
## Stats

- Worked 83.25 hours (+8% M/M)
- Streamed 80.75 hours on Twitch (+124% M/M)
- Revenue $596.44 (+89% M/M)
- 311 Twitter followers (-18% M/M)
- 154 Twitch followers (+18% M/M)

## February Goals

### Finish upload transcripts feature

Grade: C

Right now we support uploading text file transcripts (basically .vtt, or .txt). For most of the month this feature wasn't paywalled and did have some users discovering that they could upload all their transcripts for free. As of last night, it is paywalled, and remains to be seen what the conversion rate is.

I am happy that there will be more opportunities to show the paywall to users. Our number 2 cause of failures is from people uploading Word document transcripts.

I give myself a C grade because Word documents are still not supported. I investigated nice ways of showing Word documents in the UI and there aren't really great options. The best I've found is an iframe that you can host which sends the document to Microsoft, and renders it in the iframe. It works ok, but the styling options are limited so it looks a bit weird, especially on narrow screens. I'll probably try to go this direction anyway and ship something soon (TM).

### Make 5 sales via FB ads

Grade: D

Out of 11 new customers, only 3 definitively came from ads I ran. 3/5 = 60% which is a D. The rest of the customers came from google search.

There was a big win this month with FB ads because I discovered that CPMs for South Africa are very low, and was able to set up an ad campaign with very low cost of conversion, albiet for sign ups, not payments.

This has led to a flood of traffic and users, and I've been iterating on the product to try and fix all the failures that I've noticed.

I also localized the price of the product, including listing the price in Rand which is the currency in South Africa. I am already seeing some positive response here, so hopefully next month I'll be able to report that my ad spend buys more than it costs.

### Drive down failed transcripts to 0

Grade: D

We are not even close but instead of an F letter grade I get a D "for effort". I've spent a ton of time this month on improving and understanding reliability.

The site has gone from a single PUT request made from the web app to using service workers that can run in the background, and which do a multipart upload to S3.

The uploads are more reliable but there's still a lot more work to do. For one thing, the in app browser that opens when you click an FB ad doesn't support service workers. I've attempted to direct users to open the system browser before they sign in, but I think ultimately I'll just have users in this browser give me their email, then email them a login invitation. This will open in their system browser 100% of the time, and prevent people from using the product in the FB browser.

Safari and Firefox don't support service workers either, but fortunately these are not very popular browsers.

Ultimately this is still a work in progress, and it takes time to see how changes affect production.

Second biggest cause of failures is uploading Word documents, so that's getting fixed this month too.

### Measure finish transcribe time, and label time (create minutes start - transcript finish)

Grade: F

Didn't do it. I did relax the restriction on needing to label all speakers before generating minutes. GPT can usually discover the speaker names by reading the transcript, so it's a bit of a waste of time. I had a paying user who was very frustrated because they couldn't figure out the labeling system.

You still have the option to label speakers, but I think it's best to just leave it as optional.

### Use server side rendering and improve perf

Grade: B+

We use server side rendering now and it's a much better experience than it was, e.g. parts of the UI load faster. I think there's a lot of room to run in terms of overall performance of the app, but it's not the bottleneck.

What is the bottleneck? Probably upload failures, because even if a user becomes a customer by paying for a plan, they may still encounter failures that result in churn. And users considering becoming customers, often hit (mostly upload) failures, which in turn prevents them from becoming customers.

After that, I think the bottleneck is likely landing page conversion rate because 94% of vistors bounce. 90% of these visitors are people who literally clicked an ad, so given that context, this is especially terrible/can be improved.

## Things I am Thinking About

### Churn, Reliability

It's still the top priority. Close to or exactly 100% of uploads should succeed. It's the most tenuous part of the process because I am depending on the users' conditions being right, e.g. having internet that's fast enough to get the upload off reasonably quick.

I've already written about it above so won't rehash it here.

### Mobile

This month I wrote a mobile version of the website! Many users are on mobile when they come from the FB ad and while there are still upload failures, it feels good to have a better UI for such a common use case.

### New domain

I tried to purchase a new domain name that I think will give better SEO ranking and got totally screwed by name.com! They basically took my money (thousands of dollars) and then silently failed to purchase the domain. After complaining multiple times to customer support they are in the process of refunding me, but I'm expecting to lose a few hundred dollars because I was charged a currency conversion fee by my bank when making the transaction.

It's a really bad experience, and I'm considering migrating all my domains away from them, though not sure to who.

### Targeting purchase conversions

My FB ad campaign is targeting the Registration conversion event (sign ups). I did this because their docs recommend targeting an event that you will receive a few dozen of within a week.

I am guessing that there are a lot of people in this cohort that are likely to sign up, but not to purchase for whatever reason. I'd like to bootstrap an ad campaign targeting Purchase events, and I think it will be possible once I get enough customers from the current campaign to buy subscriptions.

## Goals for April

- Drive down failed transcripts to 0
- Finish upload transcripts feature for Word docs and PDFs.
- Make 15 sales via FB ads
- Ensure FB conversions API has 8/10 score or higher for Purchase events
- Build "email-only" invite sign up flow for FB ad traffic
- Improve landing page -> sign up conversion rate to 10% or higher.


Monthly Retrospective - March 2024


## Stats

- Worked 77 hours (-18% M/M)
- Of that work, 36 hours was done while streaming live on Twitch
- 47% of work was done live on Twitch
- Revenue $316.05 (+31% M/M)
- 379 Twitter followers (+28% M/M)
- 130 Twitch followers (+15% M/M)

## January Goals

### Build out feature to upload transcripts

Grade: D

I started this a few days ago and I want to finish this week. A lot of people upload .docx files believing that this will work, and it does not. It's the number one source of "failed transcripts", and I think there is a big opportunity here. Especially if I advertise this on the top of the landing page.

### Make 1 sale via FB ads

Grade: A

We made 2 sales with FB ads this month. The ad campaign is unprofitable right now, but I'm going to continue to optimize it and eventually make it work. The next targeting refinement is likely to add non US countries which supposedly have a lower CPM.

### Create metric for transcript quality

Grade: F

Didn't work on this yet.

### Create metric for minutes quality

Grade: F

Didn't work on this yet either.

### Run 1 survey

Grade: F

Didn't do this.

None of these goals felt like priorities over making the ads work well.

### Run 1 A/B test

Grade: A

I'm currently A/B testing a section on the landing page with a CEO letter. Right now it doesn't look like it moves the needle and I'll probably end up shipping it soon.

A more effective test would be something that gets more traffic rather than the bottom of the landing page.

## Things I am Thinking About

### Churn, Reliability

We had 4 customers churn this month from last, and 2 of 3 customers this month set their subscription to end the following month. I want to make sure people have a good experience. As we get more users from spending on FB ads, it becomes more apparent that many people have a suboptimal experience.

I integrated Sentry this month and I'm optimistic it will be helpful in identifying errors. I want to spend time this coming month driving down errors and transcript failures. Failures happen because of many reasons, so having good observability is critical.

A large cause of failures is people uploading .docx transcripts, so fixing this class of failures is going to involve finishing the goal from last month to allow uploading text transcripts.

Performance is another side of the story - a slow website makes people less likely to buy.

## Goals for March

- Finish upload transcripts feature
- Make 5 sales via FB ads
- Drive down failed transcripts to 0
- Measure finish transcribe time, and label time (create minutes start - transcript finish)
- Use server side rendering and improve perf


Monthly Retrospective - February 2024


## Stats

- Worked 94.25 hours (+38% M/M)
- Of that work, 55.5 hours was done while streaming live on Twitch
- 59% of work was done live on Twitch
- Revenue $241.37 (+834% M/M)
- 297 Twitter followers (+9% M/M)
- 113 Twitch followers (+11% M/M)

## December Goals

### Finish minutes template feature

Grade: D

I built out the UI and backend for this feature most of the way but didn't ship it yet. Why not? There are two or three reasons:

Reason 1 is that I got bogged down by actually trying to make the feature work well. The idea is to inject a template for the document into the GPT prompt, but creating the template is a can of worms. Which parts from the example doc get kept, and which get discarded?

I hit problems with GPT including information from the example doc in the generation for the current transcript, so if I'm not careful this can regress meeting minutes quality. Quality is something I already struggle to measure.

Reason 2 is that I made a huge improvement to meeting minutes quality that achieved much of the spirit of this goal. I had a user "thumbs down" their meeting minutes at the beginning of the month, and when I reached out, they told me they wanted more bullet points, and sections for key takeaways and next steps.

I tweaked the GPT prompt, and this user mentioned the minutes were much better. They seem a lot better to me as well, so this is a small victory.

Measuring minutes quality is an open question. I've thought about looking at number of button clicks per transcript for the "Copy to Clipboard" and "Export to Word" buttons. I think if I track this, along with listening for browser copy events (for people who manually copy) then I could get a sense of, at least, who is exporting the minutes out of the product.

Reason 3 is that, ultimately, once the GPT prompt fix went in, I didn't perceive this to be a bottleneck for the business. That's more based on my intuition, but it seems to me like getting more users is the bottleneck. What if the users are getting poor quality minutes, leading to churn? Well that will be hard to know without getting more user data and feedback. So the bottleneck is probably still users.

### Make 1 sale

Grade: A+

We acquired 9 new customers this month! This is really awesome, because I raised prices on Jan 1. In December, we acquired 4 customers, at a price point that is 6x less than the new price.

Users continue to be driven entirely by organic search, thank you Google and Microsoft.

### Send 3000 emails

Grade: F

I am cold emailing youtubers to offer them affiliate partnerships. They make youtube videos about MinutesGenerator, and they get 30% of sales.

I sent 705 emails across 186 unique leads (includes followups) with a 16% reply rate (30 replies). Of these 30 replies there has been some interest, 3 calls, and one video made! This video did not result in any sales, but is a nice milestone at the end of a long funnel.

I will say that I underestimated the work required to get this program off the ground. It's draining to respond to emails all the time, and I think about hiring this out a lot.

Hiring an SDR to manage the process sounds attractive, but I think it will cost $25/hour, and optimistically is 5 hours of work per week, so 20 hours per month = $500/month. If it's 10 hours per week, then $1000/month. I think I would need to make around 50 sales to really make the program profitable.

In part, I am losing steam on the effort because I think it may be much more effort than running FB ads. FB ads will also allow me to scale up or down more easily if I need to manage bottlenecks that arise (product quality, reliability issues, customer support burden, etc). I think I can also do it without needing an employee like an SDR.

### Build Zoom integration

Grade: F

Didn't even start on this one. Instead I set up analytics with Posthog. I'm glad I did, this is higher priority, and nobody is asking for Zoom integration.

### Build or buy a customer feedback corner widget

Grade: A

I setup Intercom! This has been pretty smooth sailing so far, and several users have used it to ask for support, which is great.

It's nice to have a clear pathway to being able to hire customer support staff when that becomes necessary.

## Things I am Thinking About

### FB Ads

I touched on this already, but I am getting increasingly excited about running ads on Facebook. I'm going to do it this month and see if we can generate any sales. I am hoping that it will provide a pathway to 100x'ing the business in a sustainable way.

I took a copywriting class this month and I think I can write some decent copy for an ad. I am not clear on the end to end process, but the first thing I did in February is setup the conversions API from Meta to optimize future ads, so hopefully we can get some momentum going here.

I think spending $1000/month of ads will generate more revenue than the same spend on the affiliate program for now. I want to do both, but I think ads may be more efficient, so makes sense to do first.

### Raised prices success

From last month:

"I raised prices Jan 1 after a 2 week long email campaign to existing users. That yielded 1 sale which is about a 1.5% conversion rate. I'm interested to see if new users will pay the higher price. Fingers crossed!"

More people buy at the higher price! Crazy, and definitely an unlock for many things, e.g. ads, hiring, acceleration.

### Analytics

I set up PostHog this month to track analytics and built a dashboard. It's been pretty good so far, definitely a learning curve around how to instrument things so that querying is easy. Ultimately I think this is going to be an unlock. Some things I'm excited about:

1. Dashboard has a failures chart so I can notice when failures happen and fix them, ideally this reduces churn.
2. A/B testing is possible, so I can experiment with things, including changing the copy on the landing page and measuring signup rate changes.
3. It offers surveys, so I can ask existing users "what is the worst thing about MinutesGenerator?" and have them tell me things to fix.
4. Paves the way for understanding traffic from affiliates and FB ads. For example, understanding what percentage of users who click an FB ad will purchase.
5. Gives a way to understand churn and lifetime customer value

### Uploading transcripts feature

5% of transcript uploads are of a .txt, .docx, or .pdf file type. This currently results in an error, but I think it is a revealed product feature request. How many users bounce from the landing page when they discover we don't do transcript -> meeting minutes?

I'd like to implement this feature, advertise it on the landing page, and see if we can improve the signup rate.

I'm not sure how to monetize it because the credit system works based on the length of the recording uploaded. No recording, no length. Some options might be:

1. Make it free at first.
2. Make it cost a fixed number of credits, maybe 30? That fits into the free 40 credit trial. Or make it cost more than the free trial to prevent free trial abusers.
3. Offer two types of credits, one for recordings, one for meeting minutes.
4. Pay fixed amount per use.

As I write these out, I like (2) the best. I could try out 30 credit cost and see how many free trial abusers there are (this happens currently, occasionally people make multiple accounts to use the free trial).

### Improving the model

I want to add some UI to "fix" a transcript that's been generated, either by combining multiple lines of dialogue into one, or by mis-labeling the speaker of a line of dialog. A third issue is dialogue that is not captured by the current model.

Creating a feedback loop is important for eventually fine-tuning the model to be better. It also lets me assess the current quality of the product.

UI will probably go in the speaker labeler, but I'm not sure exactly how it's gonna look.

Creating feedback loop for the transcript and minutes is important.

## Goals for February

- Build out feature to upload transcripts
- Make 1 sale via FB ads
- Create metric for transcript quality
- Create metric for minutes quality
- Run 1 survey
- Run 1 A/B test


Monthly Retrospective - January 2024


## Stats

- Worked 68.5 hours (-23% M/M)
- Of that work, 49.25 hours was done while streaming live on Twitch
- 72% of work was done live on Twitch
- Revenue $25.84 (+82% M/M)
- 272 Twitter followers (+36% M/M)
- 113 Twitch followers (+4% M/M)

## November Goals

### Measure detailed timing information

Grade: A

I record times of sections that happen when users go through the flow of the product. They are stored next to the data for transcripts so everything is in one place and I am very happy with it since it lets me see users' upload speed and gives me a sense of how long folks are waiting around, identifying bottlenecks, etc.

### Allow users to upload template meeting minutes

Grade: D

I've started this but it's not shipped yet. I'm hung up on how to inject the template into the GPT prompt, but I think I'm getting close to something workable.

The UI is built out most of the way, I'd estimate there's 6 more hours so I am hoping to be done by the end of the week.

In general, it's hard to assess how good the system does at creating minutes, especially if the goal is to do fine tuning. I think this ties into another issue which is that I'm not soliciting customer feedback very often and should have a way to do it consistently. Maybe an email campaign to paying customers.

### Send 10 cold emails to "admin professional"-relevant youtubers

Grade: A

I did this over the holidays and got a 0% reply rate. I'm in the process of setting up a larger campaign soon to hit 1000 prospects with an email sequence.

### Make more sales in December than I did in November (5 or more)

Grade: B

I made 4 sales, so same amount but not greater. I think this was because of a holiday slow down.

### Average 20 hours of work per week

Grade: C+

I needed 88.5 hours and did 68.5 hours, so fell short by a decent amount - it was a chiller month and also holidays.

## Things I am Thinking About

### Hiring and automation

I'm reading Buy Back your Time and I'm trying to think about how I would offload any of the tasks that I do when I sit down to work. Right now I'm feeling a tension between getting profitable by increasing revenue significantly, and optimizing for my own time.

I think what makes sense right now is to devote all efforts into acquiring more customers faster. More customers will give me more data for conversion rates and also qualitative data about how users use the site and what they want.

### Raised prices impact

I raised prices Jan 1 after a 2 week long email campaign to existing users. That yielded 1 sale which is about a 1.5% conversion rate. I'm interested to see if new users will pay the higher price. Fingers crossed!

## Goals for January

- Finish minutes template feature
- Make 1 sale
- Send 3000 emails
- Build Zoom integration
- Build or buy a customer feedback corner widget


Monthly Retrospective - December 2023


## Stats

- Worked 89.5 hours (-20% M/M)
- Of that work, 46.25 hours was done while streaming live on Twitch
- 52% of work was done live on Twitch
- Revenue $14.17 (+339% M/M)
- 200 Twitter followers (+3% M/M)
- 109 Twitch followers (+7% M/M)

## October Goals

### Record a long form podcast episode with a virtual assistant

Grade: F

I didn't end up doing this, but I did find more clarity on my ideal customer profile, namely: administrative professionals. This can include virtual assistants, but isn't limited to them. I'll talk about future plans for marketing later. Ultimately, I decided I can find a more efficient way to reach audiences.

### Time to Transcript for MinutesGenerator should be under 10 minutes per hour of recording

Grade: A-

The real value of doing this is to decrease the time to delivering value, resulting in a better customer experience, resulting in less churn and more revenue.

I removed the inital text prompt and the transcribe button - just upload your file and things will start automatically. You literally have to do one thing and it's really easy. I spent a lot of time optimizing the transcription flow after upload. I rented a GPU server so I didn't have to wait for my API provider's cold start boot times. I started streaming back results to the client from the server as soon as they were ready, instead of waiting for everything to be ready before showing. I created a progress bar that communicated where in the process the job was, and gives an ETA for being done. Other stuff too, but ultimately the take away is that people hate waiting, and the faster my service gets, the better experience people have. That reduces churn, and boosts the potential for sales. Waiting sucks and speed is a feature.

This goal is an A- not an A because I am almost certain every successful transcription in the current system is well under 10 minutes. However, I don't yet have analytics on how long each step in the process takes, so this is based on usage I have seen personally. I keep watch very diligently, so I am confident we're there, but speed is so critical that it has to be measured and tracked.

The north star is to create the best software in the world for generating meeting minutes, and that software should produce instant results.

All the optimization I did in November was such low hanging fruit that I didn't need to measure to see performance improvements. The improvements were obvious. Going forward, I have optimization ideas that are more experimental, and I want to track perf metrics more rigorously to make sure everything gets faster and stays fast.

### Make one sale

Grade: A

I made four sales this month! All with zero marketing - customers came through organic bing search. I was worried about this goal at the beginning of the month because it's more of a lag measure than a lead measure, for instance I can control sending X cold emails in a month, but it's harder to control the outcome of that activity.

I had a tiny bit of confidence that sales would come because I could see people signing up for MinutesGenerator, but then hitting issues with the product and then leaving the site. The biggest issue I noticed was that it took a long time to receive any value from the site. A user would sign up, and then be faced with three things to do: upload a recording of their meeting, write a text description of any names or proper nouns in the meeting, and then click a button to start transcribing.

People would do these steps, which is a testatment to how much they do not want to write their own meeting minutes. After clicking the button, they would see a loading spinner and transcription would take on average 45 minutes to finish. Super slow! There was no feedback things were working, most users assumed the product didn't work and would leave the site (many times this assumption was correct and no error was surfaced).

I realized that nobody wants to pay for a shitty product that doesn't work (duh). I also realized that I can make the experience more compelling by doing two things:

First, speed it up. This is what the last section is about so we already know about it.

The second strategy is to show results to the user as early as possible. If the customer sees the first few seconds of audio transcribed, they get more confident things will work. I think once they get invested, a better outcome is more likely.

I changed the product so that it produces a partial transcript, and if the audio is longer than the free trial allows, an upsell pricing table appears asking you to upgrade your plan to continue transcribing. The partial transcript shows the user this will work, which boosts confidence, which boosts likelihood of them paying. That's the theory anyway, and it seems to be working so far!

### Average 20 hours of work per week

Grade: A

I averaged 20.9 hours worked per week, slightly above my goal. This goal combined with live streaming my work has been the most transformative for my productivity. It's nice to have something measurable I can track.

## Things I am Thinking About

### Iterating on the Money Printer

I get a steady stream of real user feedback now and it's been helpful to see where the product breaks. My mental model is that MinutesGenerator is a machine that other people interact with. I input money and time into the machine, and users input files, clicks, scrolls, etc. into the machine. The machine outputs meeting minutes and also sometimes the machine outputs money. Most of the time something gets messed up, the machine breaks and outputs nothing and the user leaves unsatisified.

I've started looking at every visitor to the site as beginning a sequence of hundreds of small steps. Every step has to go perfectly in order to make money. Any of these steps can break, for example the user uploads a file and it takes too long, or they click a button and there's a UI bug, or they pay money and our stripe webhook handler isn't set up correctly, or they read something on the landing page and got confused, etc etc etc.

It doesn't matter if a failure happens on the first step or the 100th step - if something fails, it's game over and you make zero money and probably pissed someone off.

Because of this, I look very closely at how every user's experience is. If they encounter any failure at all, I immediately prioritize a fix so it can't happen again. I have done this for one month and there are still problems, but I can see the improvements reflected in sales numbers as well as successful meeting minute generations.

It's tempting to think that you can create a machine that works well without observing user behavior, but I think it's extremely difficult. For example, here are some differences between you and a new user - you may have a different OS, browser, internet speed, screen dimensions, mobile device, familiarity with online tools, file formats used with testing, expectations for what meeting minutes look like, expectations for meeting minutes file format, reading level (or else bias that your own copy writing is easy to understand), and on and on and on and on.

### Cold Email Influencer Outreach

One arm of my strategy is building a best in class product that users have an overwhelmingly positive reaction to. I want churn low and to retain users forever.

The other side of the story is the process of making known to strangers. To do this, I'm going to try and form some affiliate partnerships with creators who have audiences that have administrative professionals. I spent some time this month building a list (and a system to build lists) to do some email outreach. I'm currently warming up some email accounts to start doing cold outreach, and I'm hoping that I can land a few partners and drive hundreds or thousands of sign ups.

For example, if I can get a few creators to produce videos that get total 10,000 views, and this has a 1% conversion rate, then this would be 100 sign ups, and would 25x my current sales numbers. Part of this plan is going to include raising prices, and offering exclusive affiliate discounts. If I can generate $15/month subscriptions, then this would make MinutesGenerator profitable with an $18,000 annual recurring revenue.

In general, the plan is to build out, optimize, and automate customer acquisition channels. Right now organic search is my only channel. Becoming more well known will help this channel's efficiency improve via higher search result ranking.

## Goals for December

- Measure detailed timing information
- Allow users to upload template meeting minutes
- Send 10 cold emails to "admin professional"-relevant youtubers
- Make more sales in December than I did in November (5 or more)
- Average 20 hours of work per week


Monthly Retrospective - November 2023


## Stats

- Worked 111.75 hours (+35% M/M)
- Of that work, 47.25 hours was done while streaming live on Twitch
- 42% of work was done live on Twitch
- Revenue $3.23 (from Twitch)
- 195 Twitter followers (+8% M/M)
- 102 Twitch followers (+4% M/M)

## October Goals

### Publish 100 TikToks

Grade: F

I published about a dozen tiktoks with no viral successes.

### Get 1000+ views on at least one TikTok

Grade: F

All tiktok's published never made it out of 200 view jail.

### Create QOTD and share it every day on Twitter thereafter

Grade: F

I didn't do this because this wasn't my focus after discovering that MinutesGenerator was getting users via Google search.

### Get approved for Adsense on [AddictingTrivia.com](https://addictingtrivia.com)

Grade: F

This didn't happen.

### Average 20 hours of work per week

Grade: A

I worked 25.23 hours per week on average.

## Things I am Thinking About

### Pivoting back to MinutesGenerator

I discovered midway through the month that my first business [MinutesGenerator](https://minutesgenerator.com) has been steadily seeing signups via organic Google search traffic.

This flew in the face of an insecurity I had about the business, which was that people wouldn't want to use or pay for a service that I perceived to be less valuable then the well-resourced, older, more feature-rich competitors in the space like Otter AI and others.

I decided to try an invest more time into making MinutesGenerator work with a focus on generating leads. I decided my ICP was VA's and EA's, who as part of their job responsibilities have to take meeting minutes.

I found some EA and VA Facebook groups and was able to find that this demographic does seem interested in a tool like this, and got some feedback on the price being too high, and the time to transcript being too long.

I took another look at the product and decided to do a major quality push to try and tighten up everything and make the product super reliable and fast. For example, sometimes generating a transcript would take over an hour, my goal is to make this take under 10 minutes and ideally be fast as possible. Realtime is best.

I also changed the pricing model to be subscription based. Two tiers, a $5/mo and $10/mo option with 5 hours of transcription for the lower tier, and 20 hours per month for the higher tier.

I'm going to rent a GPU server to eliminate cold start time from Replicate instances, and try to sell enough subscriptions to cover the cost. For example, an A100 from vultr is $800/month, so that would require about 80 sales.

I want to start creating VA specific content to try and build an audience, I think I'm going to try and create a podcast to interview VA's and see if I can learn about their workflow.

## Goals for November

- Record a long form podcast episode with a virtual assistant
- Time to Transcript for MinutesGenerator should be under 10 minutes per hour of recording
- Make one sale
- Average 20 hours of work per week


Monthly Retrospective - October 2023


## Stats

- Worked 82.5 hours (-2% M/M)
- Of that work, 64.75 hours was done while streaming live on Twitch
- 78% of work was done live on Twitch
- Revenue $6.57 (mainly from Twitch prime subscriptions)
- 181 Twitter followers (+4% M/M)
- 98 Twitch followers (+34% M/M)

## September Goals

### Publish 1000 quizzes on AddictingTrivia.com

Grade: C+

I published 776 quizzes across 81 different topics selected due to their high traffic and low "keyword difficulty" according to Ahrefs.

I'm pretty happy with the approach that I took on this, which was end to end automation. This includes GPT4 generating quiz questions, descriptions, titles, and topics, as well as using the Bing image search API to automatically find thumbnails, and the Google indexing API to automatically request indexing of the page.

As a result, all of these quizzes are indexed by google and I already do see a small trickle of organic search traffic for my oldest quizzes.

Time will tell if the organic search traffic can be converted into a productive revenue stream, but I'm looking forward to running the expriment either way.

I've been thinking more about traffic acquisition, and have decided that I need to pursue additional channels, but I'll write about that below.

### Get one page on AT to rank in the top 10 results on google for any search query

Grade: B

The Google search console data is pretty broad, but it does show that I am ranking 9th position or above for few search queries like "football tactics quiz".

When I search for this manually, I don't see my website, so I'm giving myself a B because the data isn't lining up with reality. I also notice that my ranking is trending down over the month, but I think this may be because of introducing so many new pages, which should skew the averages.

I would love to see the ranking data per query but I don't see a way to do it in GSC. Regardless, AddictingTrivia has very low traffic, and I would expect SEO to be more of a long game. More and more my mindset is shifting to view SEO as a secondary reinforcing traffic source, as opposed to a primary channel.

Said differently: SEO is slow and I don't want to wait for traffic.

### Average 20 hours of work per week

Grade: A-

I averaged 19.25 hours per week - just short of my goal.

I love this goal because I am confident that if I work consistently that I will be successful after enough time.

I'll have the same goal this month.

### Investigate a solution for analytics that I can use for quality control

Grade: A

I have two channels for feedback, one implicit and one explicit. The explicit channel is a thumbs up/down button per question that lets a user indicate if a question is good or bad. The implicit channel is telemetry on the success rate per question, which tells me if a question is hard or bad, as well as if people are navigating away from quizzes without finishing.

I don't do anything with this data but if I can drive traffic to the site, then I can use it to automatically discard questions that are poor quality. This is especially important because sometimes the AI generated questions are ambiguous or have an incorrect answer marked as correct. That's a bad experience and this telemetry offers a low cost way to remove these low quality questions.

## Things I am Thinking About

### Adsense

I am currently awaiting a decision on my 3rd application for adsense ads to be run on my site. The previous two times had a turnaround time of 8 days for a review that is automated. To me this is insane, but maybe it's a good thing, because I was looking online and saw that some random redditor said that borderline cases go to a human contractor to review. Maybe my turnaround time is so long because I always get sent to human review due to being borderline?

I tried Ezoic as well, but they rejected me due to not being in compliance with the Adsense policy. I have no idea what specifically I am being rejected for because Google doesn't say, though they tell me it's "Low Value Content". Ouch.

I've made some efforts to improve the quality of the homepage, so we'll see if the 3rd time is the charm. Fingers crossed.

### Going Viral

I banked hard on SEO to be a driver of traffic to my site and so far the results have not been exemplary. They may improve over time but I have arrived at the conclusion that I want things to go faster.

Going viral is the best way to deliver organic traffic quickly, but how does something go viral? I don't really know, but I have a few ideas and those will be the focus of next month.

Idea 1: Generate TikToks

I have so many multiple choice questions in my DB that have been generated, why not package them up into a vertical video format and try and get some distribution on TikTok, IG, and YT shorts?

I'm already working on a system that can churn these out fast and cheap, so we'll see if we can make something happen in October.

Idea 2: Addicting Trivia QOTD

Wordle was able to get a lot of distribution from people sharing their scores, so I'm wondering if I can repeat that playbook and create a "Quiz of the Day" (QOTD). Every day there is a new one that is the same for everyone. Create a streak system and a little graphic with emojis that shares well on twitter, FB, etc.

I don't know the specifics yet, but I think there's a chance something along these lines can work.

### TikTok Creator Program

If an account gets enough followers it becomes eligible for monetization via the creator program. I wonder if I can grow a set of TikTok accounts with programmatically generated content. If a video can get 10K views on average with $0.50 RPM, then with 2 videos per day that works out to $300 per month.

Very optimistically, if I can create videos that do 100K avg views, and post 4 times per day with $2 RPM, then this would be $24,000 per month.

Expanding out to YT and IG, there is a chance this alone is a 6 or 7 figure ARR business on its own.

## Goals for October

- Publish 100 TikToks
- Get 1000+ views on at least one TikTok
- Create QOTD and share it every day on Twitter thereafter
- Get approved for Adsense on [AddictingTrivia.com](https://addictingtrivia.com)
- Average 20 hours of work per week


SEO is slow so I also want to get traffic from going viral

Monthly Retrospective - September 2023


I launched [AddictingTrivia.com](https://addictingtrivia.com), and became a Twitch Affiliate!

## Stats

- Worked 84.5 hours
- Of that work, 60 hours was done while streaming live on twitch
- 71% of work was done live on twitch
- Revenue $0.75 🤠
- 174 Twitter followers
- 73 Twitch followers

## August Goals

### Find a niche and target customer for MinutesGenerator

Grade: F

I deprioritized MinutesGenerator and as a result didn't invest time into pivoting to find a niche for it. More on this below on the last goal.

### Invest in learning about marketing

Grade: B

I watched several Ahrefs youtube videos about how to do content marketing and use their tool to identify keywords with low competition. I would say I learned just enough to be dangerous.

I won't give myself a higher grade here because it does seem like I could have done more, but frankly I think this goal isn't well defined because it's hardly measurable. I think I achieved what was in the intended spirit here though.

### Decide on and execute a marketing approach, e.g. SEO

Grade: A

I paid for an Ahrefs subscription and used my learnings from the Ahrefs tutorials to identify an SEO niche for my next business, AddictingTrivia. This involved spending 12 hours across two days typing words into their tool until I found what I think is the right balance of low competition keywords, and high traffic.

This process was slow, but educational and I feel much more familiar with the tool. I'll classify it as one of these one-time-cost-asset things because I intend to use this tool for every subsequent business idea I have.

This goal gets an A because I picked SEO, and if things pan out as promised, then I can build a website that has a high likely hood of aquiring traffic from the get go. This dovetails nicely with the maxim that "entrepreneurs should build something that people want". People search for things they want, so basing a business idea off search query data checks this box.

### Make a decision by EOM about continuing to invest in MinutesGenerator

Grade: A

As I said above, I'm putting MinutesGenerator on the backburner. There's a chance I'll come back and try to pivot this into a niche, but for now I think my efforts are better spent elsewhere, rather than trying to squeeze blood from a stone in a saturated market.

There are many competitors in the audio to text transcription space, and many of them are VC funded, and pay for ads, and teams of engineers and designers. I'm not optimistic about a head on competition here, and I'd prefer not to go on a suicide mission trying to win a David and Goliath style battle.

One of the luxuries that I can enjoy as a bootstrapped founder is that I don't need to make a billion dollar company, and I don't need to make commitments to investors about what my business is going to do. I can pivot as much as I want (and I plan to) in order to solve the optimization problem of finding the easiest, most sustainable way to build a business that pays me enough money to live.

I'll leave MinutesGenerator up and running for as long as I can, but for now I am on to bigger and better things!

## What got done:

- Created AddictingTrivia.com
  - Right now hosts multiple choice quizzes on Minecraft and The Office.
  - 11 pages indexed by google as of this writing, most of them quiz pages.
  - First commit went in August 15th
- Became a Twitch Affiliate
  - This makes me eligible for monetization, and I have made 75 cents so far 😎
  - My engagement stats on Twitch are rising as well, I've noticed I also have more and more regulars coming into my chat
- Helped build a collaborative connect 4 game using BashStack (powered by HTMX) courtesy of my fellow streamer BadCop. Super fun, good times.
  - Try it out [here](https://connect4.bashsta.cc/)
- SEO education and research
  - Becoming familiar with Ahrefs SEO data tool

## Things I am Thinking About

### AddictingTrivia

The basic version of the plan is to acquire traffic via google search. There is a volume of about 400K search queries per month for keywords that are supposedly easy to rank for, that are also some form of "quiz" or "trivia", for example "minecraft quiz".

I'm going to focus on multiple choice quizzes because they are the simplest to generate, but I like the idea of expanding to other quiz types eventually. I am building a system that uses GPT to generate quizzes given a topic, and I intent to have this system be fully automated end to end, starting with a root keyword like "minecraft" and ending by uploading quiz data to my DB, pushing the website, and requesting indexing from google.

My goal is to generate 1000 quizzes using this system, because I think this will lend legitimacy to my website. I believe that nobody will take seriously a quiz website with only a dozen quizzes. This will also cast a wider net in SEO-space, allowing my site to acquire more traffic.

Eventually I will put Adsense ads on the site to monetize it.

The two biggest things to figure out for this approach are backlink acquisition and quality control. Backlinks are hard to get, and I don't know how systematized I can really make this process. I'm punting on it for now, because I think it will be an easier sell to ask for a link to a website with thousands of quizzes rather than a dozen.

Ahrefs comes to the rescue here too, because I can look at my competitor websites and see who is linking to them as well. This gives a reasonable place to start searching for backlinks, but ultimately it seems like a manual process.

The second thing to figure out is quality control for quizzes. GPT hallucinates wrong answers and off-topic questions decently often, which leads to poor quiz quality. My rough idea here is to use explicit and implicit feedback from website visitors to dynamically make adjustments to quizzes. For example, if a quiz has a question that 100% of users get wrong, that is an indicator of the question being bad. For explicit feedback, probably a thumbs up/down button asking to rate the quiz would suffice.

### Twitch Collabs

I had a lot of fun doing a costream with BadCop and it led to a few followers on twitch and twitter which was nice. I spend a lot of time streaming and it's rewarding to make more and deeper connections in that space. I definitely would like to do more costreams.

## Goals for September

- Publish 1000 quizzes on AddictingTrivia.com
- Get one page on AT to rank in the top 10 results on google for any search query
- Average 20 hours of work per week
- Investigate a solution for analytics that I can use for quality control


Monthly Retrospective - August 2023


## Stats

- Worked 85.75 hours
- Of that work, 52.75 hours was done while streaming live on twitch
- 62% of work was done live on twitch
- Revenue $0

## What got done:

- Created a landing page
  - Optimized for mobile
  - Attempted to make this SEO friendly by adding customizability to the <head> tag for things like title, description, open graph meta tags.
- Finished MVP for [MinutesGenerator.com](https://minutesgenerator.com) product
- Integrated stripe
  - Checkout page
  - Insufficient credits checking
  - Flow to create user post-checkout
    - Not sure about this, on the one hand could be lower friction for conversion, on the other hand it's weird and unclear if people will even convert via buying right away on the landing page.
- Created a zero downtime solution for updating the server
  - Patches Nginx config and reloads
  - Able to "drain traffic"
    - Logic to wait for async jobs to finish on the server before killing server process and restarting
- Read "The one thing"
  - Try hard to always be working on the right thing AKA the most important thing AKA the one thing such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary.
  - If you don't know what the one thing is, then your one thing is to find out what is your one thing.
  - It's hard to know what this thing is because sometimes you don't know what you don't know AKA "unknown unknowns"
    - When it comes to marketing, for me, there are many unknown unknowns.
- Wrote a statically generated blog, with AI generated content. Takes 10-15 mins to publish a post end to end.
  - I may not end up pursuing the AI generated angle depending on the marketing strategy I choose.
  - Regardless I think having a simple, customizable blog platform that I control can pay dividends in the future.

## Things I am Thinking About

Go to market strategy (what is my "one thing")

I had a "now what" moment after launching officially on twitter. No one is going to use this product unless there is a clear value being provided and potential customers are aware of this solution. "Who is my ideal customer?" is a question I need to answer. I think answering this question is the most important next thing to figure out.Strategy-wise I came at this project backwards in the sense that I did not first identify a niche or who my customers are. I created a product that I know has broad value, but there are other competitors in the space who are well resourced with large marketing budgets, designers, engineers, etc.

I will have a hard time competing with these companies head-on in the broad space of speech to text transcript and minutes generation. It's possible that I can gain traction here but I want to find the easiest path to success, and that's likely going to involve "going smaller". If I can find a niche community on Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn and target MinutesGenerator to that community, talk with users to get feedback, and specialize it to a use-case, then I think I will have a better chance of finding paying customers.

When I create my next business, I need to find the niche first. Ideally talk to customers first. For MinutesGenerator my "one thing" is to drive likely-to-convert traffic to my site. How to do this will depend on who my ideal customer is, which is something I don't know yet. So figuring this out is, I think, the most important next step, and will involve finding a niche. Doing this will make everything else easier - for example, I could invest into targeted SEO "minutes generation for ESL social workers" or something like that.

Shared work making subsequent businesses easier

One thing I'm really happy about is the investment I've put into what I think will be reusable assets. My landing page, stripe and clerk webhook handlers on my server, my blog, learning about NextJS, PlanetScale, and zero downtime server update system. The cost of setting up a new blog for a new website is dramatically lower now that I have the code ready to go. Writing the code for MinutesGenerator took me about 3 months, and I estimate ~160 hours. Without being too scientific about it, I would estimate that at least half of this time was spent doing expensive "one time cost" activities such as building/designing/optimizing a landing page.

There will be more things to learn and more work to do on these things, but I am optimistic that I'm building a cache of assets that will help accelerate my productivity. If it took 160 hours to launch MinutesGenerator, then perhaps business number two will take 80 hours. Doable within one month, which is a ~67% reduction in wall time. How fast can I go?

Tracking my hours and streaming has been great for my productivity

I didn't start tracking my hours until the last week of June, but forcing myself to fill out a timesheet and be intentional about my work has been transformative. I set a goal to work 20 hours/week and didn't even hit it (I barely missed it would have been (20 \* 31 / 7 = 89 hours) , however I am confident that I worked more hours this month than any previous month.To be clear, when I talk about working X hours, I really mean working X hours. Almost no time checking my phone, getting coffee, chatting with people, no meetings, no emails. Just sitting at my desk writing code, or reading docs, or asking chatGPT questions.

Working more hours isn't a perfect measure of productivity, but I can get a lot done in an hour. If I can consistently put in hours, and consistently ensure I am working on the most important thing, then I am confident that I will be successful eventually. Working hard is hard work.

Streaming has been a great motivator to work long stretches without interruptions. Not everything can be done on stream, and there's a balance to strike because streaming can lead to situations where you don't work on the most important thing, because you are biasing towards more interesting content vs. what needs to be done. But despite the nuance, it's a great tactic, and I'm gonna keep at it.

## Goals for August:

- Find a niche and target customer for MinutesGenerator
- Invest in learning about marketing
- Decide on and execute a marketing approach, e.g. SEO
- Make a decision by EOM about continuing to invest in MinutesGenerator


Max Sherman

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