I've heard varying opinions on this and have my own thoughts but I'd love to hear multiple sides of the argument from the community! While you're here, you can find me on twitter here: https://twitter.com/benlkatz
I've seen people go from 0 to thousands of followers in a few months, all because they zoned in on building a personal brand. Do you have any tips for makers that want to do the same?
I graduated 4 years ago, and I had the opportunity to go on to a PhD, but I gave up on that option.
Instead, I chose the "real world".
Many public universities in my country offer free tuition, while in the US tuition is very high, and people take out student loans that take decades to pay off.
We wanted to build an AI-powered productivity assistant. Prior to development, we launched a simple email newsletter and landing page to collect leads. We promised daily emails with habit suggestions, which we coded in 5 days. (Check out Insumo 1.0 launch at my Profile) We obtained ~1000 organic leads with launching on Product Hunt, BetaList, and Reddit to generate interest. With the traction gained, we secured a pre-seed funding round from investors. With the funding we launched our iOS app, as our target audience and 80% of paying users are on iOS. We did Performance marketing on Facebook, Snapchat etc and brought in 25K+ more users. With paid traffic also resulting in organic traffic which bumped us to 35K users. We later started playing the SEO game, wrote content in various platforms and mostly on our website www.insumo.io. Kept creating content on social media, created podcasts called "Habit Talks" and kept talking with our active users which helped us to gain 10K users. Our focus was to acquire mostly free users, learn from their behavior and needs, and launch our AI-powered web app. Now We're preparing for the public beta launch of our web app.
I control every 1 hr of my day to maximize productivity. Wake up at 5:30, meditate, work, learn programming, work some more, write a novel, and run a family with 1 kid coming. You could say I'm hyper productive, but I know many of you have a lot more on your plate. As founders and makers, what do you do to make sure your sanity is kept in check?
We still hire mostly off r sum s a one-page document someone wrote about themselves. But a resume can't really show if a person can do the actual work, solve real problems, or handle pressure. Yet it's usually the first and biggest filter.
