What did I complete?
I was hoping to exceed expectations and goals this week to keep momentum, but I didn't get quite that far. I'm happy to report that I met my goals that I set out last week, just bummed I didn't go above and beyond.
Here's where I'm at right now for my micro-SaaS journey:
- I have picked an idea! (more on this later)
- I have a landing page completed
If I look back at the Week 1 retro, these were the two things I set out to do.
I suppose these are pretty big milestones in the life of a micro-SaaS venture, especially the whole idea thing being solidified, so perhaps in the future they will get their own blog posts.
To avoid endless tweaking and bikeshedding, I'm trying hard to stick to the 'progress over perfection' mindset.
This micro-SaaS journey is very much a hobby at this point, and being a busy dad with endless home to-do's and a day-job means that this effort only gets a few hours per week of my time. And that's on a good week! I can definitely see my time allocation for this shrinking down to < 60 minutes during busier weeks, when other priorities come and go.
Ironically, I aim to dedicate ~20 mins per week to this blog, too, so that's part of the equation as well.
That means I can't spend an entire week endlessly tweaking web site footers and making nice nav bars. I have to imagine those types of things are probably what distracts and knocks down a lot of bootstrapped businesses. Why? Because experimenting with new CSS frameworks and worrying about fonts and testing h2 vs h3 padding are the types of things I can see myself spending time on and coming away feeling accomplished.
It's easier and more fun to convince yourself you are being productive by working alongside your idea, rather than attacking the actual to-do list head-on.
All this to say: I need to continue to remind myself to focus on small wins directly related to idea validation, avoid fighting perfection, and simply just chip away at what actually will drive the micro-SaaS forward.
What's planned for the week ahead?
- Setup analytics
- Setup some sort of Google ad to test traffic
- Start with some small SEO
Now that I have a domain and landing page and wired up an email address, I can set up and configure analytics and start running an ad campaign.
Because this is a new domain and I have absolutely no content or SEO in place, I'll need to drive some internet strangers over to my landing page and see if this resonates with anyone. I know enough to understand this stuff is tricky and you can make a whole career out of ads, campaigns, cost-per-click, etc. So I'm not expecting to skim a tutorial and come away as some sort of analytics know-it-all.
I can probably fumble my way through Google Ads to set up something reasonable and hopefully not empty my savings account. My plan is to set a modest budget, say $5/day, let a simple campaign run for a week or so, and then analyze the results.
My goal is to answer the question: if someone searched a relevant term, and my ad showed up in your search results, did the ad sound good enough to click it?
This is awfully simple and I actually wouldn't surprise me to learn if this is fundamentally wrong in the world of ads/PPC/marketing/statistics etc but it makes sense to me.
Running an ad campaign like this also feels odd because I'm one of those people that never clicks ads. I run aggressive ad-blocking everywhere I can and my eyeballs simply skim by anything that even looks like an ad. Or is near an ad. Or anything that I think I've seen advertised before. So I can't easily relate to a potential customer seeing search display ads at the top of the results or on a sidebar and actually think, "This sounds helpful, let me click this ad."
Obviously, tens (or hundreds?) of millions of dollars are spent this way, and the internet practically runs on ads and e-commerce, so I guess I shouldn't find any of this unusual.
So to summarize this weeks goal: get page views from ads. I have a domain and a simple index.html and my goal this week is to get some website visitors. Hopefully with some basic ads and non-intrusive analytics I can start to form a good hypothesis on if this concepts makes sense.
A sizable area of concern: I'm not actually convinced I know what my goalposts are for this early ad investment. If I get 10 people to my landing page from ads, is that enough? Does that validate my idea? Should I start collecting email addresses too? When do I pause or stop burning my $5/day on ads? Is my super basic PPC campaign going to actually give me CTR and results that are statistically significant?
Rather than stress about answering all these questions now, and settling in to a "analysis paralysis" vibe that is all-too-familiar with how I typically roll, I'm going to let these ads run for a week and just see what happens.
I probably need to burn a first week anyways if I want to learn my way around the reporting and understanding what tracking options I have before I'm going to produce anything meaningful. I'm not going to be able to move forward without having some sort of activity to look at.
So in the spirit of continuing to take baby steps and look for quick wins, I'm going to just get a basic ad campaign up and plugged in and go from there. A little reckless with lack of planning, but I have momentum that could disappear any day now!
An analogy to how I'm feeling right now: "I'm going to start the car and head down the driveway, even if I don't know where I'm going. I need to leave the driveway anyways if I'm ever going to get somewhere."
Misc thoughts
Getting back in to a routine with running and strength training, and I'm already seeing a noticeable difference in how I feel. Having some sort of recurring exercise definitely always gives me energy and elevates my general mood, so I'm really dumbfounded as to why I fall out of these routines. I usually have a couple solid weeks or even months of regularly exercising, something minor will pop up (mild illness like a cold, or even just a long weekend out of town) and I fall off the wagon.
Here's to hoping this is the start of a long stretch of routine exercise (of course I say that every year).
I still want to change this blog theme too but that will continue to be low on the priority list, something to save for a rainy day.
Snow on the ground here and it's actually kind of fun to have it around again, it's been awhile since we've had more than just a dusting. Sleds and snowballs made appearances this weekend and those are ingredients for a good family weekend in my book.