This March was all about learning from the Indie Hacker community in what I’m calling Learn and Execute. Basically taking some specifics steps to execute what I’ve learnt and apply it to my own situation. March was also a month of Achievements and progress as well as COVID!
Learn and Execute – Why Engaging on Twitter Matters
Adopted Coding/Marketing week
I’ve been enjoying the Twitter chat about Coding and Marketing Week – and the dread it seems that a lot of developers face when it’s Marketing Week. Now I had this chat Olu and it got me thinking…
Why as a non-dev don’t I make up my own version of a Coding/Marketing week….so this is what I came up with:
So now I’m synced up with the Coding/Marketing week site and enjoying my equivalent struggles during coding week!
I’ve found with the Twitter Growth Challenge and Tweet100 just being part of these initiatives helps to drive good behaviors in myself so this seemed a natural step to work on the non-marketing things.
I think as well being part of these challenges you are able to have empathy with others also participating and that helps build rapport which can lead to some great relationships.
My Coding Week – Applying “Learn and Execute!”
So when I adopted this and did a coding week the last week of March. Now I do run a Trello board with one column that’s devoted to “Website Fixes” and another for “New Features” so it was those I decided to work on. Two of the features I worked on will be coming out in early April but what I did manage to complete in March was adding in my Analytics from Plausible – super simple and very easy to add on a WordPress site!
Twitter Thread – capturing all my achievements
I also took some this past month from Sam Neter who’s been streaming regularly on Twitch building his products. With that he’s built a Twitter thread sharing all of his achievements throughout the year. So again I decided to learn and execute and build up my Twitter thread with my achievements and goals.
Understanding my Niche and Making the Twitter 9-5 List
I harmlessly posted up this tweet towards the end of March and it went viral (for my level) hitting 9K impressions and 72 likes…which to put in context is 50+ more likes than I’ve had before.
What this made me realise is that there is a niche here for people that are building products on the side whilst working a 9-5 job. So I’ve started to think about that in terms of how I’m talking about my own journey. But in the meantime I setup my first public Twitter List to capture those that are in the same situation – feel free to give it a follow or reach out on Twitter to get yourself added
Achievements and Updates for March 2022
Twitter Goal Achieved – 300 Followers ✅
March saw me achieve a number of goals and one of those was to hit 300 Followers on Twitter. As it was I quickly ended up at the 400 mark and achieved just as I was writing this article too! I’ll be sharing a little more about how I’ve gone about that in future. But just wanted to say thanks to everyone that has given me a follow over the last few months!
Lots of you have asked me to add in a stretch goal – I’ll be honest I’m still thinking about it 😀 If you think I should leave a comment below!
Achieved my Product Hunt Goal – 200 Followers ✅
The second goal that I achieved in March was to hit 200 Followers on Product Hunt. As with the Twitter goal I genuinely thought this would take longer,
The few minutes I’ve been spending on the platform each day has really helped! Just to show I’ve been consistent I’m also sharing the streak screenshot too!
Now I have been asked is it worth having getting followers on Product Hunt? Well I had a think about this and wrote this article because it is a trade-off of your time for other things
Is it Worth Getting Followers on Product Hunt
I also then thought you all might want to know about the strategies I employed to get my following on Product so that you can do the same 😀
How to Increase Followers on Product Hunt
You can check out the rest of my goals here:
CollabClub – Back up and Running
We had a few weeks where frankly made very little progress on CollabClub. We got stuck on one of the tasks which involved building up some concepts prior to the MVP design.
At the end of March we had our 3rd meeting and identified the MVP features that we want to launch with. It was a healthy debate and the developers within the team used the discussion to go through the feasibility of each of the features, even identifying some shortcuts.
Now we’ve split into two teams the Marketers and the Developers. We’ll catch-up in two weeks in time to see where we are, hopefully with some initial features available. In the mean time Kavya, Luise and I will need to build our following and prepare for our Product Hunt Launch.
Twitch Extension Update – Small Progress During March
We made a little progress on our Twitch Extension this March. Sadly both my co-founder and I (as well as our families) were stuck by Covid. This inevitably stunted our progress in March.
However we did manage a couple of things. We launched our logo with a nice little video:
The new logo was made using Logology and I’ve got to say it was a lot of fun and super simple to do – the result that we got at the end even mentioned the platform we’re launching on – Twitch which is amazing.
We also spent some time working on the community Discord server. Firstly adding the community server feature which adds in rules and some signposts for where to go when they join. We’ve also worked on the channels themselves adding some descriptions and pinned messages. That’s in preparation for people signing up via the success page of our landing page!
Sadly we haven’t got the landing page up in March which means that I’ve failed on one of my objectives for the year. I’ll be honest we’re concerned about customer acquisition on launch – Twitch is inherently poor at discovery as it is and Twitch Extensions are barely marketed. So we’ve been building (coding) a few tools to help us find and interact with customers. These are taking some time to build – BUT on the plus side we think we’ll be able to market these to brands as a side product!
COVID!
The last update I wanted to talk about was COVID – yes the dreaded Covid. My family caught it towards the second half of March. Thankfully it wasn’t that bad for me but I did find I struggled to keep things going, and there was a definite drop in my Twitter engagement for that period.
But all in all I’m happy that we got through it without any serious effects!
Summing up March – Learn and Execute!
Overall I’m really happy with the progress in March, although a bit disappointed that both projects have had a few delays. However I’ve surprised myself with my little learn and execute strategy – and I’m going to work really hard to continue this during the rest of the year!