Indie

Devleads is online now! Users can now start using the platform to search for developers. You can visit it on www.devleads.app.

I haven’t done much marketing or official launches so far, but maybe I won’t do it as well. I don’t think my target audience is on Producthunt for example, so won’t do an official launch. Maybe I post something on Indiehackers but that the best of an official launch I will do.

I’m planning to build a functionality where subscribers of DevLeads can fill in a referral code. Then I will connect with recruiters and ask them to market my platform for a percentage of the revenue of the referred subscription. Kinda like affiliate marketing. But that’s a future idea for Devleads.

Overall, I’m happy to launch this product even though I have zero subscribers yet. This is my first web product and so have still much to learn.

Regarding Growrilla, I’m planning to develop a new feature this month as soon as possible. I haven’t built something new yet in the past six weeks, thus feel obliged to build a new feature. There is something already in my mind and will share about it once I’m building it.

Let’s rock!

Career

This week at Somnox has been a bit weird. Due to the increase of pressure on the customer support team, I felt obliged to create resources for them to share with customers. So this week, I haven’t written a single line of code and was busy making customer support videos. I wrote the scripts, recorded my voice, screen-recorded the solutions, and edited the video contents. Completely different from I normally do.

Honestly though, I did like to do these things. Some of you may not know, but I was a video editor before and made videogame montages, and even 3D animations (or objects) with CINEMA4D. This was roughly 10 years ago, but it seems that these skills (specifically video-editing) comes in handy once in a while. Also, I still like to do it 😄.

Of course, this does put my own schedules and tasks behind, but that is startup life I suppose. Everybody has a main role with its responsibilities, but sometimes you need to switch to fill the gaps. Sometimes there are priorities that needs to be done first rather than your own defaults tasks.

Personal Life

This week hasn’t been the greatest. After putting Devleads online, I’ve become lazier the past few days. Maybe it’s kind of a celebration or telling myself to take some time off.

But I feel I’m not using my time effectively. Probably a feeling that loads of engineers feel when they have side-projects.

For me though, it’s feels like I’m avoiding something. I’ve known it for a while now, but I’m just avoiding doing marketing for my personal projects. Think Drop, Growrilla, Devleads, and other apps that I’ve created should have had a stronger marketing presence. The reason that it is not is solely because of myself.

I stray away from marketing and sales unconsciously. I basically don’t feel comfortable with it. That’s why for the past few years I’ve been mainly focused on engineering. Even though, many engineers have taught me the lesson that a good product isn’t enough. Marketing and sales are still the main driving force.

Thus I feel like I should be doing more content creation and marketing in general. For example, creating content for social media pages like Growrilla.

And that’s what I’m going to do and try to improve on.

Instead of having consecutive nights solely focussing on coding, I’m going to create content. At least for once a day in the week.

I’m identifying that marketing is something I lack, so I will start working on it. I’m not aiming to be the best, but competent enough to do it. This is a road, I must conquer.

Overall week rating 8/10

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