October 27, 2019
Marketing misadventures
What have I been doing in October (besides neglecting to update this newsletter?) Well, marketing things. Or things that, if I squint at them, I can call them marketing things.
Let me back up a bit. I’m in a new house, and one of my dreams for my starter home was to get a personal home gym. I don’t need much — a power rack, a bench, some dumbbells — but my basement is kinda janky in terms of layout and ceiling height. I found a compact rack by Rogue (costs around $3,000 and probably a handful more in terms of finishing the basement so I can do things like drop 315lbs without being terrified I am scarring my estate forever) — right at the same time I found a YMCA (costs around $50/mo) five blocks away from my place.
I sighed, I cancelled my order, I signed up for the YMCA. There’s a genre of decision that I can try and fool myself into making under the guise of financial jurisprudence — well, if you do the math, the home gym pays for itself in five years!. The voice that tells me that is also the voice that tries to get me to spend $25 on an Uber because it’ll save me fifteen minutes (your time is worth more than $100/hour, right?)
Which is also the voice that tells me to spend a month trying to rearchitect the site to make it easier to create marketing pages rather than just create the dang marketing pages (if you could push and deploy new pages without dealing with your main application, you’ll churn them out much faster!). And it’s, like, there’s some truth to all of those things, but it also hinges on the (often faulty) assumption that I’m perfectly efficient with my time, and there’s no value in the contravariant.
So rather than do what I dubbed Project Agora, I’m just....doing the boring work of doing marketing stuff:
- Competitor comparison pages. (My partner complained that “these are too nice”, which I think is a fair and apt complaint — but there are a lot of good tools out there, and I want people to use the ones that work best for them!)
- Webflow and Squarespace tutorials.
- Working on a new landing page. (This is janky. Have fun!)
Sales and revenue
Flat, which I’m kind of okay with. I am…thinking seriously about new pricing models, the goals of which being more to make customer service and operational toil scaleable. (Everyone would be grandfathered into whatever’s cheapest for them, but if you have serious qualms about me potentially going from a free plan to a $7/month plan, let me know!)
A glimpse into a truly terrifying commit
(What, if anything, would you be interested in hearing about Buttondown’s codebase?)