Monthly Update #2: Shipped Products, Takeaways

Two months have already gone.

Time flies super fast, especially if you’re extremely busy.

Honestly, this month was much harder than I expected.

At my full-time job, we’re publishing a new report, and I had to coordinate the whole thing, making sure things worked as expected. Also, there are many smaller things that had to be done in a relatively short time.

Besides my full-time job, I spend 5 hours a week consulting a startup on growth.

So, only weekends and late nights remained for coding.

At this point, I’m spending a bit more time doing video courses and reading guides on coding than actually building the app.

The reason is pretty simple: I still have to learn basic concepts that are necessary to implement my next idea since they’re becoming more complex.

Despite the incredible time pressure, I made solid progress towards shipping products.

Here is what happened.

Products shipped

Foods Cat Can Eat: an app that checks if a given human food is good or bad for your cat. It’s similar to my previous app (Foods Dogs Can Eat).

I thought the cat version would perform much better on Product Hunt and overall, since PH is a cat lover community and cat content is kinda popular on the internet. But despite this, the Foods Cat Can Eat app received fewer upvotes.

Dofollow Link Checker: not actually shipped but the beta version is ready. It will be released in the beginning of March.

I am also working on a funny web app that will be released at the end of March. 

Revenue generated: $0

Still focusing on shipping products, but the dog food checker app shows increasing traffic, so in the coming months, as an experiment, I will try to place some ads on the website.

Milestones/successes:

Foods Dogs Can Eat app was featured in two magazines and mentioned in a newsletter. I received some really great feedback from people working with dogs. It’s so incredible how helpful some of them were to provide feedback on the app. Since its launch, the app has improved a lot. 

Blog posts:

I also published a blog post on how to automatically generate Mailchimp campaigns using Google Sheets and Zapier. This is pretty cool stuff if you’re dealing with a lot of campaigns and using the same template over and over again. Check out the post here.

Building products:

It’s still fun. But now, I’m facing more complex problems than I’ve ever encountered, so I need some training and have to read a lot. I need to learn how to use APIs, for example.

Marketing products:

I spent way to much time promoting my first app. So, for the coming ones, I will spend less time on promotion. I’m trying to follow a 20-80 rule here, which means focusing only 20% of the marketing efforts that account for 80% of the results.

I promised to publish a post about a minimal promotion plan, but I haven’t written a single word yet.

I’m promoting and marketing stuff 8 hours a day, which means I’m quite often not in the mood to do an extra 4-5 hours of marketing for my products. It is really hard to motivate me to do marketing that goes beyond the bare minimum promotion. I think it’s one of the biggest downsides when you launch a lot of products and still work full-time; you have little or no time to promote every single app properly.

Motivation level: On a 1-10 scale, it’s around 8.

Coming up:

• 2 new products in March
• MPP plan for makers