It’s wild to look back at my posts from late Feb and March 2020 and notice that I… had all these explanations for breathlessness and “colds” and we both actually had coronavirus. Thomas and I were both sick on and off for 3 months. I had a daily fever and breathlessness for just under 100 days. Because it was punctuated by fake-out periods of two to five days where all symptoms receded, it took until late March to recognize that we, in fact, absolutely had coronavirus.

My sense of smell still hasn’t recovered.

But overall, I’m fine.

Yesterday: Alex sent a really lovely email to the Stacking the Bricks list yesterday, announcing the Growth Stacking project for me.

Today: 332 subscribers! Basically doubled overnight.

I just sent out the very first RSS digest email with a little personal note. Huzzah!!

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.

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.

Well, here we are! The first day of intentional (rather than semi-random and scattered) public posts about my Growth Stacking initiative for Noko Time Tracking, née Freckle.

This right here is in the meta category so everything will be about the Growth Stacking project itself.

Today’s Wednesday, and I want to launch by Friday

That first day launch will include…

1. ▶️ Shortened landing page copy (still need to streamline this)
2. ▶️ A downloadable mind map for my new ACCK (Attract Connect Convert Keep) growth framework
3. ▶️ Hopefully, these posts embedded into the Growth Stacking site via JSON. Altho… maybe not.
4. ✅ A working email list

We’re going to soft launch to our Stacking the Bricks list first and see how that goes.

I’m trying out micro.blog for this project because:

I was torn between making a real splash with a semi-custom app and launching sooner, faster, and dirtier. You know I’m all about JFSing, but there was a real argument to be made to take a little more time (a few weeks only) and do something really, innately remarkable. There’s a real tension between “fast” and “remarkable” — and I loooooove to create things that are remarkable — but Alex convinced me faster was better.

Using an off-the-shelf tool gives me more time to develop the custom thing I was intending to use instead. So in case it all goes sideways… this was all his idea. 😂