Internet outage, Story View updates and Gift Hunt results

This is my first weekly backlog post. Writing a summary at the end of every day about what I was working on makes it a bit easier to get over the feeling I'm not doing enough. Although, I still have mixed feelings about the results.

2019.11.04. Monday

Today I changed a few things on the mobile version of the Gift Hunt landing page after I find out that on the subpages there is no call to action element. So if someone visits those pages eg after a Google search, they won't be able to purchase the plugin right from there, only if they visit the homepage. I don't want to make it that hard, so I added a CTA to the header and to the footer as well.

I've also set up my first Facebook ad to promote the plugin. I wanted to create a Google search ad first, but based on the keyword and Google Trends research I made, people are not really looking for these kinds of plugins at the moment.

The Facebook ad will run for one week, and I set the spending limit to $100. We'll see how it works.

And this was the first day I started to write my Daily Backlogs 😊

2019.11.05. Tuesday

I had to rearrange my tasks for today as I didn't have a proper internet connection. I lost my connection around 10:30 AM and 6 hours later I'm still waiting for a resolution from my provider.

I wanted to do some research for Gift Hunt but I didn't want to use all my mobile data for that, so instead, I was working on Story View. I added a new function to it that makes it possible to display the latest stories in the widget section. This could help content creators to drive more traffic to their stories from other parts of their website.

I'll roll out the new feature tomorrow and I'll also send an email about it to the customers. This will also be a great opportunity to let them know about Gift Hunt. I'll send them a discount code that they can use to purchase Gift Hunt if they are interested.

Early morning I had my second customer for Gift Hunt, that made it pretty easy to get out of the bad :)

2019.11.06. Wednesday

Back online 🥳 The Facebook ad for Gift Hunt was approved last night and I had a few visits from it already. I hope I'll have some customers as well.

I started the day by changing the content of the email that recipients get when they download the free version of Story View. I added a small footer to it that promotes Gift Hunt. Note to my future self: spend more time on building a database of potential customers.

I also rolled out the latest version of Story View (1.6.0) today and sent an email about it to my customers. And I finally updated the Story View milestones on Indie Hackers.

I spent the rest of the day spreading the word about Gift Hunt, mainly in Facebook groups and I also got in touch with those who wrote about Story View previously. I hope Gift Hunt would be interesting for them as well.

2019.11.07. Thursday

I spent most of the day trying to figure out how to better promote my products (mainly Story View, Gift Hunt, and Discount Hunt) to potential customers. I've read several articles but most of them were around the same topic. Based on one of the articles, I've added screenshots to my landing pages because even though I've made a few videos about the frontend and the backend of the plugins, it looks like most of the visitors don't watch them. I hope these images will help them to get a better overview of the core functions of the products.

Posting Gift Hunt to Facebook groups doesn't seem to worth anything at the moment. I didn't get any reaction in the past 24 hours.

I started collecting Shopify stores I can promote Discount Hunt to. I'll spend most of the day tomorrow by sending them emails about the app.

2019.11.08. Friday

Well, today wasn't really exciting. As I planned yesterday, I spent most of my time searching for Shopify stores I can promote Discount Hunt to and reaching them out. Luckily, I've found more than 70, and I sent all of them a short message about the app. This was really time-consuming and I'm not sure how effective it will be but I had to try it 😊

Yesterday I've found a project-based remote job that looks promising so today I sent my application to them as finding a short term remote project to support bootstrapping is one of my goals for a long time now.

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To tell you the truth, I was hoping that by the end of this week I'll have more customers for Gift Hunt. I know I didn't spend all my time distributing it, but I tried a few things. For this product, the timing is more important than in other cases because I think it's more effective when people use it around holidays. I know there is more than a month until Christmas but that's why I think this is the right time to start using it.

I reached out to WordPress related magazines for a review but it looks like they are focusing on paid "partnerships" and I completely understand that but at the moment their offers are higher than I can afford. Eg if I pay $300 for an article, I have to sell 15 copies of the plugin just to get that money back. That doesn't look a great deal at the moment :)

I have to figure out something else.