Hello there
This is the #11 Issue of Weekly Dan.
Welcome to 22 new people who have joined this week. You are nice.
Every Friday, I share 5 golden nuggets with you:
One Personal Insight
One Marketing Tactic
One Product for Inspiration
One Thought-provoking Question
One Great Resource
Let’s get going.
Personal Insight 🤯
I am building a new product — Sponsor This Newsletter.
It will be a directory of newsletters that are looking for sponsorship posts. I will sell it to startups that want high-quality traffic from a new acquisition channel.
It’s a fun project, but I’ve noticed that my attitude toward it has changed.
When I came up with this idea in September, it sounded too good to be true. I imagined tons of customers, press mentions, and instant virality.
You know, the stuff that never happens. It was my overromantization period.
It ended when I started building the product.
I’ve researched competitors, run customer discovery surveys, and got 15 newsletters on board. Now I think the product is doomed.
This is my overdramatization period. It will end with the first paying customer.
I know this because it’s always the same with the new MakerBox product. From love to hate in 1 week.
Do you have the same pattern?
Marketing Tactic 🧭
No one has ever said, “This is too much social proof for our product”.
I definitely haven’t.
That’s why I love getting reviews from opinion leaders.
User testimonials are great, but having reviews from niche celebrities is a superpower.
Let’s get you some.
Find opinion leaders
Whose opinion do people trust in your niche?
What accounts will grow dramatically in the future?
What accounts are more likely to agree to your offer?
Reach out to them with your offer
Engage with their content for 2 days
Write a highly-personalized message
Give your product or service for free in exchange for the testimonial
Follow-up not more than one time
Leverage the testimonial
Add a new landing page block with testimonials from opinion leaders
Add this testimonial to the welcome email sequence
Add this testimonial to your pricing page
Trust sells.
Product for Inspiration 💫
Writing is the sexiest skill to learn in 2022.
It’s a rising tide. The easiest way to benefit from it — build a writing tool.
Meet, Typeshare. A platform to start writing with templates and publish it on multiple platforms.
Here are 3 things you should steal from them:
Clear positioning. Typeshare could say, “Everything you need to write online”. But it’s less catchy for newcomers. They know that newbies want to start.
Nail one use case. It’s appealing but not effective to cover every possible Persona. A smaller market leads to higher conversion.
Visually desirable. Everyone loves templates. But this visualization makes templates x10 better. Even I want to spend 50 bucks on the template I don’t need.
The text doesn’t sell. But sick visualization does. Do you leverage it enough?
Embedded virality. Typeshare has a unique tweet format — atomic essays. It’s so eye-catching that people ask how to make it.
Make your product more sharable. Let customers sell your product without you. So you can finally enjoy building features.
Thought-provoking Question 🔋
Imagine that in 6 months you will shut down your startup.
What would be the #1 reason for this?
Both first-time Founders and second-time Founders know the biggest vulnerabilities of their products. But only the latter embrace and try to solve them.
For my first startup, it was huge costs on salaries. We hired too many people, lost money every month, and spent our funding too soon.
For MakerBox, it is a Product Hunt dependency. If we fail our launch, we don’t break ramen profitability.
That’s why we are solving this vulnerability:
We grow our email list to control the audience
We launch high-ticket products to upsell existing customers
We are creating an SEO-friendly blog
We will build an audience on TikTok (soon)
We will launch a subscription product (soon)
What about you?
Great Resource 🏈
I’ve read hundreds of articles about growth.
Most repeat the same platitudes: Facebook's A-ha moment, Dropbox's growth loop, and Airbnb’s professional photos.
But there is one article I can reread annually — Growth Framework by Brian Balfour.
It’s a Growth Bible:
How to go beyond Product-Market Fit?
What is the ARPU <> CAC spectrum?
How to price your product?
That’s it!
What have you enjoyed about this issue?
See you on Tuesday 👋
Absolutely not a CTA 🗿
1) Get more actionable marketing ideas in MakerBox Workbook.
Crush your marketing goals without going crazy.
2) Let me roast your landing page.
It will be painful. You will get more paying customers from it.