I hate customer.io. I had forgotten just how much I hate customer.io. It brags “THIS IS LIVE” without giving me any way to edit it not-live. It’s opaque, the text is tiny, the text is GREY ON WHITE, the interface is cluttered beyond belief,,,

It’s astonishing to me that none of these tools let me view all the emails at once so I can get a feel for the corpus of content we are sending people!

Anyway there are like 6 interwoven campaigns because when we set it up (foolishly), customer.io did not have a way to jump around with internal logic so it’s just a giant clusterfuck. FML.

Just Founder Things:

We’ve added almost $500 MRR but I don’t know precisely how.

Some of it is converted trials — that’s easy to see. But, like, the MRR shot up overnight… while the number of paying accounts didn’t increase.

I have questions:

• Did a small account cancel and a large account convert simultaneously?
• Did somebody add a bunch of users to their existing account?
• Did free accounts or expired trials emerge from the dead?
• (worst thought) Is there an error?

You’d think we’d already have a way to see this in our backend. You’d be wrong! But we shall be adding it soon.

I’m always saying, “Running a business means learning to live at 80% done, forever.” And it’s true. The work is never done.

Also… calculating stats — like churn, and even revenue — is an art, not a science.

I’ve been laid up the last couple days with a glutening (ughhhh fucking gluten), but Thomas is working on embedding Noko reports into web pages (for the Growth Stacking project itself!!) and the rest of the team is working on changing up our trial.

A long, long time ago, we switched to a 14-day trial with no credit card required, and changed up our onboarding email sequence accordingly. It was supposed to be an experiment… theoretically, removing the CC requirement should increase our conversion to trial, and the shorter 14-day limit should have spurred people to act… but then I got sick and never checked back in, and neither did anyone else.

The experiment didn’t work.

We’re going back to a 30-day, CC-required trial.

No, not because we want to rely on people forgetting to cancel. We have always and will always send ample notification.

We’re going back to CC trials because of human nature.

The key to converting trials is creating success.

You can’t create success if people don’t take 5 minutes to actually try the software out.

Yep, you can work on your onboarding interface, and your supportive lifecycle emails. We did work a lot on those.

But a lot of our trials end up not making even one single time entry.

It’s not because they don’t care or aren’t really in the market.

We’re all busy, and have so many conflicting demands on our time, that a deadline (with teeth) is sometimes the only way to get us to take any action, even towards something we want.

I know I’m not the only one who’s immediately signed up for a no-deadline trial, taken 5 seconds to poke around, gotten distracted and forgot it ever existed.

That’s why launches and live events are such powerful marketing tools: they create a deadline to decide, in or out.

The SaaS equivalent is being very aware that you have an upcoming deadline to pay or cancel.

And your level of commitment to trying the app is so much higher when you’ve already gone to the trouble to take out your wallet.

In some cases, more friction leads to better results.

I absolutely know that there’s room for improvement in our onboarding UI and emails, and the app interface itself overall — there are so many ways I can create more sucess, *faster*… and that’s part of my plan.

But first we’re going back to the thing that worked.

I’m not committing to getting anything else done myself at this point because I’ve got one, maybe two days before I spend all day getting an infusion that will leave me groggy if not actually asleep.

I’m going to try to review the trial emails and sketch out the improved onboarding UI. But we shall see.

While Thomas fights with Cloudflare and fixes a few last-minute issues… I thought I might as well lay out my long- and short-term plans for #GrowthStacking, the initiative and the site/design/toolset itself.

My ultimate goal (aside from massively growing Noko) is to come up with a growth framework and a tool for executing that framework which also, coincidentally, will become part of the Nokoverse.

Thereby furthering my core mission of growing my business by helping you grow *yours*.

And specifically, I prefer to execute my mission through research, analysis, design, education, systems, tools.

So here’s the big plan:

1. publicity for Noko +
2. fodder + new products for my biz education business +
3. building reputation for both me and Noko +
4. a lasting, powerful tool that is a compelling reason to use Noko…

It’s a win-win-win-win.

That’s the big, long-term plan.

The smaller, short-term plan is…

1. a landing page,
2. a newsletter, and
3. a micro-blog

That’s what we’re launching today, Feb 7, 2020.

Although I’m not publicly sharing this micro-blog today.

I’m gonna wait a week so there’s some good juicy stuff in here, ripe for binging.

The rough development plan…

Think I’m gonna syndicate this microblog into the nokotime.com/growth site with JSON, rather than direct people here. So I can segment stuff by categories.

Then I’ll work on some custom content pages like timelines, and embedded Noko reports for the GS project.

Then… I’ll work up a rough-ass, internal-only version of my specialized to-do app that is going to power the project, and eventually serve as both marketing (public/free version) and a feature for Noko (increasing the value of the product for customers).

This is a 2-3 month project. Every step of the way is useful, and nothing is wasted.

Big plans. Tiny steps.

Today’s project is to get the Growth Stacking page launched and the first automatic email set up. That means:

• converting the Elementor shitpile into an actual HTML/CSS page
• tweaking the design
• especially improving the CTA design
• writing the email itself

I’m trying to decide whether I want to export the giant Growth mindmap I made, or simply share it with the shareable Miro link since it’s still a WIP anyway.