Last week I said I was at a point of unusual clarity with Snip. I still am. Here’s kind of my plan:

1. Fix all of the products “critical” defects to the point where I’m not too ashamed of the product to recommend it (not a ton of work)
2. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
4. Pay a professional designer to help make my marketing site not embarrassingly terrible
5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

Basically the idea is to turn the event of getting a new free trial signer-upper from, “Oh, fuck! Somebody signed up for a free trial! They’re not going to be able to figure out the product and they’re probably going to accidentally archive themselves like everybody does in the beginning. Let me real quick email them and have them never respond, because no one ever does. I won’t call them because I know from trying that a billion times that that doesn’t work. Some day I really gotta fix this goddamn onboarding process. Goddamn it.” I want to change the feeling from that to, “Yes! Somebody signed up for a free trial! Let me check the logs to see how far into the 8 onboarding steps they made it. Maybe the lifecycle emails I have set up will prompt then to get unstuck.” I want to feel good when somebody signs up for a trial, not feel like I just got pantsed in public.

And of course I’ve changed plans a billion times over the course of getting Snip off the ground, but I would actually be surprised if I fundamentally deviate from this plan. I don’t think I’ll ever go back and wish my onboarding process sucked again, or that those bugs would come back. I’m getting engagement on my site now even with the little traffic I have, so I think I have enough to roughly measure the effectiveness of the funnel. When I want more traffic, I know that in addition to SEO I can do AdWords, trade magazine ads, etc. and I would LIKE to have a strong funnel behind all that traffic when I spend the money to get it.

I expect 1-4 up there to take a number of months, so unfortunately the time between now and then might be kind of boring. It feels weird since I’m not trying for or even hoping for new customers until #4 is done. What would actually be great is if at some point I can afford, financially, to just take a month and knock out all that shit at once. Worst case scenario, it takes a long time, but that’s okay.