Weekly backlog 04.

2019.11.25-29.

Short summary:

• 🏗️ Gift Hunt updates about pro features
• 🥳 New Discount Hunt customer
• 😔 I have to pay for another monthly service
• ✍️ I finally finished the guest post about Gift Hunt
• 🤗 Another great chat with a fellow maker

2019.11.25. Monday

I started the week by publishing last week’s backlog and while I was editing it I realized that although my goal was for the past week to distribute Discount Hunt I barely worked on that. I have to change this somehow. The problem is that even though I know this is a really important part to succeed I really don’t like to do it. Probably, if I could find the reason why I feel this way, I can also do something to change that feeling.

Added a new subpage to Gift Hunt with details about the pro features (https://gifthuntplugin.com/gift-hunt-pro-features.html) and shared it again on Reddit but this time as a free plugin. The last time the premium version got only downvotes, I hope that won’t be the case with the free one. We’ll see.

To visualize different features of my products I like to use small animations because I think those can help better understand how they work. But creating these animations is really time-consuming so in most cases, I end up using something that I’m not satisfied with. I wish there would be a tool that I could use for that.

2019.11.26. Tuesday

A new store installed Discount Hunt this morning and they haven’t uninstalled it immediately, so I’m hopeful and excited :D And it’s still installed on a store from last week, the 5 day trial ended today so I hope that they’ll keep it and will use it.

More Discount Hunt news:

• I implemented an extra security layer to the app previously which turned out to be too strict and in some cases didn’t let visitors submit the data collection form, luckily the customer who installed the app this morning noticed it and I was able to fix it in a few minutes
• An agency reached out that they’d like to use the app for an Easter egg hunt and they had a few questions about it. Their message was useful because of 3 things:
  • they were asking about features that I haven’t implemented yet, but it’s on my todo list, and this confirmed that these are features that customers would use and not something that only sounds great in my mind
  • it worth the time to write a few examples, because Easter egg hunt is one of them and I think they found the app because of that
  • based on their questions, I have to add more info to the landing page

Today, I finally finished the first draft of the guest post I’m writing about Gift Hunt. I think it took me about 6 hours from start to finish. It’s not a long article (about 1100 words) but when it comes to writing, I just can’t find the right way to do it faster, better. I have to learn to do this better because creating content for my products is something I can’t avoid.

2019.11.27. Wednesday

I spent most of the day working on freelance projects and on a side project I want to launch at the end of the week or at least next Monday, Tuesday. I call it side project because it is something I want to work on next to my products and freelance projects, so it’s not something I will focus on full time. Details soon.

And today I was lucky again to have a conversation with a fellow maker. Now I know that I’d like to do this on a regular basis. It is really interesting to learn more about the ideas others have and the way they are thinking about different questions. Maybe I’ll build something around this in the future. To tell you the truth, I already have a few ideas :D But those wouldn’t generate any revenue and I still have to focus on that. So maybe later.

2019.11.28. Thursday

I still had to make a few adjustments in the guest article I’m writing about Gift Hunt and because the target audience of the magazine where it will be (hopefully) published is mainly focusing on WooCommerce I had to set up a demo store where everyone can take a closer look at the plugin and how it works. As my target audience is almost the same, I changed the default WordPress demo link on the landing page to the URL of this new demo store. I hope it’ll be easier to understand how the plugin works.

The other half of the day was about my freelance project and some personal stuff. I had to find an electrician because the switch in our bathroom became broken. Actually, it’s been broken for a month or two now, but we were still able to use it, so I didn’t feel the pressure to find someone to fix it. Not because it’s a really difficult job to do (probably I could do it with the necessary tools) but because finding a professional (a real one, not a “handyman”) is the hardest part. And I don’t like that. There is a site in Hungary that you can use to find experts, so I went with that and I think I broke their system by just hitting refresh in the middle of the searching process. Long story short, tomorrow an electrician will come to take a look at the broken switch and now I'm itching to build a better version of the "expert finder" site :D

2019.11.29. Friday

I deep-dived into my drawer because I want to sell some of my old stuff I’m not using anymore. Mainly old phones and laptops. If I can sell them, I’ll use the money to a) pay for the services I’m using to run my products and b) to buy ads to promote my products. Probably the money won’t be cover both, so the order is reversed this case (ads first, services second). I’m not looking for a huge pile of cash, just a few dollars (~100USD) but that’s just enough to run a small campaign.

Guest post about Gift Hunt is in the finish, I hope it’ll go live sometime next week.

Last night, I received a notification from SendGrid that I used all my free credits for this month so I need to upgrade my account. I’m using their service for Discount Hunt (when someone finds the gift and fills the form, the app sends an email with the code to the lucky users) and I was surprised because I have 2 active customers at the moment and I didn’t expect to send more than 100 emails in a month. It turned out that in just one day there were more than 100 hunters on one of the stores. That’s pretty neat, even though now I have to pay for another service :D

I also started to work on a dedicated landing page that I can use in the ads I’ll set up for Discount Hunt. I haven’t finished it yet, but I want to during the weekend.

---

Todo for next week:

• (from last week) create a separate landing page for Discount Hunt to optimize Google Ads
• (from last week) create a different mutation of the Gift Hunt article for Discount Hunt and use it in Facebook ads
• made some changes on the Gift Hunt landing page about pricing
• launch “secret” sideproject