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How pricing experiments helped me reach $6,000 MRR
It’s been a while since my last post! Since then, I’ve been focusing on growing Remote Rocketship. I’m super excited to announce that it’s reached $2,000 MRR! 🥳 You may recall from the last post that I mentioned that the only sustainable channel to grow the website is SEO and that I was learning how to do it from scratch (and it’s now getting 19,000 monthly search clicks!). In this post, I want to share everything I’ve learned about SEO and how to approach it. In doing so, I hope you’ll also share your tips and help me fill in any gaps in my knowledge!
In my last post, I talked about how I going about searching for a new idea to work on. I’ve now landed on Remote Rocketship, a job board for remote roles. In this post, I’ll talk about how I got there, what I’ve been up to and how I’m thinking about moving forward.
I’ve been searching for new startup ideas and problem areas to tackle. It’s quite difficult to do, especially when you begin adding constraints to the criteria such as “Am I excited about this problem space?”. The internet is filled with helpful ways to come up with startup ideas and below is the summary of what I’ve learned on the topic during the last few months.
Over the last month, I’ve been exploring a new idea in the cold outbound sales space. The idea is to generate personalized cold emails at scale using AI. Currently, there is a trade-off between quantity and quality when it comes to sending cold emails: Either you spend lots of time researching a prospect and crafting a personalized email, or you send generic emails in bulk to a large group of people. Naturally, the response rate for personalized emails is much higher than the generic ones, so I’ve been looking into how to do this at scale.
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I always think that I’ll be happy when everything is running smoothly. When X visitors are flowing in, conversions are steady, the app works flawlessly, and revenue is predictable. But that’s not life. And nor is business. Life is messy. And there’s no such thing as perfect. At least, not the version of "perfect" I have in my head. Messy is the perfection. Every chaotic piece, every moving part, somehow coming together to make it work. Look at our bodies: an intricate mess of cells, signals, and systems, all in constant motion, working toward a common goal. What's more, nothing runs in a chronological order. That's only our perception. Things are constantly out of sync. Dancing in the background. Building our simple reality. I want to embrace this more. The unpredictability, the imperfection. The beautiful and disorderly relentless mess of it all. I don't want inbox zero. I don't want to have my life in order. I want to let go more. Not hold the beautiful bird on my hand every so tightly that I squeeze the bejesus out of it. Do more. Do less. Whatever. Live as it comes. PS: I wish I lived more like my writing above.
Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages. I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.
Ike Saul is the founder of Tangle, an independent political newsletter that aims to tell you the news from both sides of the political spectrum.
Plus my new AI tool and the latest AI + Video tool I helped hunt on Product Hunt
Highlights I launched my first Kickstarter project and found Kickstarter surprisingly painless. I’m kind of on track to reach my Kickstarter goal, but I’ll need to get creative in raising the last 2/3rds. I’m soliciting suggestions for fun services to run on my 4x ARM CPU / 24 GB cloud server. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: