Author Archives: Jason

A rough picture of my marketing system for Ben Franklin Labs

3 Replies

A common problem for freelancers/consultants is the “boom or bust” nature of freelancing. You oscillate between too much work and too little. I believe this is a fixable problem, and I think the answer to this problem is probably a solid marketing system that has been tested and proven to consistently bring in new work.

I think the most ideal possible marketing system is one that somehow operates without any involvement from the business owner. I realize that’s not realistic, but it’s the end of the spectrum toward which I’m always trying to head. The other extreme end of the marketing system spectrum is a “system” that’s nothing but desperate, frenzied cold-calling.

What I do think is realistic is a marketing system that’s comprised of activities and assets where the assets are continually becoming more and more valuable and effective and the activities are continually becoming easier, more enjoyable and less time-intensive. For example, attending a Chamber of Commerce meeting is a marketing activity. When I meet someone, I hand him or her my business card which is a marketing asset. My card may send my new friend to my business’s website which is another marketing asset. The more effective my business card and business website are at getting any particular prospect to know, like and trust me, the less time and effort are needed on my part to achieve the know/like/trust thing.

So activities are gradually replaced by assets. But in the beginning I didn’t really have any marketing assets, so all I could start with was activities. Below is a list of my different marketing tactics which are each a mix of activities and assets. Below is my first-ever attempt to document my marketing system for Ben Franklin Labs, so consider it a first draft. Both the marketing system itself and this written representation of the marketing system have huge room for improvement, but I hope this snapshot of where I stand in October 2014 is somewhat useful/interesting.

Attending networking groups

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: 5+ (don’t know exactly)
Number of engagements won through this tactic: none yet
Description: I’ve been attending between 0 and 3 Chamber of Commerce events per month since I joined in spring 2014. I’ve also been randomly attending some other events, including a BNI group and a couple BNI-copycat groups. I plan to join the BNI group.
Funnel steps: meet a member, chat about business, follow-up email, one-on-one meeting, then either a) sales meeting(s) then engagement start or b) referral to someone else who has a need.

Attending local tech meetups (sometimes as a presenter, sometimes not)

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: at least a couple (don’t know exactly)
Number of engagements won through this tactic: 1
Description: I’ve been attending the GrWebDev meetup and the Grand Rapids Ruby Meetup, both somewhat sporadically. I’ve been plugged into this “scene” forever and so I’m pretty well-connected with the people who come to these meetings.
Funnel steps: meet a member, chat about web development, see each other around multiple times, maybe be seen when I’m presenting, get an email saying the person’s company needs a developer and asking about my availability

Attending tech conferences

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: 1
Number of engagements won through this tactic: 1
Description: Every year since 2012 (so 3 times) I’ve gone to Windy City Rails. Every time I go I make a few more solid connections (and strengthen existing ones) and I also get pushed forward a little as an engineer. I go to WCR because it’s within driving distance. I think I should probably be going to more like 2-3 tech conferences per year rather than just one.
Funnel steps: meet an attendee, chat about web development and probably career, follow-up email, maybe ask the new friend for a referral, maybe receive an inquiry email later down the road

Public technical writing

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: none yet
Number of engagements won through this tactic: none yet
Description: I’ve been producing technical content for a number of outlets: BenFranklinLabs.com, AngularOnRails.com and a couple of other business’ sites. AngularOnRails.com is where I’ve put most of my content in 2014. Both AoR and BFL get good organic search traffic (1000+ clicks per month). AoR has gotten more attention, having been featured in Ruby Weekly and JavaScript Weekly. (At least I’m pretty sure it’s been in both. I get the two mixed up. It’s at least been in one multiple times.) I’ve also been in Ruby Weekly and/or JavaScript Weekly for the content I’ve written for other people’s sites. Some of my articles have gotten passed around on Twitter quite a bit, and at least two have reached the first page of Hacker News. I think my biggest couple days ever were about 5000 visits each. Although my writing seems to have gotten a relatively large amount of attention, I haven’t yet gotten a single lead from it. The reason for that could be that I haven’t yet put more than about 30 minutes of effort into trying to build a funnel around my writing.
Funnel steps: visitor reads a few articles over time, sends inquiry about my availability (this funnel has never worked and is probably naive and probably needs some more thinking put behind it)

“Staying in touch”

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: none yet
Number of engagements won through this tactic: none yet
Description: I’m not sure what a good label for this tactic would be, but every month or so I go through my CRM and reach out to people I haven’t talked to in a while. I might just send a quick email asking how things are going. I might share a resource. I might invite the person to lunch, coffee, or some other kind of in-person meeting.
Funnel steps: I engage with the person however many times, then eventually the person sends me either a referral or asks me him- or herself about a potential project.

Referrals

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: can’t remember – I think 3
Number of engagements won through this tactic: 1
Description: Referrals can of course be solicited or unsolicited. Sometimes during my “staying in touch” rounds I ask for referrals. Sometimes people send me referrals out of the blue. My understanding and expectation concerning referrals is that they’ll naturally become more numerous as my list of contacts and list of clients and past clients grows, although it would definitely also be good to put some sort of formal referral system in place.
Funnel steps: I ask for a referral and get one, or a referral comes to me unsolicited.

Talent marketplaces

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: 10+, don’t know exactly
Number of engagements won through this tactic: 1
Description: I haven’t done a lot of this so far. Talent marketplaces vary widely in quality. What I mean by talent marketplace is something like ODesk (at the shitty end of the spectrum) or AirPair (at the totally awesome end of the spectrum). AirPair has sporadically sent me “expert requests” throughout the year and I’ve done a few mentoring sessions with them. The work is easy and can pay well, although so far it seems like only a good source of supplemental income, a “side dish” as opposed to a “main course”.
Funnel steps: I get an “expert request” email, I respond to it with my pitch and availability, the prospect books a session with me

Engaging with recruiters

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: dozens, maybe hundreds, mostly low-quality
Number of engagements won through this tactic: 1
Description: I’m constantly getting emails and phone calls from recruiters. Most of these leads are junk. Most of them are for either full-time permanent positions or “staff aug” positions where you’re technically a contractor but you have to commit to 12 months and work in the office (which would usually mean out-of-state relocation), and the only difference between doing that and being an employee is you maybe get paid a little more. And my rate these days is almost always way higher than staffing agencies can afford to pay, so I almost never engage with recruiters. But once in a while it works. Just last week I accepted an offer from a recruiter where all the factors came together in just the right way for it to make sense for all three parties (myself, the staffing agency and the client). This kind of thing is super rare, though.
Funnel steps: recruiter calls and/or emails me, I respond, we have some interviews, we do some negotiation, I get an offer

Job boards

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: dozens (haven’t kept track because I’m stupid)
Number of engagements won through this tactic: 4
Description: Job boards for me include craigslist, WeWorkRemotely.com, and this service called Workshop where I get a daily email with a curated list of job board leads. It’s pretty simple: I scan the job boards and send pitches. With 4 engagements won through this tactic it’s been my most “successful” marketing tactic so far, but it’s kind of a lame marketing tactic. It’s time-consuming and the prospects tend to be looking for “commodity developers”, meaning the prospect has a very rigid range of compensation they’re willing to consider. It’s also a 100% “me-chase-them” marketing tactic as opposed to a “they-chase-me” tactic. I intend to eventually outgrow this tactic. The good thing about job boards, though, is that there’s not much system-building necessary in order for it to work. You can just go try to find a client. But this also means there’s more competition from other vendors and more noise on the prospect’s end.
Funnel steps: I send my pitch, prospect responds with questions or to schedule a conversation, we talk, we start the project

Twitter

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: a few (don’t know exactly)
Number of engagements won through this tactic: none yet
Description: Every once in a while I’ll search Twitter for “looking for rails”, “looking for angular”, “seeking rails”, etc. Sometimes the tweets that come up are promising, like “Looking for a Rails developer IMMEDIATELY. Email me at johnsmith@example.com”. I’ve generated some promising conversations this way, although no projects won yet. Twitter as a lead source has many of the same problems as job boards, so I plan to also outgrow this tactic eventually.
Funnel steps: I respond to the call for a developer, prospect responds with questions or to schedule a conversation, we talk, we start the project

Email newsletter

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: none yet
Number of engagements won through this tactic: none yet
Description: I have a list of about 30 or so people who have opted into my newsletter. They’re almost all local, and if I recall correctly they’re mostly business owners. (I should probably have a better handle on who’s on my list.) For a while I was pretty good at sending my newsletter but for the last few months I’ve been totally sucking at it.
Funnel steps: newsletter subscriber receives the newsletter however many times (and maybe responds to questions in the newsletter emails), then sends a referral or inquires about an engagement, either unprompted or as a response to a direct offer or request for a referral

Casual conversations throughout the normal course of life

Number of leads generated from this tactic so far: none that I can recall (at least not in 2014)
Number of engagements won through this tactic: none yet
Description: Zig Ziglar said “always be prospecting”. So I am. I almost always carry at least a couple business cards with me in my wallet, and I meet people in my day-to-day life with surprising frequency whose lives in some way “touch” what I do professionally. I’m very conscious not to go into “sales mode” with people at inappropriate times, but there’s of course a difference between trying to sell to everyone with a pulse and a wallet and simply keeping your eyes open for when legitimate opportunities present themselves.
Funnel steps: meet someone at a party/grocery store/dark alley, talk about something to do with business or computers, get to know each other over time, the person asks me if I’d be available to do a project

How October 2014 is different than October 2013

Leave a reply
  • I’m working at a rate that’s 2X what I had worked for most of 2013, sometimes 3X
  • I have 9 Snip customers instead of the 3 or 4 I had in October 2013
  • Snip is profitable
  • I have the satisfaction of knowing I can earn a whole year’s “real” income while self-employed
  • The Snip website has a couple opt-in forms and Olark chat, which are collecting leads, which didn’t exist in 2013
  • I have a dedicated co-working space that’s a lot better than my previous co-working membership
  • I have a bunch of business relationships that I didn’t have before

How I’d like October 2015 to be different from October 2014

  • Working a max of 20 hours per week on non-Snip stuff
  • At least 50 Snip customers

Weekly Snip Report, October 22nd, 2014

Leave a reply

I missed last week’s update. Sorry.

A cool thing happened between now and last time I posted: a new prospect called my 800 number, started a trial, gave me her credit card info, and got fully onboarded into the product. She said she tried some of the other products and she liked how user-friendly Snip is. If she becomes a paying customer she’ll be customer #9 and the second out-of-state customer, the second customer who was “attracted” rather than “hunted”.

I also discovered that my Olark chat had been broken for a couple weeks. For some reason even though I knew I hadn’t been getting chats for a while, it didn’t occur to me to just try to chat with myself and see it it worked. It didn’t. That’s fixed now, and in the last few days I’ve gotten a few chatters.

I also had this really annoying problem where my Google Analytics goals were inexplicably not working. I thought I had run out of things to try, and then finally, I realized that my WordPress URLs have trailing slashes but my GA goals didn’t have trailing slashes. That was the problem. My goals work now. I’m now looking forward to being able to attribute conversions to channels, particularly AdWords vs. non-PPC channels. How much do I have to spend on AdWords in order to get a customer? If I can know this number, and get it down to at or below what I believe my customer LTV to be, then I can confidently pour more and more money into AdWords (provided the ROI continues to be there).

Paying for a professional redesign of my marketing site is looking like more of a remote possibility at this point in time. A number of forces came together to mostly wipe out the money I had saved up over the last several months. The only place substantially more money will come from is my consulting business, and I’m of course always trying to make as much money as possible in that area, so I don’t need to deviate from my current course to save up more money. It’s just a matter of time.

I want to review my most recent plan that I shared:

  1. Pay for professional site redesign
  2. Turn on Google AdWords (done)
  3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
  4. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
  5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

#1 is currently out of reach and #2 is done so that leaves:

  1. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
  2. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
  3. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

I’m actually re-thinking the steps of my funnel after experiencing some recent activity. Here’s how I was originally conceiving the funnel:

Home page -> enter email to view demo -> view pricing page -> sign up for a trial -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> enter email to view demo -> read autoresponder emails -> sign up for a trial -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> pricing page -> fill out pricing form -> receive phone call -> start a trial -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> chat with me on Olark -> invited by me for a phone call -> start a trial -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> call 800 number -> start a trial -> become a customer

My most promising prospects so far have involved a phone call. What if I just funnel everything into a phone call? I think a phone call is probably a higher-commitment action than filling out a form, but it’s much easier to build trust over the phone than over the web. If the difference is between closing, for example, 5% of 40% (2%) and closing 50% of 20% (10%), then the tradeoff could make sense. So maybe my funnels would look like this:

Home page -> enter email to view demo -> view pricing page -> call 800 number -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> enter email to view demo -> read autoresponder emails -> call 800 number -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> pricing page -> fill out pricing form -> receive phone call -> start a trial -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> chat with me on Olark -> invited by me for a phone call -> start a trial -> become a customer

OR

Home page -> call 800 number -> start a trial -> become a customer

Let’s compare that now to the most recent plan:

  1. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
  2. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
  3. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

Funneling everything into a phone call would make #2 unnecessary because when I talk with a prospect on the phone, I can just set his or her trial account up “manually” on my end. It would also make #3 unnecessary because so far the onboarding pain points have not been problematic when I have the opportunity to answer questions and explain things over the phone. So that would leave:

  1. Change “start trial” CTAs to “call for more information” CTAs
  2. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

My level of activity/engagement over the last few months has felt pretty good, and I feel like if I can 10X my traffic and therefore engagement level, that might well put me in pretty good shape. Right now my traffic level (less than 800 uniques in the last 30 days) feels like it puts everything below the threshold of measurability/meaning. It’s of course easier said than done to 10X my traffic but I don’t think I’m asking for a lot as far as absolute numbers go. Eight thousand visitors a month is not a ridiculously huge amount.

So I’m changing my mind for the billionth time, which I feel pretty stupid about. I don’t know what all this mind-changing means. I wish I would stop changing my mind so much, but of course the only reason I change my mind is because I believe my new belief is right and my old one was wrong.

Weekly Snip Report, October 8th, 2014

Leave a reply

Super rushed post this week. I started working on YET ANOTHER design refresh for the Snip site. I’m actually taking away even more stuff and making it even simpler.

I decided that the account creation tie-in I talked about last week can wait until I further improve demo opt-ins.

I changed my pricing page to a lead-gen form on the existing site. That so far has gotten one inquiry, but it turned out to be bogus. (It was a cosmetology student doing a report for a school project.)

AdWords continues to chug along. It seems that my ads targeting “salon management software” have a way higher CTR than anything else. So I might put all my eggs in that basket: turn off all ads except the salon management ads, and talk mainly about salon management on the site.

I turned off Facebook ads for now. Since my current site isn’t converting nearly as well as I expected, I decided to make my opt-in even LOWER commitment for the new minor design refresh, and I figure I might as well not burn any more money before I have that in place. I still have the AdWords going because that continues to collect valuable information about what people are searching for and what kinds of ads they click on. By the way, my new demo opt-in will be simply a big red button on the home page that says “View Demo” – no email or name required there. THEN, on the next page, there will be a form with a first name and email field that you can fill out to view the demo. I’m basically trying to rip off tripbright.com.

Weekly Snip Report, October 1st, 2014

Leave a reply

For several weeks now I’ve been dedicating the first hour of each workday to Snip. This has worked out really well for me. I used to have a huge problem with making time to work on Snip. Now I know I’m going to have a bare minimum of 5 hours in each week, usually more.

Now that I have Google AdWords going, the next step of my plan is to create a free trial sign-up form on my marketing site that triggers an API call to my Rails site that creates an account for the user. That means I can do away with my shitty, long trial sign-up page that I have right now. I’ve actually spent the last several days just paying down technical debt because I’m getting sick of putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids and writing each piece of code like it’s the last thing I’ll ever add to Snip. I’ve probably done about enough of that now and I should just get on with writing the account-creation feature.

AdWords continues to slowly do its thing at a max of $15/day. Nothing interesting to report yet except that my ads seem to be ranking pretty well. I also turned on some Facebook ads today. Clicks from FB seem to be really cheap. The AdWords clicks seem to regularly be $5-10 per click, but I’ve gotten 6 FB clicks so far for $2, so that’s about 33 cents a click. Who knows yet, of course, which of the two channels will have a better ROI.

My New Mexico and North Carolina salons both seem to have fallen off the wagon.

Weekly Snip Report, September 25th, 2014

2 Replies

In my last report I shared my plan for the next few months. Not shockingly, I changed my mind about what I should do, but not much. Here’s my original 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…

Between then and now I read Perry Marshall’s 80/20 Sales and Marketing at the behest of a mentor of mine. Perry’s advice is that if your sales funnel is not working, break your sales funnel into its pieces and optimize each piece, starting with the top of the funnel. My mentor actually suggested I do this exact thing and I didn’t take his advice, but now that I’ve read the 80/20 book I think my mentor was exactly right. I just didn’t understand before what he was saying. Here’s my new plan:

  1. Pay a professional designer to help make my marketing site not embarrassingly terrible…I actually checked into my designer’s availability and she was booked up for at least a good month when I checked. I didn’t want to wait that long, so I went ahead and taught myself the very basics of responsive web design and coded up a non-embarrassing version of my site. So if you go to snipsalonsoftware.com, you’ll see a fully responsive version of the site. It’s not impressive but it’s not embarrassing. And of course, if you’re visiting this site well after September 2014, the version you’re seeing probably has little resemblance to the version I’m talking about. Having a professionally-designed version of the site is definitely on the roadmap. I just didn’t want this step to hold up everything else so I did an okay version myself.
  2. Turn on a Google AdWords campaign. (I have this going right now. I turned it on a couple days ago. Again, following the advice in the 80/20 book.)
  3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
  4. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
  5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

So the steps aren’t much different. I mostly just reversed the order. I feel like I’m probably getting closer to knowing what the hell I’m doing because rather than shooting in the dark and fundamentally changing my mind every two seconds, my different plans are becoming more and more convergent.

If anybody’s curious about the details of my AdWords campaign, I’m doing $10.00/day. I have maybe 5 different keywords I’m bidding on and I’m split testing with each keyword. So far I’ve gotten 5 clicks (over two days), all on the same ad. My CTR for that ad is like 1.10%. I understand anything over 1% is considered good, so that’s cool.

I had had a salon in New Mexico sign up for a trial a couple weeks ago. Things seem to have been going good with them but from the schedule it looks like the main stylist, the only one who ever used the schedule, is on vacation right now. I called her yesterday and left a voicemail.

Another salon signed up for a trial last night, this one from North Carolina. The owner had a bunch of questions and put in a bunch of appointments which are both good signs.

The meaning of life

Leave a reply

I read some time ago about the meaning of life. I can’t remember if it was in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey or Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl or both. Anyway, I found what I read useful and I’d like to share the idea.

“What is the meaning of life?” is not a question you should ask. It’s a question you should answer with your life. It’s up to you to decide what your life is for and then live out that purpose.

So if you’ve ever wondered what the meaning of life is, there you go.

Weekly Snip Update, September 10th, 2014

2 Replies

I had an interesting thought recently that I think will be helpful to me. I realized that Snip is more important than any particular client project, and that Snip will (I hope and expect) still be around 10 years from now, paying dividends. Yet each week, Snip doesn’t seem to “make the cut”. I usually only work on Snip an hour or two a week, and some weeks I don’t work on it at all. I don’t think that puts me in a position to be successful. It’s been a long-standing problem that the biggest obstacle to growing Snip is nothing within Snip itself, it’s the fact that I have to earn an income, and that takes time. But I don’t know if there’s any great excuse for working on Snip as little as I have been. I think there’s some mindset problem. I think I might have finally found a way to solve the problem.

I thought of the “pay yourself first” concept from the personal finance world, and I thought it might make sense to apply that practice to Snip. So on Sunday I decided I would “pay myself first” and work on Snip for the first hour of each weekday, meaning I would get a minimum of 5 hours in each week. I’m only 3 days into that, but so far it’s working out pretty well. It feels like the wrong thing to do – it feels “irresponsible” – but I think that’s probably just social conditioning. The “responsible” thing to do would be to give up and get a regular job, which I know is actually dumb. So I just have to power through the feeling and do what I know to be the smart thing.

I have a new trial user, which historically hasn’t happened very often. This is someone who apparently viewed a demo some time in July, and then she chatted with me on Olark last Friday. I set her up with an account on Saturday (or rather I had someone do it for me because I was offline). The prospect never signed on and didn’t respond to emails and I thought I lost her. But then yesterday she chatted with me on Olark again (because that’s easier than email??) and today we talked on the phone for a long time and I walked her through some shit. I checked her account again just now and she seems to have entered a bunch of appointments for the future, at least for herself. That’s a good sign. There are 4 other stylists at her salon but none of them seem to have done anything yet.

I discovered earlier this evening – somehow for the first time – that Android doesn’t like Snip’s SSL certificate. You would think that someone would have complained about this by now. I have no idea what the problem is. Gonna try to fix that tonight.

Weekly Snip Report, August 28th, 2014

1 Reply

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.

Weekly Snip Update, August 22nd, 2014

Leave a reply

I feel like I’m at a point of unusual clarity with Snip. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling clueless, confused, conflicted, hopeless, hopeful, excited, depressed, sure, unsure, and many other things, usually all within a 24-hour period. It’s been a total roller coaster.

At this point in time I feel like I know exactly a) what I need to do and b) in what order. The “in what order” part is the most significant thing. I’ve been wrestling in my head forever between whether I should work on conversion first, then traffic, or traffic first, then conversion. I don’t think the right answer is 100% one or the other but I think I know how I want to handle that problem, and I stumbled upon the answer in kind of a surprising way.

I had the idea a while ago to build a certain lead magnet for my consulting work. The lead magnet is AngularOnRails.com, and it’s gotten a surprisingly good amount of traction so far. It’s been featured on Ruby Weekly, ng-newsletter and the first page of Hacker News. Given that I’m also working 40 billable hours a week for a client through the end of October, I had the idea that maybe it would be best to just focus on Angular On Rails until the end of October and put Snip on hold. (This is not a light decision since it would be the first time consciously putting Snip on hold since I started it three and a half years ago.)

But then I thought, if I’m going to put Snip on hold and let it run in the background for a few months, there are a few loose ends it would be worth tying up first. For example, the Snip marketing site is basically totally broken on mobile right now. I don’t want to have Snip sitting there and just not collecting leads when for a few hours of work I could be passively collecting leads.

And I seem to be getting more and more prospects chatting with me on my Olark chat. It’s irritating when this happens because I don’t have anything great to do for them when they want to take the next step toward me. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been spinning them up demo accounts (for the two people so far who have made it to that point), but then once they have that, it’s not clear to them what they’re supposed to do. I also had someone sign up for a trial last night, but since I don’t have any kind of automated onboarding process (not even an automated welcome email!), these trial sign-up notifications just cause me pain and irritation, since my past experience with these people has been that they don’t respond to any of my communication, phone or email. I think at least some of the onboarding process needs to be in-product hand-holding in order for it to be effective.

There are also a couple bugs I’d need to fix before I’d feel comfortable consciously putting Snip on hold. Like right now, when someone signs up for a trial, they start getting their schedule sent to them daily via email, and the unsubscribe part of that is currently broken. That bug weighs heavy on my mind, and I can’t just let that sit and have Snip consciously on hold.

So basically I want to get to the point where seeing a lead come into my funnel isn’t a source of pain/guilt/irritation, and that there aren’t any bugs in Snip that are so bad that I feel guilty about them constantly.

I think the first thing I’ll do is fix the in-app bugs, then improve the trial onboarding experience, then see where I’m at.