Howdy makers!We all know how hard it gets to handle life, take care of projects and juggle things as makers. And we end up with a lot of stress. So I'm curious how do you all manage it? What kind of methods do you use to cope up in life!Drop your comments below and share your wisdom!
Sometimes I find myself browsing and searching for information up to 1-3 mins. It's something I saw/read recently. Curious if anyone else had this issue.
2.5 years ago I decided to quit the rat race and I left my career in big tech to go work for myself, on my own terms. Initially, I was going to focus all my attention on building a SaaS, but I quickly realized I didn't want to put all my eggs in one basket. Fast forward to today, I make and sell educational info products, do some contracting (working quarter-time at Gumroad), run a SaaS business, and at the end of this month, I also plan to get into selling physical products.I made $550K+ in revenue since I started working for myself, with over $400K coming from info products. Ask me anything!
TL;DR: we're building a product to help remote teams make decisions faster and I would love your help on how to recruit beta testers. - Hey, I'm Cl ment and I work full-time at a B2B SaaS co that's been around 5 years and done well. For a number of reasons, we recently decided to pivot. It's exciting and scary. We originally wanted to build the best knowledge base tool in the world. We've hit Product Market Fit, even while competing with big guys Confluence & Notion. We've grown steadily. We have net negative churn. 90% of revenue comes from organic (word-of-mouth, SEO, product-led). A few thousand teams sign up every month. But we want do better. We want to anticipate and solve the problems that our market faces. This brings me to ask for advice. We're developing a unique product for a small, growing, market we love: async-first teams. We bet that while the pandemic forced a lot of companies into remote, we can all learn from the companies that operate with a remote-first mindest. That means fewer meetings, and less time online overall. More time on deep work, and on living your life. The first piece of the puzzle is faster decision-making. So here's where the company's at now:
- We are now 100% focused on creating the best communication tool out there
- We are working with beta partners to improve our new release: Discussions, a tool for making decisions and resolving problems in the flow of work. Our success will massively rely on growing our beta waitlist. We hope this will lead to a big public launch of the new version. We're looking to recruit teams of 10+ employees for our (free) beta, that are ideally software/service companies. Geography doesn't really matter since they should be async-first. These are some initiatives we focus on to grow our waitlist:
- Recruit teams within our existing users
- Invest a lot in content and distribution we believe unique insights about remote will help us establish our position
- Launch awareness campaigns on social (product tours, screenshots, call for beta testers)
- Reach out to a selected list of "top remote companies" to ask for feedback
- Reach out to "remote influencers" to get visibility on podcast, blog posts, etc. ** Do any of you have experience building waitlists? Out of curiosity, is anyone here interested in giving feedback about the product?** Thanks and looking forward to discussing it with you. - Cl ment
I have been thinking about this for a while. Pandemic, remote working, deadlines, with so much going on, do you find it challenging to cope with the mental stress? How do you manage it? Are there some ideas that are effective for maintaining mental health? If you're someone battling with mental health, feel free to share your experience in the comments section.
Hey makers! It's the final day for revealing nominations for 3 more categories including the biggest category Product of the Year. Check for details below:
Product of the year
Side project
Product demo video
You have till to vote so pick you fav products and give the community a chance to celebrate them. Find the full set of nominations list for 2021 Golden Kitty Awards here
Getting early customers for your product isn't easy - they need to buy into your vision and get a ton of value from your product. Let me know if you have any inspiring (or lucky ) stories about how you attracted and closed on your first paying customer!
We are increasingly connected to our phones which can make it difficult to fully unplug or be present at times. Once you wake up to start your day, how quickly do you reach for your phone to check your mentions, emails, etc?
Hey, all!
There are many productivity tools out there offering different features. But I still haven't found one that covers everything I want. To me, the essential features a perfect tool must have are: - A good text editor ( I mean, I love notion. But why is it so hard to bring the text there to other formats? Sometimes I summarize some things inside notion, but taking them to an actual doc or pdf is so painful!) - Simple, minimalistic design - A good place to have random thoughts and things that I need to get done without losing sight of them - Good integrations!! I use Gcal a lot, so I would love to have a productivity software that actually integrates with it. What about you?
User feedback is crucial to the product development cycle - but it isn't always the first step to building a successful product. How early in your journey did you start integrating user feedback? "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford
Every couple weeks at SigmaOS we do sprint plans to lay out the tasks for the next 2 weeks and every morning we do a standup to quickly go over what we did the day before and what we are doing today. Would love to hear what your thoughts on this is and what you use in your own teams :)
