how to improve your pitch to acquire companies here.
I also joined a professional Leadership slack community with tens of thousands of members. On average I’m posting 15-20 messages per day there. This helps in a few ways: first, it gives me a community to discuss leadership topics with and stay sharp; second, that helps me think of and generate content, I can simply take an item I discussed and turn it into a video or a blog post; lastly, over my first 30 days in the community, two people have approached me and asked for a form of 1:1 coaching/mentorship (but only one was a qualified lead).
In general, it’s a huge boon to me to join a community like this as leaving a company to go “on my own” has been largely isolating and challenging for me. And while I joined the SIB, unfortunately there wasn’t many options for me to join with them over a longer period of time. Before joining this slack I was even considered taking a part time job just to regain a feeling of professional community again. It’s not perfect, but it helps a lot.
An sample of some of the posts I’ve been making (the emjoi is a reaction someone made on my post).
Extra Projects
Async
I was looking for ways to improve Async team collaboration while still retaining the “feeling” of talking to people and knowing them. Something to kind of fill the gap between “we have a standup-call“ and “we write text standups“.
It took me approximately 1 week of work spread over 13 calendar days to go from “I have an idea“ to “working Android App“ (my first ever Android app — btw, wow is the mobile tool chain a massive pain! I don’t know how anyone can stand it!).
I have a number of really interesting “maybe roadmap” ideas for how this project can grow, but my idea right now is to not develop it any further, I only want a landing page which collects emails of interested parties who would like to try this. If it surpasses a few thousand, I will invest time here again in product/app development. For now, the Landing Page is everything.
I’m also seeking for partners on this app who would like to own the marketing aspect and driving up interest for it or validating the idea further, because I need to invest my time on my existing plans. This project is a “seed” which someone else can help me grow.
This project also helped me improve my landing-page skills and getting rapid feedback. I went through about 10 iterations based on real feedback in 4 days.
Life
Overall it was a very busy quarter in terms of personal events:
I caught covid and it totally knocked me out for about 2 weeks. On-top of that, it also really demotivated me and felt like a massive setback for my business.
At the time I was still sick, a close family member went into the hospital for 2 weeks. The moment I was recovered and testing negative for 2 days I went to the hospital.
I moved apartments. First we had to pack up everything from the old one and move into the new one, but also we had to demolish all “improvements” in the old apartment and set it back to it’s original 1960s state.
Had to tear up the improved flooring which had no scratches… and “reset it” to the heavily damaged linoleum-looking flooring that I suspected was full of asbestos. The inspection team remarked with surprise, “uuh! Original DDR Fußboden“ (“Oh wow! Original GDR flooring!“).
Had to dispose of a shelving unit covered in lead paint
Entirely rebuild a small room
Sell off or give away all the furniture we weren’t going to take with us.
Travel 1 hour each way between old and new apartments for each sale, give-away or construction job.
We were living in a mountain of cardboard boxes for over a month because of delays and damaged delivery of new furniture shipments.
While we were in the middle of moving, my first born child came! I’m not giving specific details here but I’m a bit sour with some advice different healthcare providers gave. I’ve never seen something so simple get so over-complicated. Again, I won’t share specific details, but my mom and sisters back in Canada are now 100% convinced living in Germany is like living in the 1920s.
Everyone is healthy, we get sleep now, and I even have time to work on my business again.
I’m going to challenge a German court’s decision on interpretation of their naming laws as they forbid my child to have the last name “MyLastName-WifeLastName”. Wish me luck.
No-Framework
This one isn’t really related to my business, but it is an idea I want to poke at slowly in my “I need to do something else“ time a bit. I have a conceptual idea that across all languages and frameworks there are frequently repeated “philosophies”, “patterns“, and “how we do it here“ atomic concepts that don’t need to exist in any specific language per-se, but end up only being documented in specific languages.
No-framework is an attempt to describe common patterns (not necessarily “design patterns” — and I’m not really interested in filling the site with a poor clone of Gang Of Four concepts). These concepts can exist without being tied to a specific language, and those concepts can be composed in specific ways (again, without a language) to create a “conceptual framework”.
What you are left with is “conventions without code“. Typically people like frameworks because “they provide conventions”, and some people like frameworks because “they also provide tools” — but that last one becomes an issue because all code rots and becomes debt. So my objective here is to “ship concepts, not code”.
Might be interesting, but presently it’s really under-developed, and not related to my business (as far as I know). I only spent a day or two on this.
uuh! Original DDR Fußboden!