I created a goal to earn $1m this year. If interested in the background, you can find it here, but I’m posting because I’m looking for advice on the current progress of my startup, which is written out below.
Original goal: http://ift.tt/2fVkiXq Update 1: http://ift.tt/2oBSlvg
Below is a Q1 recap of where I’m at right now. I like doing this sort of retrospective because it helps me identify what is going well and what is not going well. I received some good advice when I first posted my plan here in December so I thought I would share this update to see what sort of nuggets you can offer.
Thanks!
Q1 has come and gone. I am behind schedule, but progressing.
Revenue Stream 1: Day Job
Going as planned. I am currently on maternity leave, so I only make 60% of my salary from 2/13 – 5/7. This was expected.
Revenue Stream 2: Sell Infographic Builder Side Gig
I’ve put this up for sale a couple times on Craigslist and Flippa to no avail. There is too much work required to make this an attractive purchase. I had hoped to make $25,000 off the sale. I know I already said I’d drop it, but I didn’t because of those pesky emotions. I have decided to pivot and not spend any more time on this (for real). I will need to make up the $25k with revenue stream #3.
Revenue Stream 3: Personalized Children’s Book Side Gig
Problem A: Not Focused
We’ve been in finishing mode for what seems like forever. We have one developer (a co-founder who works for free, like all our co-founders) and development has been slower than expected. I attribute this as a failure to do true Agile/Lean development. Without the short-term goals of sprints, clear feature requirements, standups, and retrospectives, we haven’t been as efficient as we could.
Shame on me. My day job is as a Product Manager for a SaaS company so I not only have experience in Agile/Lean development, but am really good at implementing it.
Problem B: Forced to Pivot
Our original MVP was an eBook with a printed book as MVP 2, but research showed that the MVP for children’s books needs to be a printed book. Parents don’t want to buy eBooks for their kids, and neither do grandparents.
This pivot will take some extra time. The product is already done, but we need to update the purchase process on the website. They are small changes and hopefully won’t take more than a week or two./ (Famous last words, am I right?)
Benefits: More Time to Prepare for Launch
The additional time it has taken to develop the website has given me more time to develop a comprehensive, actionable marketing plan. Marketing is not my forte. People often think Product Managers are Marketers, but while there is some overlap, they are quite different skill sets.
I have been looking at strategies others have used, cherry-picked from a few templates, and feel like I have a good pre-launch and launch campaign in place. In the past, my marketing plans were too high level and generic, which I believe led to the failures of past side gigs. This time, I have a step by step plan with pre-written text and images ready to go.
I’ve decided to focus mainly on Instagram marketing. Moms are heavy users of this social media platform and there is an active community to tap into. I’ve identified a group of influencers with various levels of followers and hope that their voice will help build the brand, at least initially while we have no marketing budget.
I have not reached out to them yet because I don’t have an idea of when we will actually launch. I am not sure if this is a mistake, but I would rather not string them along for months, which might cause them to lose interest in the product or lose confidence in the company.
So, our revised goal is to launch in Q2
As for the projected revenue, we are still figuring out the pricing for printing and shipping. Finding the right printing partner has taken some time since we have an unusual business model. Like the website development, we are so close. Until we have those figures, I can’t create sales projections or estimate my share of the revenue. So basically, I have no idea what the impact will be on my personal goal of earning $1M this year. Only 8.5 months left!
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April 15, 2017 at 09:28PM
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