#17 Weekly Dan — Templates Everywhere

Bad luck, Product-Market Fit and traditional competitors

Hello there

This is the #17 Issue of Weekly Dan.

Welcome to 20 new people who have joined this week. You are nice.

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Every Friday, I share 5 golden nuggets with you:

• One Personal Insight

• One Marketing Tactic

• One Long-term Trend

• One Thought-provoking Question

• One Great Resource

Let’s get going.

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Personal Insight 🤯

I freaked out 2 weeks ago.

MakerBox made $284 in one week. The worst revenue in 3 months.

And we did a lot of marketing that week: Product Hunt discussions, Indie Hackers posts, Blog articles, and Affiliate partnerships.

Nothing was working. We felt miserable.

This week we were moving to Indonesia.

Haven’t worked at all. Today is the first day we’ve done some work tasks.

It’s already $727. With almost zero effort.

It’s not always about your input. Sometimes it’s just bad luck.

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Marketing Tactic 🧭

I love asking questions.

And recently, I realized my audience on Twitter enjoys answering them.

It takes less than 2 minutes to come up with an engaging question. And it’s performing better than 95% of my threads.

Try asking more questions too.

And follow these tips to get more answers:

1. Users can answer from mobile without googling

2. Users will feel good about themselves after answering your question

3. Users will benefit from reading other replies

4. There is room for jokes and sarcasm

For example:

❌ What is the best Stack Overflow discussion you’ve seen?

✅ How many times do you visit Stack Overflow a day?

Or

❌ What account on Twitter do you hate the most?

✅ Who to follow on Twitter to learn marketing?

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Long-term Trend 🛸

Templates obsession

This one is crazy.

People want to structure everything with

• Frameworks

• Templates

• Systems

• SOPs

And there is a template for everything.

For starting a side hustle, scaling an agency, improving marketing, growing a Twitter audience, building a landing page, writing a cold email, sleeping, running, networking, getting funded, passing a job interview, cleaning a dog, crafting a new framework. You know, on pretty everything.

It goes viral on Twitter. It gets hundreds of upvotes on Product Hunt. It’s in your Bookmarks, waiting for that juicy Sunday.

Here are a few ideas why this is happening:

1. Oversimplification. An expert who gives an oversimplified step-by-step guide is more engaging than an expert who only says, “it depends”. And maybe the latter is correct, but the first one will go viral.

2. Shortcut desire. People think that following some magic formula will achieve success sooner. If I just do the same steps as Entrepreneur X, I will be a millionaire by December!

Your marketing can benefit from this trend. If people are looking to systemize their life, let’s give them some templates.

1. Create a marketing freebie about frameworks

2. Create templates to cover significant use cases in your product

3. Write a Twitter thread about your favorite marketing frameworks

4. Create your framework and show how your product is built on it

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Thought-provoking Question 🔋

What is a traditional way of solving your problem?

Startup Founders often focus only on technological competitors.

If I build a habit tracker, I should analyze every existing habit tracker.

Nothing wrong with this exercise. It can bring a few insights about your marketing.

But in most niches, your main competitor is not a technological company. Instead, it’s a traditional way of solving this problem.

• For delivery service, it’s shopping at the supermarket

• For an online course, it’s buying a business book

• For therapy apps, it’s talking to friends

And every day, some people are getting tired of these traditional solutions.

So the better you understand it, the easier it will be to convert new users.

Spend 10 minutes answering these questions.

1. Find one traditional way of solving your problem

2. What do people hate about it?

3. What do people love about it?

4. At what point are people looking for new solutions?

5. How can you leverage this information in your positioning and marketing funnel?

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Great Resource 🏈

Product-Market Fit is like a tax cut.

Everyone wants it, and only 1% get it.

Jeroen Coelen knows it. That’s why he runs a newsletter called “I want Product-Market Fit”. What a coincidence, huh?

This newsletter is a pure goldmine for Indie Founders. Especially if they care somewhat about customers.

I read it. You should give it a try too.

Here are 3 issues I recommend starting with.

1. Customer-problem fit: not all problems come equal

2. ‘Any colour as long as it’s black’: the untold story

3. 4 types of problem-solution fit

If you subscribe and Jeroen won’t deliver, you can call me a donkey on Twitter.

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That’s it!

What have you enjoyed about this issue?

See you on Tuesday 👋

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Absolutely not a CTA 🗿

No pressure. Whenever you are ready.

1) Get 50 actionable marketing models in MakerBox Frameworks (What a coincidence, huh? x2)

Level up your marketing. Stress-free.

2) Let me roast your landing page.

It will be painful. You will get more paying customers from it.