Ngl, these days have been taxing. 🤣 

I have a big family, so these holidays have been mostly lunches and dinners back to back. 🥵 

But still, something moved forward! 😬 

Table of Contents

• First feedback from beta users

• CRM setup and outreach

• I started freelancing

• Conclusion

First feedback from beta users

I got the first feedback from someone who is not family & friends! 🥳 

There are definitely some issues still. Well, that’s why it’s a beta in the end. But these are the kinds of relationships I’m currently looking for: potential customers who are eager to try it and more than willing to share what they think. ✨ 

Different users value different aspects:

• being SEO-optimized,

• being human-sounding,

• being more product-aware rather than relying only on external sources,

• etc.

One thing I've found in common so far is that everyone wants to produce a blog post that requires minimum or zero editing. Well, this was an easy requirement to guess, but it’s always better to hear it from potential customers. Alternatively, provide a way to easily iterate as you’d do when using ChatGPT or Claude.

This is something that I need to think about. 🤔 

The ability to iterate was part of my initial design, but I’m wondering how important that would be if the first output is already very good and requires minimal manual edits.

It’s also satisfying to see the first positive feedback! 😍

However, there’s still a lot to do, but I’m excited! ✨ 

Public roadmap and feature requests

I like to be very transparent with customers. For this reason, I wanted to have a public roadmap and a board for feature requests.

The first thing that came to my mind was Canny, but damn. 79EUR/month just that it’s really too much…

I bumped into Supahub and it’s really nice! I have what I need for free! ✨ 

Check it out here!

And it already has the first feature request (that was not posted by me)! 🚀 

Now customers can request a feature or check the roadmap from the app itself. The link to the public roadmap is also available in the footer of the landing.

CRM setup and outreach

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I wanted to better track my outreach efforts using a proper CRM. I spent some time this week studying Attio and so far it seems really nice and highly customizable.

It’s still early to share my setup as I’m still getting used to it and so far I’ve only started prospecting leads using Sales Navigator and adding them to the CRM. I only added a few automation, but there are still a few things that I need to figure out so I’ll tell you more next week.

I set a goal starting from next week:

• add at least 50 leads/day in the CRM,

• connect/send a DM to at least 30 leads/day.

I’m really serious this time I even installed Attio and Sales Navigator on my phone. 🤣 

The reason why I aim for more identified leads than contacted ones is:

1. I’d rather have always something in the pipeline rather than the opposite,

2. There are some days when I might be able to contact more leads because I can use the iOS app for that (for example when I’m AFK), but I cannot use it for adding new leads easily.

I even installed a habit tracker, let’s see how things will go. 🤣 

I started freelancing

Yeah, you read it right. 😅 

Being bootstrapped has its cons and this is one of those. Unfortunately, I don’t have an infinite amount of money in my bank account and I need a refill. 😂 

I’m also waiting for my accountants to come back from holidays to give me an estimation of the amount of taxes I’d need to pay in June. 🤞 

The good thing is that I’m already working again for Athenian a few hours a week so it’s a project I already know with people that I already know. ✨ 

If you don’t know the story about Athenian check out my very first issue.

The bad thing is that I won’t be able to focus all my forces on HeyEcho, but that’s life. During these holidays my schedule was all over the place, but from next week I’ll need to properly allocate the time for solopreneurship, freelancing, gym, family duties, etc.

In the meantime, I also applied to Toptal and created a profile on Upwork, but I’m not actively looking yet. But I’d rather be prepared. 😁 

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this update!

Let’s start rocking! 🤘 

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