We're on a mission to get our first 300 paying users

On Friday morning, I was talking to Ken and I made the mistake of asking him to have a look into exactly what our expenses were at the moment. But what we realized was a little bit intimidating. Our expenses have obviously gone up because we've been growing the team, dedicating everything to content operations, getting lots of content out there. We're just at a point where we've started getting a whole bunch of people into free trials. And the trial window was 60 days, but we're actually going to shorten the trial window down to other 14 or 7 days because because what we've got at the moment is a lot of people coming in clicking around and either it's not for them or they're just not ready to move all their project management stuff across. We haven't seen any sort of indication that a shorter trial period wouldn't stop or encourage people to sign up more like the risk reversal of it because it's a free trial. I think 60 days was too long. And basically what that meant was our data window or our feedback cycles were going to take too long because we have people who we think are going to convert to paying customers, but they've got a 60-day free trial. What we might do later on is bring the 60-day or 30-day trials back to test if they improve conversions once we've got a lot of people funneling in. But we want to get basically the goal is because of our expenses, the goal is to get about 300 paying customers into the system as fast as possible like in the next 6 months. So on Friday, we got the whole team aligned around that goal and today we're going to break it down into all of the things that we want to test. So one of the things that we want to go into is trying different things. So we've been using Facebook ads, meta ads on Instagram. We started with static ads and we got some really high performing static ads with low cost but the conversions we don't know of the quality. Some people have been really good and other ones there was a bit of junk in there using audience network etc. So we cleaned that up for where they were getting delivered to. And we also had Ken record a whole bunch of video ads to see how the video ads perform. And since running them on Friday we've had about five or we've had about five or six conversions through the videos. uh they are definitely more targeted and more the type of person we want in there. Um but we were getting off the static ads, we were getting like 60 or 70 a day and now that's gone down to five over the weekend. That's fine because the weekend's usually much slower anyway, especially the alternate cuz most of these people signing up are in the US. So we will see today be slow as well and then we'll get better data on Tuesday, Wednesday and they look like much more genuine businesses than we were getting before which is good. which is interesting. But the other things we're going to try are looking around for creators who want to make videos about the product to do like uh influencer marketing essentially. But what I need to do for that, what I need to do for that is put together the I guess there's something like a press pack that you would use which you'd send to a creator and say these are the talking points. These are the things you want you to talk about. Then just let them go for gold. I would have always preferred to keep the people promoting the product to people who have used the product. But with our time horizons, I just don't think we can get over this. I guess the friction of moving your entire project management thing, I don't think we can wait for those people to start using it to get this. And the other thing I've been thinking is realistically, even if it's not for the person talking about it, as long as they don't position it as I use this product, as long as they say like this will be useful for this type of user, I think I'm okay with that. So, we're going to try and find the right people to do that. Put the press back together. I've also started doing briefs for the three core new focuses of development because we're going to get to the end of this advertising window. And at the end of that advertising window, Ken and Kieran are going to go back to product development. And the product development so far from what I can see is going to center around three key areas. There's onboarding and activation is one thing that we really want to improve. So like I was saying, people are signing into the product and they're clicking around having a look around and then some are starting to use it and some are not. So, we want to improve the number of people who start to use it and figuring out what that looks like, what'll get people to that moment where they're like, "Oh, this is amazing. I need this thing." That's one of the things that we want to focus on. Then reporting and analytics. So, we have we had tracking links in the system. They're still there in the old version. You want to bring those back to the forefront because they're very useful for us to track what videos are sending people to Clipflow and which bio links are sending people to Clipflow. And then we also want to aggregate all analytics and data back into the platform. So we have uh three YouTube channels, we have three Instagram accounts, two Tik Toks, LinkedIn and Twitter. And essentially what I want to do is be able to track not just the tracking links from the buyers, how many clicks they're getting, but the aggregate views across all of these things. And then more importantly, which leads into the next thing that we'll be working on is which posts correspond to better performance to get back to like what are we making that is working and converting? What are we making that is growing the audiences. So the next thing for Clickflow in the production space is most likely going to be posts, which is once you're inside a project, you can create a post. The post could be a YouTube video. We are not doing the passing off to the platforms. This will just be a way of scheduling and planning everything but not like automatically scheduling it for you. We're currently running tests AB tests with YouTube shorts and Instagram between posting with Buffer and posting manually. And almost every single time we post from a third party platform, it's dropping the views massively. Now, I don't know if it's just location based, time based, what's happening. We're trying to figure that out. But we don't want to go into being a publishing tool until we figured that out. And the thing that really slows down the publishing part from our experience is not knowing exactly what to do and when. So if we can get posts in the system, a project can have multiple posts, go to different platforms, and you as a publisher can just work through the checklist, go, I need to put a short on YouTube, copy the title, copy the description, copy the media link, blah blah blah, and just transferring stuff over. It's an annoying manual thing. It'll be about 10 times better than it is right now because you'll have everything contained in the one spot. It'll also also give us the opportunity to put the tracking link bit back into YouTube descriptions and channel bios and stuff. So, I started specking out those project briefs so that I can get a little bit of pre-work and pre-consideration done before they get ready to start development. Um, so I've put a few kickoffs in for those three projects. And then and then it'll be pretty much main focus publishing, getting everyone on task, and then pretty much main focus is going to be getting those 300 paying customers into the system as soon as possible. Agencies are converting much harder. Um, not harder, like easier. they they have the pain point. They're already problem aware and they're much easier to sell to. I don't know if I still don't know if we're going to end up being like four agency down the line, but a lot of the features that are good for agencies will be good for business owners with big internal teams cuz the internal content ops team runs kind of like an agency anyway once you've got multiple channels. So, we're just going to try and get a whole bunch of people into the system that want to pay. There's reactivating everyone who's already signed up. We've got about 2,000. That's probably approaching 2,000 users in the system, people who've signed up. Of those 2,000, there's probably three or 4 hundred using it. Reactivating the people who tried it out and didn't use it via email, sending emails out to anyone who's gone into a lead genen thing. We're also obviously going to be trying to improve the number of views and number of views and audience awareness, like getting the message out there. We're also doing the audience awareness and getting the message out there, growing all the channels at the same time. All of those things combined need to get us to about 300 paying users in six months time. I think we can do it and we're all going to be focused on the same thing. So that's it. Monday morning. Let's get it.