Third Time's the Charm? – We'll see

[buscus.stan]

hey everyone, here we go again
it's the time of the year for another attempt at keeping a progress thread (my third now). One day time I'll just do it. Maybe it's this time, maybe not, I guess time will tell. It's not for lack of ghosting entrepreneurship, more for lack of time and energy. Between my contracting work, my business, wife & kids, who has time for writing on forums?

anyway, a quick summary: software engineer with nearly 20y experience walking towards freedom. Last year I partnered with a lawyer and we bootstrapped a "documents delivery on steroids" service. It's been growing, but not at the pace we were hoping. We plan on adding more similar services that target legal professionals in Spain with the aim of making their life a little easier. We're a bit stuck on marketing - since we don't have a big number of potential clients, traditional marketing strategies don't work that well and many legal professionals are notoriously against anything new. Also, none of us have any significant experience with marketing, advertising, sales. So it's been a bit of an uphill battle

the plan now is to shift a little bit and built a side product to offer legal services to regular people. I want to drive traffic to this website with paid advertising and employ my SEO skills. The goal of this website is to partly fund the main product and for me to learn more about advertising and marketing

this is where I am now:
* the landing page is built, although I'm no designer so there is definitely room for improvement. I will let improvement be driven by a/b testing & paid ads behaviour
* the google ads account is set up and I spent the last 3 days on setting up some campaigns and ads and researching keywords and so on. Thank you, Andy Black, for all the resources you posted <3
* my ads are not yet running for some reason, maybe they are not approved or something, so I'm still looking into this. I contacted support and waiting for a resolution. I followed Andy's and others' suggestions of going with manual bidding and I suspect Google doesn't like it. You'd expect that if I want to pay, they would be happy to take my money..

I'm excited to learn as much as possible about paid advertising, although I plan on an 80/20 approach - I don't think I'll be a top 1% percentile marketer, but I should still be decent enough to not waste a lot of ad money

ok, this is it for now, have a nice weekend everyone and thanks for your time

 

Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member: Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)

[buscus.stan]

for a while now I've been using an agile methodologies flavoured system to organize my day. For people not familiar, agile methodologies is a project management approach that breaks down work in small, iterative cycles called sprints. These sprints can be whatever you decide, I'm going with 1 week sprints. There is a sprint planning session at the start of the sprint and a sprint retrospective at the end of the sprint.

So this is how it goes for me:

Every Sunday afternoon I take 1 hour to plan the sprint/week ahead. I write down 3 main outcomes for the week - what I want to achieve this week. I also write down a habit that I want to adjust, add or enforce. Once I have a plan outlined, I break down the 3 outcomes into smaller tasks. I write down other chores I know I will have to do this week.

The next step is to put it all together in an actionable way. I use github projects, google calendar and apple reminders for this. In github I have columns for "Next", "In progress", "Done" to organize the tasks. Google calendar I use to block out chunks of a day when I will do deep work. And apple reminders I use for things I have to absolutely not forget about.

The system works ok for me, the one thing I struggle with sometimes is getting so obsessed with one thing and ignoring the others. I'm going go make this exercise here for a while as a way to keep me accountable. Starting now!

3 outcomes for Week November 4th -> November 11th

1. asesorya com (tfl): get google ads running and tweak ads/landing page based on results (no more than 10h this week)

2. MIV (contracting): scaffold app - choose platform, template to use, do a splash landing page

3. CW (contracting): understand the work involved and start coding gift cards

Tweak/Add one habit

* get better at the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7.00, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps




have a productive week, everyone

 

[buscus.stan]

3 outcomes for Week November 4th -> November 11th

1. asesorya com (tfl): get google ads running and tweak ads/landing page based on results (no more than 10h this week)

2. MIV (contracting): scaffold app - choose platform, template to use, do a splash landing page

3. CW (contracting): understand the work involved and start coding gift cards

Tweak/Add one habit

* get better at the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7.00, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

sprint review for last week

* overall: this wasn't a great week overall. I got sidetracked with a hardware failure on my personal server. That took about 1.5 days of my time to fix and set everything up again
* 1. still haven't gotten my ads shown. I don't know wtf. I talked to some google ads support guy, he was no help, just said that to increase the budget and improve the quality score and the landing page. I did all that, I think. I have no idea, since I don't see a quality score. I increased the budget to double what the top-of-the-page cpc suggestion is. I suspected something was wrong with the account, so I closed the google ads account and created another one. I even copied some ads from the competition, which I don't think they are better than mine. I don't have many ideas left... Next I'll try to set up a campaign with "maximize clicks" instead of manual cpc, maybe that will do the trick. How stupid is this: google take my money! meh, that's ok, I have enough money.
* 2. Didn't get to do anything on this point. It's not critical, but it needs to be done by the end of the month, so time is ticking
* 3. I did good work on this one
* habit: I went through my daily routine 4 out of the 7 days, not bad but not great either. The hardware failure screwed up my schedule and it was a lot of catching up.

and sprint plan

3 outcomes for Week November 11th -> November 17th

1. CW (contracting): deliver gift cards - deadline is on Friday the 15h, so this is the top priority of the week

2. asesorya com (tfl): get google ads running and tweak ads/landing page based on results. Last effort - if I can't make it work, I'm looking at other paid ads providers

3. crypto is pumping so I need to look at the positions, maybe stuff needs to be adjusted

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

 

[buscus.stan]

3 outcomes for Week November 11th -> November 17th

1. CW (contracting): deliver gift cards - deadline is on Friday the 15h, so this is the top priority of the week

2. asesorya com (tfl): get google ads running and tweak ads/landing page based on results. Last effort - if I can't make it work, I'm looking at other paid ads providers

3. crypto is pumping so I need to look at the positions, maybe stuff needs to be adjusted

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

sprint review for last week

* overall: this was an ok sprint. This will sound like a joke, but another SSD failed this week, after the one failed the week before.
* 1. I finished the gift cards, but didn't release. Not my fault, the translations were not ready so this is going out first thing Monday
* 2. worked on asesorya to try and get google ads to show my ads. I have 1 impression ) I did a max-clicks campaign that is still learning, so curios to see if this will bring me some impressions. Clearly I'm doing something wrong, but don't know what yet
* 3. I sold a little bit of my coins on this pump. If it goes higher, I'll sell more, if it goes lower, I'll buy it back
* habit: this was not good at all. I was so consumed by trading and trading assistant in the evenings that I went to bed too late so I screwed up my mornings. Need to get better at it. I did good work, but staying up late working is not sustainable in the long run.

and spring planning

3 outcomes for Week November 18th -> November 24th

1. CW (contracting): release gift cards v1; release "start" button

2. asesorya com (tfl): look into other paid ads providers and maybe other advertising ideas
- buy a phone number, publish it everywhere and set up whatsapp business
- setup Meta Business account and facebook/instagram pages
- crash course in facebook ads (meta ads?)
- look into print advertising (flyers)

3. re-setup trading assistant io
- clean install of ubuntu server
- configure the ruby env and the app on the new SSD

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

have a productive week, everyone

 

[buscus.stan]

Good day today, the family is going to eat well tonight. Maybe even some cake

We signed the first client today! Actually my wife did. He's not a lead from advertising, he's actually an acquaintance to which my wife mentioned our service and he actually needed it

Without going into too much detail, the service we're offering is claiming money that you paid under abusive clauses. Not everybody qualifies, but there are plenty people that do

I also realized something. I might have gone the wrong way with trying to advertise through google ads. I think I need both google ads and social-media ads. Or maybe google ads later in the lifecycle.
- on google, people supposedly already know they need a service and they're actively searching for it
- on social media, you can reach people that don't even know your service exists and they need it

From this guy and a few other friends and neighbours I asked, nobody heard that you can claim this money, so maybe I should focus on finding clients that didn't even know they can claim money

 

[buscus.stan]

3 outcomes for Week November 18th -> November 24th

1. CW (contracting): release gift cards v1; release "start" button

2. asesorya com (tfl): look into other paid ads providers and maybe other advertising ideas
- buy a phone number, publish it everywhere and set up whatsapp business
- setup Meta Business account and facebook/instagram pages
- crash course in facebook ads (meta ads?)
- look into print advertising (flyers)

3. re-setup trading assistant io
- clean install of ubuntu server
- configure the ruby env and the app on the new SSD

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

How I did?

* overall: this was an ok sprint. Maybe not as good as last week, but ok. It got screwed a bit in the middle by the covid/flu shot which knocked me out for about 36 hours.

* 1. gift cards still not released, pending translations as the guys who does them was on vacation. Did very good progress on the "start" button

* 2. I got the phone number, it's not activated yet. It took me a F*ckload of time to set up the meta business account, facebook page and instagram page, but they're there

* 3. I didn't do a clean install, the SSD was a bit delayed so I temporarily configured everything on the main disk. I'll revisit this asap

* habit: ok, but still not consistent. I need to be able to do this routine ideally every day, but at least 5 times a week.

3 outcomes for Week November 25th -> December 1st

1. CW (contracting): release gift cards v1; release "start" button

2. asesorya com (tfl):
- get the phone number activated, publish it everywhere and set up whatsapp business
- crash course in facebook ads (meta ads?)
- get some feedback on the landing page, maybe ask on the forum for a roast?

3. crypto is getting hot, time to find 5 charts to milk

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

 

Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member: Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)

[buscus.stan]

3 outcomes for Week November 25th -> December 1st

1. CW (contracting): release gift cards v1; release "start" button

2. asesorya com (tfl):
- get the phone number activated, publish it everywhere and set up whatsapp business
- crash course in facebook ads (meta ads?)
- get some feedback on the landing page, maybe ask on the forum for a roast?

3. crypto is getting hot, time to find 5 charts to milk

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps

How I did?

* overall: it was an ok week, managed to touch all three points for the week although I haven't fully completed each of them
* 1. released gift cards and did good progress on the start button
* 2. i have the phone number activated, but I need to wait 7 days to claim whatsapp. I got meta ads working and finally getting some traffic
* 3. I have a few charts to trade, let's see how it goes
* habit: did pretty good, the one I'm still struggling with is going to sleep earlier and waking up earlier.

3 outcomes for Week December 2nd -> December 8th

1. CW (contracting): release "start" button; start work on currency picker

2. asesorya com (tfl):
- get whatsapp activated, publish it everywhere
- get some feedback on the landing page; start AB testing it

3. nothing else, need to focus a bit this week

Tweak/Add one habit

* continue the struggle with the daily routine: go to sleep before 23.00, wake up before 7am, meditate for 5m, journal for 5m, time block, take 5000+ steps