Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • I didn’t really have anything that felt like a fail this week

Results:  

  • MME Revenue:
    • MME $1988
    • Systemly Revenue – We’re at 15 customers (2 of which are 1 off projects and 2 prospects on the horizon)
      • One-time Revenue = $1500
      • MRR: $4689 but the sales call today should put us over $5k
  • 2 – New customer launch calls
  • Brought on 1 new customer
  • 1 sales call later today (as we record on Fridays)
  • We lost our first customer which I sort of expected but had a really great “exit” conversation and I don’t know if I’ll even say lost as we’ll most likely be helping them again but the level of support they need is lower than what we are offering but since they are one of our earlier customers we’re working on some level of plan to support them.
  • I said I was going back to zero based calendar which I’ve been doing for the most part but started a new “to do” style thing called Bullet Journal which you can check out at BulletJournal.com. it’s a pretty interesting way to organize your day, month and 6 months as well as have a good way to organize the notes you take throughout the day. So I’m giving that a shot for the next couple of weeks to see if it sticks.
  • I shared the next round of website updates with the mastermind group and got some more good feedback. I’ve decided I’m taking what  I have and the wireframes I’ve sketched and bringing them to someone to finalize the job. I have conversations with 2-3 people that I think would be able to help so I’m excited for the evolution of this and getting this bad boy live.
  • Standard support work
    • Built a really cool marketing campaign that I think is going to generate one of our customers a lot of money
  • I put together 5 or so blog post topics that I’ll start writing this coming week
  • Identified the remaining MVSOP (minimum viable SOP’s) and I’ve begun talking to a few candidates to join our team as a junior Infusionsoft support person
  • Zero to scale insiders monthly call which was fun and I think Sean who was on the hot seat got a lot of value
  • I am now reading Ask by Ryan Levesque which has been interesting so far.

Plans:

  • Interview a few candidates for junior support
  • Share mockups with 2 designers to get quotes
  • Write 1 blog post for blog
  • Get 1 new customer
  • Setup a drip campaign in Convertkit for my personal blog to play with that tool more
  • Sarah starts 5 weeks straight of working nights so I want to make sure I adjust my work schedule a bit to spend time with her and also not overwork. I’d like to spend my evenings reading, trying to make new meals and on planning but with not a lot of overkill cuz I don’t want to be working 24/7 for these 5 weeks either.

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Didn’t fully complete the first sprint for our agile marketing approach. Did start getting tasks setup though.

Results:

  • $27.8k MRR – we gained a couple and lost a couple, but added more revenue through the software. We’re still dealing with the fallout from when our software was experiencing major issues.
  • In person sales meeting with a prospect. Went well and they could also be an integration partner once we open up the public API. We’ll see what happens there.
  • Had a call with a sales person where we just weren’t on the same page. We had our software issues which impacted some of his deals he closed which he lost confidence in, and then we had several changes that impacted his role like changing commissions, tasks, etc.
    • I think for the most part, it’s safe to assume your first sales person won’t work out just because of all the things you learn when bringing them in. That said, we still have a full-time sales person and a customer of ours which helps us out from time to time. Going to stick with this for now.
    • Our plan will be to build the sales team locally and have them in an office at some point in the first quarter next year.
  • Began planning our agile marketing approach. Evaluated Trello, Teamwork, Flow, and some others. Ultimately, decided to use Zenhub!
    • We needed to be able to track sprints, which you can do using milestones in Zenhub.
    • The tags and communication with Slack is exactly what we needed. Since it mirrors our dev setup, it keeps things unified as well which is really nice.
  • Set up an account with Tend.io. Trying this before trying Mixpanel. Our goal is to use Tend.io to determine what marketing channels are leading to revenue.
  • AUA Call – where we had an Insider member on the hotseat where we dove into growing his SEO agency.
  • Interview Rick Mulready regarding Facebook ads. That episode will be airing next Thursday and was good timing as we’re now starting to prepare our marketing efforts. Still probably at least a month or so away from diving fully into Facebook ads, but we at least have a plan of action for when we do.
  • Spent a lot of time working with our engineers working on the product. Getting better and better every day which is fun. Still some obvious bugs to fix yet, but I have intentionally been holding off on scheduling and planning new sprints just so we can get caught up, implement more testing, and really evaluate the roadmap going forward.
  • Listened to this podcast http://thisweekinstartups.com/daniel-ek-founder-spotify/ about how Spotify got started with the founder Daniel Ek (eck). I originally heard about this episode through the Podcast Wire Weekly (next week Greg can discuss it). I signed up for the newsletter awhile back and Erik does a great job of recapping some of the best startup focused podcast episodes out there. I think the website is thepodcastwire.com, but we’ll link it up in the show notes if you want to check that out.
  • Micah and the team spent most of the week preparing for a new customer interfacing process where we share the work we’re doing (like email sequences and the lists that we’re building) as well as finalizing and rolling out the new weekly reporting process.

Plans:

  • Finish setting up our first marketing sprint inside of Zenhub.
  • Incorporate a weekly update meeting. Plan to incorporate a 15 minute standup meeting Monday mornings where I run through everything we’re working on.
    • Should help get all of us on the same page
    • I think will help camaraderie given we are remote
  • Help the wife go through next steps with our Amazon product idea
  • Finish my portion of our Zero to Scale lead magnet where we share all the tools we use.

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