On one hand, there’s the sunk cost fallacy; on the other, the fear of not having pushed hard enough on distribution. The line between the two is razor-thin. 🤏

Table of Contents

• The current state of conversions and promotions

• My journey so far

  • NextCommit

  • WordMuse

  • BeaconCX

  • EchoWords

  • HaveYouHeard

• Looping back with a different perspective

• Accused of being a copycat

• Conclusion

• Appendix

  • Personal branding

    • X

    • Beehiiv newsletter

The current state of conversions and promotions

At the beginning of the week, I was quite frustrated.

Last week, I sent an email to all 20+ beta users to announce HYH's general availability and provide the coupon to redeem their discount.

Nobody converted. 😑 

Not only that but after sending multiple emails asking for feedback, nobody replied. 😭 

Ofc maybe they were not the right persona, or maybe they were just exploring whether Reddit could be part of their strategy, etc..

But the outcome is the same, nobody converted. 😅 

I wanted to try Google Ads again (I used it in the past already for EchoWords) to experiment. I used many different headlines and screenshots trying to maximize the conversion.

This is the result:

• 1.4k clicks,

• 20k impressions,

• 7% CTR,

• 0 conversions.

The interesting thing is that even the free “Demo” plan has been tried by a single user. I know, I know, I didn’t diversify much my distribution channels. In the end, I only used X, Reddit, and Google Ads. But I think it’s already a data point to consider.

This week I also launched HYH on Product Hunt and got 6 upvotes and also not many views. 🤷‍♂️ 

It’s crazy how every time there’s a bunch of “AI influencers” reach out to sell you upvotes…

My journey so far

Let me cover my journey so far as that would explain why I’m talking about “connecting the dots”.

NextCommit

This is my baby. 😂

This is the first project I started by taking inspiration from RemoteOk by Pieter Levels. It was so bad in the beginning and you can actually check it as a screenshot here. I finally learned the feeling of pushing something live on production solo, it felt great. At the same time, I started realizing and learning a lot of things:

• the customers won’t just automagically come and buy your product,

• I need to think about how to monetize,

• and from whom to monetize (demand vs supply),

• etc.

It’s still up and running with 300+ total signed-up users, but didn’t really bring much, and I also didn’t focus on it since I started working on EchoWords.

Someone even informally offered to buy it and repurpose it for a different niche, but we didn’t move forward as I wanted to keep it.

WordMuse

What? 🤔 

Yeah, I really never talked about this in my newsletter because I never launched it and it was Summer 2023. The idea was to have an AI for creating blog posts. I had a very basic MVP, but then I started working full-time at The Linux Foundation, and this just slipped away. I never really reconsidered it.

BeaconCX

Oh, this didn’t even start. 🤣

I didn’t even finalize the idea other than being in the Customer Success space. 😅 

But this was the first time I started doing things like:

• interviewing people who know the space (I didn’t know “The Mom Test” back then, so I can only imagine the great quality of my questions…),

• researching the space and the players already in this space,

• etc.

It was a very different approach from the previous two. I’d define it as more “mature” or more “aware”. In the end, I didn’t move forward because I couldn’t figure out how I could be impactful in the space. The biggest problem seemed that CS is usually the scapegoat in an org because it’s hard to prove the value they bring:

• if there’s a churn it’s because CS didn’t do their job, while it could be that it was a bad lead in the first place,

• if there’s an upsell it’s thanks to Sales, not thanks to the eventual relationship with CS.

It seemed a very hard problem to solve as it involves many stakeholders within an org, so I decided to avoid getting into it.

EchoWords

Mid-spring of this year I started this newsletter, and I wanted to spread what I was writing, and that’s the only reason why I started EchoWords. 🤦 

In retrospect, it was quite an impulsive decision, and tbh nowadays I’m not using it myself either. 😅 Not many functionalities and the most important thing is that I was not able to keep “my voice” when repurposing the content.

Anyway, I had a full retrospective here when I decided to pivot. The main reasons:

• very narrow ICP: I was targeting only Beehiiv customers so the best option was outreaching them. On one side it’s easier because the messaging and value proposition are very specific, on the other hand, it’s easier to post some content on different platforms knowing that someone would fit your ICP.

• value and frequency usage: repurposing only on X was not enough to justify the cost, also considering that most publishers publish only once a week. If on top of that, you add the fact that the “personal voice” was not properly maintained, well…

The good thing is that when working on this I discovered how convoluted is the invoicing system in Italy. 🤯 

Now I’m just re-using the same implementation that I implemented back then which took me 2 full weeks. 🚀 

HaveYouHeard

Here we are! 👋 

With HYH I want to democratize product distribution. What I mean is that building products is getting cheaper and cheaper, but founders are still struggling with the distribution. I talked more in-depth about this a few months ago, but ofc there are many ways this can be tackled. I needed a starting point.

Back then I was fascinated by the success that ReplyGuy had. 70k revenue in 9 months. WTF. 🤯

At the same time, it aligns with solving the distribution problem, at least as a first step.

But probably even in this case, I’ve been too impulsive. 😅 

There’s a BIG difference between the two. The biggest one is the effort required: HYH purposely doesn’t provide automatic replies to engage to avoid sounding spammy and eventually harming the customer’s brand. It’s not that I don’t believe in automating it with AI, but it has to be done well. Once it can reflect the brand's voice and knowledge then it would make perfect sense. Otherwise, people on Reddit are not stupid, they would spot immediately that it has been generated by a bot.

I think the low effort required to adopt ReplyGuy is what makes it successful from a revenue perspective, but I don’t see it as sustainable long-term, again, at least as it is right now.

One big problem is that the majority of marketers do not even have Reddit on their radar as a channel, let alone consider it to be part of their strategy. Those who have it may not have the time to commit to it due to the effort required.

Looping back with a different perspective

I still want to solve the distribution problem. 💪 

Looping back to the initial idea of WordMuse, so focusing on the content marketing side by streamlining blog post generation, could be a better idea.

Almost every marketer, if not everyone, has content marketing as part of their strategy. This would make it easier to find people willing to at least try it. After discussing with different marketers, it seems that maintaining the brand voice is still an issue. The majority are using ChatGPT, but that’s only the starting point after which everyone adds their own custom workflow with different levels of nuances (custom GPTs, more advanced prompting, fancy ways to “tune” the ChatGPT memory, etc.)

The bad side is that there are tons of SaaS in this space. 🤣

The reason I feel like the dots are connecting is that I envision a platform that not only helps generate content (similar to my initial idea with WordMuse) but also enables seamless distribution across multiple platforms by repurposing it whether on X (EchoWords) or Reddit (currently the focus of HaveYouHeard).

At the same time, I’m also considering at some point the idea of having a spin-off of NextCommit, but for marketing positions to build an email list.

Let’s see what will happen. 😬 

Maybe I’m getting too excited again too soon? I should probably test for ADHD. 🤣 

Accused of being a copycat

Yeah 😂 

It’s not that important, but ngl it annoyed me when it happened, maybe because of my ego. 😅 

This made me write probably the longest X post I ever wrote.

But it’s just noise, and I shouldn’t put any weight on these things. It’s just a distraction, and in the end, I’m more than fine with my conscience.

Check it out yourself if you’re curious.

Conclusion

I’ll reach out to people interested in joining the journey early on by sharing the vision and inviting them to get involved. Having a few potential customers with us from the early stages of development would be a huge advantage!

Time to push even harder! 💪 

I hope you enjoyed this update!

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on X/Twitter and LinkedIn! 

Appendix

Personal branding

X

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