I’m referring to building something new and working on it in such a way that the general public knows about it without you telling them.

Nobody likes or wants to fail. From a young age, we’re told we are awesome so there are expectations that when we set out to do something, we are going to succeed. That’s not always the case. In fact, we know that it’s not true, even as we tell others and they tell us otherwise.

People fail all the time. Have you ever applied for a job and not been asked to come for an interview? It happens all the time but in each instance, you have failed in some way. You don’t think about it, but these things do affect you.

Nobody Wants to Fail… Especially Publicly

It’s exponentially more pressure to do something when everyone has an expectation that you will succeed. Falling flat on your face on a public stage, both in a figurative and a literal sense is a mortifying thought. Go search YouTube or Facebook and you’ll find plenty of videos of people who quite literally got on a stage in front of other people and then fell.

We laugh because it’s not us.

But when it IS us, just walking out onto the stage is terrifying. The words echo in your head: Don’t fall… don’t fall… don’t fall…

That’s not far off from “Don’t fail”.

A little over a week ago, I announced that I was launching a video series called The 21 Days Before My SaaS Launch.  Since that announcement, I’ve recorded 9 videos and released them privately to several hundred people who signed up to receive a daily email announcing the new video. Presumably because they were interested in the story.

Or they wanted to see me drink whiskey. I’m really not quite sure.

Most stories like this are produced with the benefit of hindsight and a bit of what I’ll call “creative polish” to keep the ego from being too badly bruised. Given where my last product ended up, I know I can’t do any worse than that. But I also can’t say for sure that I know everything is going to work out.

Sometimes, You Will Fail

There are plenty of ways I could fail. In fact, on a pretty regular basis I fail to accomplish everything I’d like to. I think this is a common theme for most founders but nobody talks about it.

Nobody wants to share the day to day struggles where you had all these big plans and got almost nothing done because a bug report came in that needed to be fixed. Or you didn’t get a good night of sleep the night before. Or your kid got sick so you had to take him to the doctor. Or a billion other ways… that life just got in the way of what you were trying to accomplish.

This happens to everyone. You, me, the people we look up to online, everyone. But here’s something to consider.

Working Publicly Increases Chances of Success

It’s counter-intuitive but you have some pretty bad ideas. Don’t get me wrong. Many of mine are terrible too. But when you make decisions in public, they get better because other people get to see them and point out the errors or edge cases they don’t cover.

The byproduct of this is that these additional ideas will define your own thoughts, processes and progress in ways you can’t anticipate. You might say “I’m going to run a Facebook advertising campaign and here’s what I’m expecting”, only to have someone comment that it’s wildly unrealistic based on their experience and here’s why.

You get the benefit of collective wisdom.

That doesn’t mean you listen to everything people say, but rather that you get additional input and insight that you wouldn’t have received otherwise. It’s still up to you to decide the correct course of action but at least you’re no longer operating in a bubble. And that’s the real benefit of working in public.

I’m Sharing My Launch Story

Initially, I was only going to share this with people on my mailing list. Along the way, I’ve received feedback through a bunch of different channels, some private and some public. I’ve learned that what I’m doing is having a really positive impact on people who are following along.

I came to realize that it could help people if I made these videos publicly available. More selfishly, it would help me as well. So here’s a direct link to the series itself. No email signup required, no hidden access links. Here’s the link to the table of contents that lists every video so far.

The 21 Days Before My SaaS Launch

Each post is a 5-8 minute video showing you a glimpse into my day as a founder while I gear up to launch my SaaS app called Bluetick. I also start each one with a brief introduction to a new whiskey from my collection.

While I’d appreciate it if you signed up for the daily emails during that series, you’re under no obligation to do so. You can simply check back in on occasion when you feel like it. Thanks, and I hope you join me for the ride.

The post Working in Public Is Hard first appeared on The Single Founder Blog.

The downside of these post-mortems is that they’re always filtered in some way. One common form of filtering is through the lens of hindsight. The author or speaker sees the results and makes some educated guesses about what went wrong and why, doing their best to extrapolate on the results of the decisions they made to educate others.

Another form of filtering is one that glosses over the realities of the day to day drudgeries of what was really going on behind the scenes. There are multiple reasons for this.

The first is that the day to day happenings are sometimes quite boring when contrasted against the whole picture. Another is that there’s quite simply not enough time to cover all of the details in a meaningful way. And finally, there’s probably a certain amount of ego preservation. Nobody wants to look bad in front of their peers. After all, fear is what stops many people from doing anything at all.

My upcoming product Bluetick.io has been in the public eye for some time now. That’s helpful in that people are aware of its existence in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t be. It would seem like that’s a huge advantage.

The reality is somewhat different.

I feel a ton of pressure for it to do well because there are so many eyes on it. This is especially true in light of my last product AuditShark, which I have to chalk up as an abysmal failure. I had a really hard time letting it go because I felt that same pressure for it to succeed. I pressed on, even in the face of evidence that it was never going to work, mainly because I equated the success of my product as the success of me as a person.

Fortunately, they’re not the same thing. And although AuditShark was ultimately a failure, I also learned a lot along the way.

When are you launching Bluetick.io?

I’ve pushed off on a public launch of Bluetick on three different occasions. The first time, I backed away because even my alpha users weren’t using it. It simply wasn’t solving a problem for them yet and it needed work. A metric ton of work if I’m being blunt about it.

The second time, was an arbitrary date I’d written down targeted as the beginning of the year. Quite frankly, it still wasn’t there yet. There were scaling issues, usability issues and some of the integrations simply didn’t work very well. My early customers were just starting to pay for it, but it was still a bit too soon.

The third time I back off from a public launch was around MicroConf. This was a little out of my control. The product was ready but there was just too much going on at the time and it was the first time we’d run two conferences back to back. I didn’t have the time to spare.

However, the delay gave me another couple of months to help push the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) to where I wanted it to be when I finally launched.

I announced on the podcast this morning, that it’s finally ready and have a launch date.

Here’s the plan

Exactly three weeks from today is Tuesday August 1st. That’s my planned public launch date for Bluetick. I’ve been doing reasonably well at most of the things you would expect to be doing leading up to now. Customer development, onboarding, adding web pages, building the mailing list, etc.

It’s not perfect and there’s a lot more that could be done but given all that I have going on I can’t say I’m displeased with my progress. Is everything ready? Absolutely not. Am I embarrassed by anything in the product. For sure.

It would be nice to spend another 6 months working on it but that’s neither an option, nor is it realistic.  There’s no “good” reason stopping me from doing a public launch. That means that right now, it’s crunch time. This is where I think it gets interesting. And this is where you don’t usually hear a lot about what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’d like to share what’s happening on a day to day basis during the launch in a way that you wouldn’t usually see.

Join me “Behind the Scenes”

Every evening for the next 3 weeks, I’m going to record a short, 5-8 minute video. I’ll tell you what’s going on behind the scenes in preparation for the public launch of Bluetick. You’ll hear what’s going well, what isn’t and what my plans moving forward are.

Keep in mind that these videos will be largely raw and unedited. That’s intentional. Don’t expect a lot of polish. They’re intended to capture the essence of the Bluetick launch story as it happens. Whether it’s good or bad, you’ll hear it there first.

So how do you get them? Easy. Just subscribe to the mailing list below. I’ll send you a daily email with a link to the latest video that you can watch at your leisure.

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If you prefer to watch a few of them first, you can check out the first day of the series or the list of entries for the entire series before you decide to follow along.

Wait… Did someone say whiskey?

How could I forget? The full title of this series is “The 21 Days Before My SaaS Launch – With whiskey to drown the sorrows”. At the beginning of each video, I’m going to introduce you to a different whiskey that I’m sampling for the evening.

I expect a lot of things to go wrong during the next 3 weeks. If there was ever a time to drink alcohol every day, it seems like this would be it.

The post The 21 Days Before My SaaS Launch first appeared on The Single Founder Blog.

Dear 2016,

You were awful. And not just a little bit. You will not be missed.

Sincerely,
Mike Taber

In December, my Mastermind group reviewed our year-end goals and all three of us fell woefully short. It was a combination of personal shortcomings for each of us and as a group, we didn’t have a system in place for holding ourselves accountable to those goals throughout the year.

My Biggest Failing of 2016

Personally, my biggest failing was the new product I started working on in January of last year called Bluetick. I pre-sold it to over a dozen customers(more on that process in the future), charging credit cards along the way to establish solid commitments and to validate the idea. My goal was to get an initial version of the product into the hands of these customers in April, which amounted to roughly four months of development time.

I assumed the role of ‘manager’ and let the team get to work as I tried to coordinate between them and work with my prospective customers to figure out whether we were meeting their needs. My development team was able to get something minimally functional ready by April and we started putting it in the hands of my users by May.

Unfortunately, I quickly realized that it wasn’t anywhere near being ready for serious usage. There were numerous bugs, partially-implemented features and some major design flaws. Within a few months of that initial release, I made the painful decision to let the entire development team go. At that point, I dug into the code base myself and either rewrote or refactored the majority of the application.

Fast forward six months to December and Bluetick is roughly where I wanted it to be last April. I had effectively hit the reset button on the application development. It’s not a decision that I’m happy about. However in retrospect, I wouldn’t have made a different choice.

It sucked, but it was completely my fault.

I could try to sugarcoat it somehow. I could try to place the blame elsewhere but it wouldn’t do any good, nor would it change anything. At the end of the day, my responsibility was to keep the product moving in the right direction but too many things fell apart along the way and for a variety of different reasons.

Some shortcomings were personal failures. Others were bad choices. In any case, the blame for what happened rests solely on my shoulders.

Fortunately, 2016 is in the past and Bluetick is substantially better off today than it was six months ago.

Reset Button… Again

The thing I like most about each new year is the ability to wipe the slate clean and start over. Conceptually, you can make the decision to start over and wipe the slate clean at any time. Psychologically it’s more difficult to do that if you don’t have a mental starting point.

People don’t start going to the gym on a Thursday because it screws up the arbitrary weekly schedule. For most people, this schedule starts on either Sunday or Monday. New Years resolutions are all based around a seemingly arbitrary date, but that arbitrary date is universally rooted in our heads as a “new year” so it tends to work well as a new starting point.

New year. New beginnings. Hit the reset button.

Unfortunately, the reset button fails from time to time. That’s not uncommon. I said as much last year when I hit the reset button. Sometimes it fails immediately. Other times it works for a little while and then sputters out. Software runs perfectly every time but it’s the humans that put bugs in it and by our very nature, we are fallible.

2017 is looking pretty good so far, even if we’re only a week into it. I’ve exercised a few times, written a new blog post, started some new marketing campaigns, gotten up each day at a reasonably decent hour and most importantly: I’ve set an initial launch date for Bluetick for the end of January.

Yes, I mean January of 2017. Damn you engineers and your lousy attention to edge cases and loopholes.

What’s Bluetick?

Bluetick is an email-based sales automation tool. It’s used to systematically follow up with people in your sales funnel in an effort to move them to the next step of the process. It does this by hooking into your mailbox and monitoring for replies to emails which are sent on your behalf.

If the person doesn’t respond to an email, then the system sends the next email in the sequence. These emails are sent directly from you and replies are received directly in your mailbox. The main difference between something like this and an email service provider is that it uses your mail server, not someone else’s, so it really is coming directly from you without any weird “Reply-To” fields.

The other difference is that emails are sequenced to achieve a goal. By default, the goal is for the other person to reply to the email you sent. However using either our API or our recent Zapier integration, that goal can be triggered based on an action in any of more than 700 other applications that Zapier is integrated with.

An Example: Scheduling a meeting

Let’s say that someone fills out a form on your website requesting more information and you capture that information into a CRM or a project management tool that supports tagging people.

Using Zapier, you could configure it to look for a specific tag to be applied to a contact. When this tag is seen, the information could be sent through Zapier to Bluetick, which would then fire off a series of emails to the person with links to your calendar to schedule a meeting.

When your prospect schedules the meeting, Zapier can then send information back to Bluetick telling it that the goal has been reached and it should stop sending emails. Otherwise, Bluetick will keep following up until the person replies to the email, schedules the meeting or the sequence of emails ends.

If the email sequence finishes without a response, Bluetick can send this information into your CRM indicating that the contact never responded to your requests for a meeting. That may be the end of your attempts, but you could optionally build other mechanisms for reaching out to the person.

Bluetick helps you systematically follow up with people so that you don’t have to.

Bluetick.io Limited Public Launch

My initial launch of Bluetick.io is going to be intentionally small. There are a TON of moving parts to the product and it’s substantially more complicated than I thought it was going to be when we first started building it. Fortunately, I have a good engineer helping me with some of the technical pieces and while I expect the infrastructure to hold up well enough, I still want to be cautious in the early days.

The last thing I want to do is have it fall apart because I added too many customers all at once. That would get me more revenue, but the tradeoff would be that I would burn through too many prospective customers before I figure out the best marketing approaches and the friction points in product adoption before I could fix them.

To avoid that problem, the initial launch is going to be limited launch to no more than 20 people beyond the current people who’ve placed preorders. I’ve talked it over with a few people and this has a number of advantages. First, it allows me to ease into adding stress to the back end of the application. At the same time, it gives me time to fix bugs, implement new features, provide good customer support and help to onboard users into the application.

If I do too much too quickly, that wouldn’t be possible. I’d rather be slow and methodical while staying on the path than to go too fast too quickly and careen out of control. There’s something to be said for moving quickly, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of your current customers.

Once I’ve onboarded the initial batch of customers and gathered more information, I’ll then be in a better position to determine what the priorities are moving forward and when we can schedule the next batch of customers.

It seems like a reasonable plan. Let’s hope it survives contact with the enemy.

Interested in learning more about Bluetick? Head over to the website. There’s a free, 5-part email course on how to automate your followups.

The post Goodbye 2016, Hello Bluetick.io first appeared on The Single Founder Blog.

I don’t blame you. I used to be a lot like that. In some cases, I still am. For example I refuse to be an affiliate for or promote products that I don’t believe in. I won’t intentionally email people after they’ve unsubscribed from one of my mailing lists. If we’re discussing working together and what I’m offering isn’t something that I think you’re going to benefit from, I’ll tell you straight up that it’s probably not for you. I simply don’t feel comfortable selling a product to someone that isn’t going to be a good fit.

For me, most of this boils down to basic honesty and a sense of human decency. I won’t sacrifice my moral compass in an effort to make a few extra dollars. It’s just not worth it.

But if you’re anything like me, you probably spend a lot of time on the internet. Between your desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone, you’re probably online more often than not when you’re awake. And as such, you see some dark corners of the internet that are downright ugly. You know what I’m talking about. My Spam folder has thousands of emails in it. I remember a time when I might get one or two each week. Now I get more than 50/day and that’s on an extremely slow day.

The shady side of marketing is why developers shy away from marketing. They don’t want to be put into the same bucket as sleazy marketers and salespeople and developers tend to be inundated with the amount of sleaze they see on a regular basis. A good product should sell itself, right? There are lots of good products and services out there like DropBox or Airbnb that aren’t all up in your face. You might think: “They sell themselves and don’t do any marketing!”

Just because someone isn’t overly pushy about their product doesn’t mean that they don’t do any marketing. It’s a matter of how overt they are about their efforts and how much you recognize it as marketing.

The core of DropBox’s marketing efforts in their early stages were to allow you to get more disk space by sharing it with your friends. They engineered a viral program to an astonishing efficiency. Those words are very deliberate… they engineered that marketing effort.

Airbnb leveraged the audience of Craigslist to grow quickly. Some people look at it in retrospect and believe it was a bit further than they would have been willing to go, but its users didn’t notice, nor did they really care.

Both of these are prime examples of doing marketing in a way that’s closer to the middle of the road rather than either end of the spectrum. Let’s talk about that.

At one end of the spectrum, you have Super Sleazy Steve. He’ll sell anything to anyone and do whatever it takes to make that sale. At the other end, you have Zero Marketing Joe who wants to stay as far away from Sleazy Steve as possible. Self promotion of any kind is unthinkable.

Unfortunately, Zero Marketing Joe launches a product, nobody hears about it and then he has to go get a full-time job because he can’t pay his bills.

Poor Joe.

What Joe really needed to do was be a bit more reasonable and set aside some time to do some smart marketing. That’s where Marketing Monday comes in.

What is Marketing Monday?

Let me state for the record right now that the idea of Marketing Monday isn’t mine. I first heard about it at MicroConf several years ago and repurposed the phrase in one of my talks the following year to indicate a day of the week that you do nothing but marketing for your business.

As developers, we have a predilection for wanting to write code at the expense of all other tasks because we feel comfortable doing it. Writing code is enjoyable for many reasons. We get to see our changes almost immediately so our feedback loop on whether something is working is super-short. We get to be creative and solve hard problems. And we get to focus on stuff that makes sense to us and is interesting.

But it’s the first thing that’s really appealing about writing code. Getting feedback on what we’ve done is often no more than a compile or browser refresh away. This satisfies our ever growing need for immediate gratification and if we’re honest with ourselves, we really need that.

As a society, we’ve become accustomed to everything being made better over time. From smartphones to internet bandwidth, if you can make it better, do it. And so we’ve become accustomed to really short iteration loops. We crave them because results generate an endorphin rush which becomes addictive.

The downside to this is that when you’re doing marketing, it takes radically longer to get that feedback. You can get that feedback immediately when you’re writing an article by looking at what you just wrote. But what about promoting the article? How many shares did posting it to Reddit get you? How many people visited it from your email list?

It’s frustrating to do those activities and see no quantifiable results for days or even weeks after the fact. The effectiveness of an article you write isn’t measured by how well you write so much as how many people see it. Most of your efforts should be spent doing promotion, yet without the immediate feedback it’s difficult to motivate yourself to spend that time doing promotion. Not to mention the feeling that you’re being sleazy when you self-promote.

Marketing Monday Alleviates Open Loop Feedback

Looking at traffic stats from one day to the next for most entrepreneurs doesn’t help you make decisions because those statistics on a day over day basis are generally meaningless. They can fluctuate wildly from one day to the next. I would challenge you to find a B2B company whose internet traffic isn’t generally high Monday through Friday and then significantly lower on the weekends. I know they’re out there, but most small B2B companies are open five days per week and their website traffic reflects the days of the week that their target customer base is working.

Comparing Thursday’s traffic to Wednesday’s traffic means very little. But comparing Wednesday’s traffic to the previous Wednesday can show a growth pattern. And comparing the last several weeks of traffic together is even more meaningful than that.

Marketing Monday helps to alleviate the pain of open ended feedback loops because it forces you to consider the effects of your efforts over a block of time. By considering these effects at only one point during the week, you eliminate the mental anguish caused by looking at your key performance indicators in the middle of a cycle. If you use Marketing Monday, then you’ve arbitrarily chosen one week for that cycle.

You could just as easily choose the 1st of each month or the 15th. But by choosing a single day of each week, you accomplish several other objectives simultaneously.

Marketing Monday Blocks Off Dedicated Marketing Time

When you set aside a specific block of time for marketing efforts, you’ve artificially created a scenario where you will perform some level of marketing activities each week. Marketing is a constantly evolving problem that requires regular maintenance. More about that later but for some of us, that’s a bitter pill to swallow. Personally, I’m not a fan of routine maintenance.

Most of us prefer code. Code doesn’t rust. You write it once and if it works, you don’t need to touch it again until something externally breaks it or the user requirements change. Code just runs over and over again and so long as it isn’t negatively impacting anything else, it’s fine the way it is.

With marketing, you need to be constantly measuring, experimenting and doing different tasks to keep on course. Marketing is a little bit like riding a bike. If you stop pedaling, eventually the bike is going to stop moving. If you’re not constantly making course corrections with the handle bars, you’re going to crash. The bike isn’t going to ride itself. You need to assist the mechanical system to help keep everything under control.

And just like riding a bike, you can can coast for quite a while if everything is going smoothly. You might catch a strong tailwind or go down a hill. A well timed PR piece on your company or product can do wonders for your publicity. But as with riding down a hill, eventually that’s going to end and you will need to keep pedaling. You need to perform those course corrections or your bike will crash.

Additionally, developers going down the path of entrepreneurship have a tendency to code first and do marketing later because marketing is uncomfortable. Setting aside dedicated time to marketing not only ensures that you at least do something, but you will get better at it over time. As you get better, you become more comfortable and the positive impact of those marketing efforts becomes more pronounced.

What Does Marketing Monday Look Like

If you’ve made the decision to set aside a day of the week for marketing, congratulations. You’ve taken the first step away from being Zero Marketing Joe. Now what?

The first thing you will need is a checklist that tells you what to do each Monday. Remember that part of marketing is performing routine maintenance on your marketing efforts to keep them on track. To do that, you need to know where things are at now. Here’s where metrics come into play.

Step 1: Gather Your KPI’s

The first step on your Marketing Monday checklist should be gathering the key performance indicators (KPI’s) for your business. Those KPI’s might be website traffic, email subscribers, trials, sales or a variety of other statistics.

The specific metrics you gather will depend on where you are in your business. If you’re just launching a product, then website visitors, email signups and visitor to email conversion rates will be more relevant. If your business is later stage, then the number of trials per week or the trial to paid conversion rate will be more relevant.

Each of those numbers should be gathered over a set of specific time periods so that you can compare apples to apples. The following time periods make sense as a starting point but again, if your business is in later stages, other time periods may be more appropriate.

– Past 7 days
– Past 14 days
– Past 28 days
– Past 3 months

Step 2: Compare Trends

Now that you have your data, start comparing how well your KPI’s are trending against previous time periods. Now ask yourself two questions about them:

1. Are they moving in the right direction?
2. Is it a meaningful difference?

Obviously if the numbers are going in the wrong direction, you have a problem. A more subtle problem is whether or not the numbers are showing a meaningful difference. This is partly based on percentages and partly based on gut-feel.

For example if you have 100 website visitors one week and 125 the next, it’s moving in the right direction and raw percentage-wise is a 25% growth rate. That sounds promising. But do a gut check. Is adding 25 website visitors week over week really meaningful? It’s not. You can get thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors in a single day if you post a relevant link in the right place.

If you multiplied everything by 100 and increased from 10,000 visitors one week to 12,500 the next, that would be meaningful. The percentage growth is an important indicator, but the base number must be a meaningful number too.

Speaking of meaningful numbers, look for sudden spikes in your data. These can be either positive or negative spikes and depending on the KPI can be good or bad. You want to know if these spikes were caused by dumb luck or your marketing activities. Try to trace each spike back to its source. You might be able to replicate good effects by doing more of whatever activity caused the spike.

Step 3: Identify Poor Performers

Some of your KPI’s are either underperforming or going in the wrong direction. It should be easy to identify these and treat them as problem areas that need to be addressed. Once you have this list, ask the following:

1. What explains the behavior of this KPI?
2. What things can I do to influence the behavior?
3. Which of those things will have the most impact and take the least amount of work?

Step 4: Identify Top Performers

Any of your KPI’s which are performing well for this time period should be analyzed and have an explanation applied to them. If you can attribute their performance to your activities from previous weeks, that’s fantastic. You most likely need to do more of those activities, especially if your KPI’s are performing much better than anticipated.

If you can’t explain it adequately, then either it was a fluke that you probably can’t replicate or you need more data to identify what happened. It’s not likely to be obvious from your KPI’s alone what caused the trend you’re seeing so you’ll need to dig a bit. The KPI is going to dictate where you look. If the KPI has to do with website visitors, then digging in your Google Analytics account is appropriate. If the KPI has to do with paid acquisition, then your paid acquisition channel is the place to start looking for answers.

When searching for answers, be careful that you don’t get stuck going down a rabbit hole. Find the answer to the cause of your KPI trend and move on. Don’t get distracted by “interesting, but non-relevant” data points.

Step 5: Reinforce and Execute

Now that you’ve identified what’s working, what’s not and the causes of the trends you’re seeing, you need to execute on your marketing activities. Many times, it’s appropriate to double down on the things that are working and abandon the things that aren’t. If you’re going to abandon a marketing strategy, make sure that you’ve given it enough time to work.

Something like paid acquisition should yield immediate results, while content marketing or SEO could take months to see any noticeable effect. The point is that abandoning a marketing strategy should be a conscious and calculated decision, rather than something you stop iterating on because you are afraid isn’t working. If you’re unsure of what to do, run it by a colleague or a mastermind group the next time you meet. Those people are there to help you.

Most marketing activities are a result of continuous repetition. Posting new blog posts, link building, adding pages to a website, tweaking or redesigning different content, etc. These are things you simply keep doing more of. Over time, the results compound themselves and become more effective.

Step 6: Sanity Check Your Marketing Strategy

At this point, you’ve validated the data from your KPI’s. You will have analyzed the data to make sure things are working and replaced anything that isn’t. You’re probably close to the end of your time allocated for marketing.

The last step is to look at your KPI’s and consider whether those KPI’s still make sense for you. Are those data points still the most important aspects of your business or should they be replaced?

If something is working well and you’re getting diminishing returns from the tweaks you’re making, perhaps it’s time to move on to something else. The idea is to make the entire system better and if you’re getting 90% efficiency from the second stage of your marketing system but the third stage is only at 5% efficiency, working harder on stage two won’t make stage three any better.

Put stage two on the back burner and make stage three your KPI instead. That doesn’t mean you should stop tracking that data from stage two. It only means that it’s no longer a focal point for Marketing Monday where you’re trying to adjust that number.

Another big mistake that many people make when choosing KPI’s is having too many of them. There’s a difference between tracking a data point and treating it as a point in your marketing system that needs to be adjusted. There’s a lot to be said for having just a single KPI that you’re completely and utterly obsessed with but in many businesses, that’s not realistic. Usually you will have three or four that you’re looking at with one being more important than the others.

Once you get over five or six KPI’s, things get messy. It’s really difficult to make changes in a half dozen places and expect to be able to narrow down exactly what changes caused what results. Don’t try to do too much all at once.

Bonus Step

This bonus step is brought to you by Jacob Thurman of TwoDesk Software.

Keep a journal of everything you do on Marketing Monday. Write down each experiment you start, what you were thinking when you did it, and then later, the outcomes. Spend a little bit of each Marketing Monday going back and re-reading a portion of that journal, so you only have to learn lessons once, and you don’t spend your precious marketing time re-learning or re-deciding something you already figured out months or years ago.

That’s a fantastic addition to this six-step process. The last thing you want to do is have to run an experiment again because you didn’t adequately document the results the first time.

The Goal is to Maintain Your Marketing System

What comes to mind for me when I think of a marketing system is something along the lines of the machines in a manufacturing line you might find in a semi-automated bakery. In a bakery like this, you will have a bunch of raw materials that need to be fed into the machines. Some are materials are refined and ready to be used immediately while others needs to be mixed up or massaged a bit.

If the incoming materials in the bakery are not quality ingredients, you won’t get the results you want. Either the resulting bread is completely unusable or it will be of poor quality. If it’s an intermediate step where the materials from that processing stage need to be fed into the next, the effects will cascade down the manufacturing line. The same is true of your marketing efforts. If your incoming leads are not well qualified, the results of your efforts to turn them into paying customers will be poor. You may see those effects immediately or you might not see them until the end of the line, which could take days or weeks.

In a bakery, you can try to substitute different ingredients that cost more or less and then measure the effects on the final product. The same goes for the leads you gather into your marketing system. The raw materials in your marketing system take the form of blog posts, emails to your mailing list, paid advertisements, the prospects who enter the marketing system and more.

When you think of your marketing efforts as an assembly line with lots of little switches, dials and inputs, suddenly marketing makes a lot more sense. Your job is to fine tune the various inputs and intermediate stages so you can get more performance out of the system. This produces a better system and ultimately a better business. However to accomplish that, you need to spend the time maintaining the system.

Use Marketing Monday perform regularly scheduled maintenance on your marketing system.
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The post 6 Steps for Implementing Marketing Monday first appeared on The Single Founder Blog.

This initial excitement doesn’t usually last long. Most of us last more than a week but not even half of us make it to mid-year. A mere 8% of us are able to make it to the end of the year and claim those goals as having been reached. That’s a pretty abysmal failure rate. But we all do it to some extent and the question of how this comes to pass bears some discussion.

Reflecting on 2015

I set aside some time in December specifically to reflect on my accomplishments for the past year. My most notable accomplishment was publishing The Single Founder Handbook. I was and still am proud of this accomplishment. It’s the single longest piece I’ve ever written and while I know that I’m biased in saying it’s a good book, plenty of other people have said the same thing. It’s the book that I would have wanted to read before I started down the path of being an entrepreneur a full decade ago. Some of the topics I wrote about, I learned from other people. Unfortunately many others were ones I learned from hard experiences. In some ways, I wish I hadn’t had to run into them myself, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be where I am now had I not encountered some of those challenges.

On the other extreme of the spectrum, this was also the year that I made the painful decision to stop working on AuditShark. This was a product I had dedicated the better part of the last several years to building and after extensive consideration, I felt that it was best to move on. I wanted something where I would be more successful faster and AuditShark just wasn’t going to do that for me. It was more of a situation of “maybe eventually successful” at something that was ridiculously difficult. But I had to be honest with myself about where things were at and what was realistic. You don’t get extra points for succeeding at something that’s ridiculously successful.

This particular decision involved far more personal turmoil than I’ve commonly experienced in the past. You can listen to the podcast episode where Rob Walling and I discussed this decision here, but I won’t bore you with the details of it today. That’s not the point of this post. I’ll give a post mortem on it some other time but suffice it to say, it wasn’t easy to let go.

Why do we set annual goals?

Vast numbers of people set annual goals at the start of each year because it’s an opportunity to hit the reset button on a part of our lives that we’re not happy with. We want these changes to happen but the undertaking for each one is big enough that it feels like there should be a line in the sand to mark the starting point. Nobody starts a new workout routine on a Thursday. It doesn’t make any real difference in the long run, but it “feels” better to start on a Sunday or Monday.

Similarly, the beginning of the new year feels like a good time to set goals so we have a concrete and memorable starting point from which to measure all of our progress each year.

For most “normal people”, these goals tend to be personal or career focused. These types of goals include things like getting into shape, losing weight, looking for a new job, finding that special someone, a new hobby or taking more vacations.

For the insane people entrepreneurs among us, the new year is a chance to do better than we have in the past. The new year is an opportunity to move past some of our prior failings and shortcomings so that we can build a better future for ourselves and for our families. Our goals tend to be more business oriented. These goals might include growing a mailing list by 100%, increasing revenue by 20%, quitting your day job or even just making an extra $1k/month on the side.

Very few people set goals that are completely and utterly unattainable. And yet, each year so many of us fail to reach what should otherwise be reasonable goals that countless articles are written about it. This begs the question…

Why do we fail at meeting our goals?

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich points out three reasons in particular.

Here’s why New Year’s resolutions fail:

• They’re unspecific. We say “I want to get healthy this year” but when faced with the birthday parties in March, the overtime in June, and the family vacation in August, that goal falls by the wayside.
• They’re unrealistic. “I want to go the gym 5x/week.” Really? You averaged twice a month last year. Setting unrealistic, highly aspirational goals is a quick way to guilt and failure.
• They’re based on willpower, not systems. We say, “I want to walk more” instead of parking our car 10 minutes away. We say, “I want to stop messing around and go to sleep earlier” instead of testing different ways of falling asleep (like leaving our laptop in the other room, unplugging our TV, quietly covering our partner’s face with a pillow, etc). Hey, it’s a test.

It’s difficult to take serious issue with any of the reasons that Ramit lays out. Oh, you can certainly nitpick at them but calling them flat out wrong is rather difficult. As an example of nitpicking, an unrealistic goal of going to the gym 5x/week is totally doable. Last December, I made it to the gym 6x/week for nearly the entire month. Unfortunately, I tore something in my shoulder which ended my workouts a few days early but I didn’t stop early due to lack of motivation or any personal shortcomings. I was able to manage going to the gym every day because I had a good motivation system in place for getting there.

What was that you ask? I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but one of my fatal flaws is that I have something of a “prove you wrong” streak and on this particular occasion my wife had said “I don’t think you can do it”. More on that some other time, for sure.

There are ways to do accomplish just about anything if you put your mind to it, even if it might seem on the surface to be unrealistic based on historical performance. Which again begs the question: Why do many people regularly fail to meet some of their annual goals?

There are many factors involved but if you study extremely successful people to identify the secret to their continued success, whatever their “field” might be, you’ll find the same thing over and over. If you study a marathon runner to understand how they’re able to compete in so many marathons, you’ll find that they run a lot. If you study a professional musician in an A-list band and analyze how they became successful, you’ll find that they practice playing music a lot. If you study a professional programmer, you’ll find that they write a lot of code and build a lot of side projects.

Consistent progress towards a goal is one of the key differences between people who are successful and people who aren’t. Knowing this is a key data point but it doesn’t help people to make consistent progress. After all, not everyone is born a marathon runner. And therein lies the problem.

The key to making consistent progress boils down to your motivation to do the work
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You Must Enjoy the Journey

Consider the marathon runner. She runs because she enjoys it. The musician plays his instrument because he enjoys playing. The software developer doesn’t need encouragement to write code because to her, it’s fun. I call these things “practice” and successful people don’t need to be motivated to practice. They enjoy practicing for the sake of practicing.

The rest of us see their achievements and believe those achievements to be their goals but that’s not the case. The reality is that what they want is to experience the journey and practice their craft. Their goal is to do what they love and they’re doing it every day. The achievements we recognize are a byproduct of that practice and while they’re a nice perk, those achievements are not the goals in and of themselves.

If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then a lack of motivation will inevitably follow.
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The inherent problem with using these band aids is that very few types of goals have a hard-stop at the end. There’s almost always a certain amount of effort required to maintain the results you were originally looking for. If your goal is to lose 25 lbs come hell or high water, you will find ways to motivate yourself to lose the weight.

But if you hate exercising or dieting, once you’ve achieved your goal, then what will happen? Are you going to continue doing the things you hated to keep the weight off? Probably not. It’s far more likely that you’ll scarf down Cheetos on the couch and gain most of it back within six months because after you achieved your goal, you stopped doing the things that got you there. Then you’re right back where you started. It may not happen right away, but the end result of that neglect is inevitable.

Do a Mindset Check

Before you set a goal for yourself, use the 5 Why’s method to help get to the root of what you’re really looking for. Then ask yourself if the activities involved in reaching the goal are ones that you can maintain, even after achieving that goal. If they’re not and your goal requires some level of extended maintenance, then you have a problem and need to make a decision.

Should you:

• Push through it anyway, knowing it’s going to require a ton of extended effort and several systems to keep you on track?
• Modify your goal to make it easier?
• Outsource parts that you don’t enjoy?
• Pick something else entirely?

None of these options is incorrect. However if you can’t see yourself performing maintenance effort, then chances are good that you either won’t reach your goal at all or you won’t do the work necessary to maintain that level of success afterwards. Either situation is a cause for eventual failure and that failure could very well put you in exactly the same position a year from now.

Before Setting Your Annual Goals

Ask yourself just one question about that goal. Do you want to do the work? Or are you just in love with the benefits of doing the work?

The post Hitting the Reset Button first appeared on The Single Founder Blog.