Week 18 Update - May 3

Actually posting this on May 3rd. Is it a miracle?

Switching gears to sales and marketing mode

I’ll be switching from feature development and testing into sales and marketing for pretty must the rest of Q2, May and June. Webinars, workshops, ads, emails, demo, and calls. Our primary mode of outreach is cold-email outreach and paid social ads to mortgage titles and interests. The primary call to action is attend a live webinar and sign up for the free trial.

If someone jumps on the free trial without attending a training, we’ll try to get them in the office hours trainings. If someone attends the webinar, workshops, we want them to sign up and setup there co-branding on the call.

I committed to my microconf mastermind (accountability) to assign code days and sales days. Code days imply remote work, work from have dev station. Sales days imply office, video, webinars. Not remote. Need to implement and stick to it.

1:1 Demo calls?

I plan to provide a motion for 1:1 demo calls, but it might be challenging at this stage in the game to fulfill on enterprise sales type discussions. At this point, we are focused on the bottoms up sales approach. We are not equipped to handle enterprise sales at this point.

Selling the roadmap

Our roadmap and future features will be critical as we jump into “sales mode.” Selling the future vision of what this application, this ‘platform’ could be will be super-important to getting true believers on board with downpayment.gift.

If we get any revenue in the next two months, awesome. If we get feedback on the current app and the roadmap, then I’m going to be happy. If it’s crickets and no one seems to care about offering down payment registry campaigns… well… let’s not talk about that!

Features and Bugs

Added the discount_code property to client sign up to track the PLEDGE_GIFT_CODE at signup.

Tested 3 different spinner wheels in total now. It looks like we’ll be using a custom, on-site, approach instead of embedding javascript from another site.

Added feature flag in rollout to MANAGE DEMOS feature were users can assume the Demo Users role. It’s turned on by default. This way we can easily toggle this in Redis.

Added a feature flag for spinner widget on signup. This is turned off completely for now. We’ll have to pitch w/o it and hope to complete it in the next week or so.

Fixed issue where spaces in User name, last name, result in invalid email and thus validation errors uncaught in Demo User.

Fixed issue where invalid chars need to be stripped from demo user email. Same issue as above, anticipating this edge case.

Fixed issue where demo user was created with a partner_code field from it’s referring partner (owner) where we did not want that field assigned. Caused issue with a client user_type having a vendor partner_code. Fixed in User.create and elsewhere, replacing User.find_by_partner_code with find_by_partner_code_and_user_type is ‘vendor’.

Registered for Founder.University

Online zoom founder program that used to be an in-person, SF Bay Area thing. Now it’s all remote. Asked to pitch 2-minutes for practice. Did not get response. Hopefully will have a chance to practice pitching or record a video of it regardless. I did manage to revise the old pitch deck I created at the end of September in pasteapp.com.

TODO: send pitch deck and video to revue investor list.

Joined the slack group for This Week in Startups for the founderuniversity slack channel.