Weekly Indie Log #3

This week was my first fully dedicated marketing week and it just flew by! 🤯

Coding and Marketing Week

I got the idea of cycling between coding week and marketing week from Jon Yongfook, founder of Bannerbear .

The idea is simple, you dedicate yourself to coding fully for a week then switch focus to marketing the next week. Then you go back to coding and so on. The benefits are numerous:

• Split your time equally between coding and marketing.

• This simple rule makes planning easier.

• Addresses bias by treating both coding and marketing as important.

• Starting with coding helps inform your marketing efforts.

MRR Update

So this week, I've managed to bring Stomod's MRR to $150. The goal hasn't changed, still shooting for that $5000 MRR by year's end. To get there, I've whipped up some cool marketing initiatives for this week. Let's dive in and talk about them below.

Notion Influencer Collab on Tiktok

One of the marketing initiatives I wanted to try out was to collaborate with a Notion influencer on Tiktok ever @levelsio tweeted about it .

So this is exactly what I did. My wife helped me out a bit by creating a list of Notion influencers on Tiktok and sorting them out by number of followers, average views on videos, etc.

I then reached out to each of them by DM and picked the one with the best price/value proposition to do a collab video with them.

Yvonne from Tiktok is the person I decided to go with and she was super professional and delivered the video as per the timeline she proposed.

My instructions for the video were very simple. It had to showcase how easy you could create a blog using Notion and Stomod and for the video to be in the same style as she usually posts on her Tiktok account.

I wanted her audience to feel like this video came from her and not as a sponsored video. I’m super glad with the final result and you can check out the video below:

https://embed.notion.co/api/iframe?app=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2F%40yvonneyq_%2Fvideo%2F7340252725994687762%3Flang%3Den&key=656ac74fac4fff346b811dca7919d483

Tiktok Influencer Collab Impact

I got a spike in signups for Stomod after the video was published. While Yvonne did post a link with my UTM tags in her bio, the video itself does not have any clickable links. Tracking the impact of the campaign in that sense is not 100% accurate.

However, the goal of the campaign was not only sign ups but also to raise awareness of the product. From that perspective, I am pretty happy with the stats after 3 days:

With the number of bookmarks, I see for sure there’s interest in the product and I am hoping that this has a trickle effect down the line with possible customers coming back from this campaign to check out Stomod and possibly sign up.

Deriving More Value

With the Tiktok collab, I have got additional derived value: a video I can use to promote Stomod via Tiktok ads. After trying out different other ad platforms like Meta Ads, Google Ads, Reddit Ads, I want to give Tiktok Ads a run for its money and see how it converts. This will be the topic of another weekly indie log 😅

Better Tracking for Marketing Initiatives

One thing which I believe is imperative for any marketing effort is to setup proper tracking for all metrics so that impact can be measured and that I do not do things blindly.

For this I decided to go with PostHog .

PostHog

PostHog is an amazing piece of software which allows me to embed a script on Stomod and it tracks pageviews, session replays, A/B Testing and more.

I spent some time this week to properly setup this tool and to create funnels to measure impact for my ad campaigns from Google, Tiktok and more.

One thing I realized very quickly is that PostHog scripts can possibly be blocked by people running ad blockers. However there is an option to proxy the requests on my own domain to avoid that.

After struggling a bit with it, I managed to setup the proxy server on stomod.com and now I have more visibility into how users behave on the site without having to worry about PostHog being blocked.

Other Marketing Initiatives

Subreddit & Medium Accounts for Stomod

My other marketing initiatives revolved more around the SEO part of Stomod. I setup two things:

1. A subreddit for Stomod where I would post blog posts from https://stomod.com/blog

2. Cross-posting articles from the Stomod blog to Medium with the aim of getting a link (even if it’s no-follow) from Medium by setting the canonical link back to the original blog post on the Stomod blog.

Landing Page Updates

With PostHog now firmly setup on stomod.com - I decided to run an experiment around the CTA with different wordings: “Get Started for free”, “Get Started”, “Start Free Trial”.

This is just a start as I plan to have even more drastic experiments to see which changes resonate more with my visitors.

Product Update Videos

Finally the other initiative I undertook for marketing week is to produce short < 60 seconds product marketing videos which explains the features I shipped during the previous coding week.

The goal is to repurpose the videos for different platforms:

• Twitter/X - as a drip feed of scheduled tweets over the next week about the new features

• YouTube - where I created a dedicated channel for Stomod and post these videos as shorts with hope that it drives some traffic to Stomod.

• TikTok - same as above.

It’s very difficult to measure the impact of posting those videos to the different platforms listed above but I am hoping long-term it raises awareness and bring some customers from those platform after they view one of my videos!

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That’s about it from me for this edition of the Weekly Indie Log. I have added the ability for you to drop comments on this blog post now - feel free to share your thoughts! 👇