Around this time 12 months ago, I had an idea to build to an app that helped businesses to follow up on Twitter conversations.
That idea became Nudge.
It’s been an awesome journey, so far and there’s been a ton of learnings along the way.
In this post I’m going to open up about our first month in business. You’ll find out how many sign ups we got, how much income we made and more.
Let’s get started.
Launch
On February 5th, 2015, I received an email “the DNS has been switched, the site is live.”
Nudge was open to the public. “Oh sh*t, things just got real,” I thought to myself as I scrambled through Google Docs to refresh my mind on the launch plan and frantically tested every feature and link on the site.
I’d been expecting this message – we’d planned to launch on the 5th, but it still seemingly caught me off-guard. I guess you can never be fully prepared for the wash of emotion – pride, fear, excitement – you go through when you launch something.
One month in (5th March, 2015), and we have made some steady progress on sign ups – at the time of writing we have 259 registered members.
Choosing transparency
Over recent years, I’ve been hugely inspired by the transparency shown by startups like Everlane and Buffer. And I love the behind-the-scenes content founders like Josh Pigford (Baremetrics), Alex Turnbull (Groove), Joel Gascoigne & Leo Widrich (Buffer) and Mikael Cho (Crew) continue to share about their businesses.
As such, I took the decision that I want to be transparent with my business from the the start and to my knowledge, not too many people have documented their growth from zero upwards. So, this should be a fun experiment.
The starting point
Month One in review
Month one was all about getting the product out in the wild and gaining feedback.
When you jump aboard the startup roller-coaster it’s hard to tell exactly how successful your actions are in real time. It’s only when you step back and take the opportunity to look at data and draw conclusions from it that you see whether or not you’ve executed and whether you’re on the right track.
So what better time than now to look back on my first month of running Nudge and see how things have gone.
- New sign ups: 259
- Visits: 2,694
- Unique visits: 2,239
- MRR: $20
The wins
- People are using our product (wow, this feels good. Like, really, really good)
- We have some $’s in the bank (every little helps at this stage, right)
- We were featured on Product Hunt and received some great feedback off the back of it
Resolutions for month two
Resolution 1: Focus on content/social strategy
Since launching Nudge, I’ve not focused as much as I wanted to on our content strategy. We had some early success on Twitter with a #CMAD tweet that got us some attention and a number of beta sign ups. I want to build on that during March.
For those who know it’s about more than just Tweetin’, Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day #CMAD pic.twitter.com/vQdIhJZVyK
— Nudge (@Nudge_app) January 26, 2015
Resolution 2: Happiness
I’ve already started sending personal “thank you’s” to early members (examples: 1, 2) and throughout March I’d like to focus on some small wins to increase retention and keep members happy.
Resolution 3: More interviews / calls
“Interviews” sounds terribly formal, ha (man, I hope I don’t turn into a boring-CEO-type). Over the course of February I’ve spoken to 5 early Nudge members over Skype. It’s been such fun and each conversation is an amazing opportunity to learn.
This month, I want to speak with not only Nudge customers, but more people who work in community management / customer success to understand the issues they face day-to-day and what Nudge could do to help.
Want to chat? Book a time here.
Resolution 4: Figure out what I’m selling
You can spend a year building something but you’ll never truly understand how people will want to use it until you’ve opened it up. Already I’ve learned a ton here and have started to split test messages using a small budget on Facebook / Twitter ads, to see which message is most appealing to our target audience.
I’d like to continue these experiments and also start a/b testing our homepage copy.
Resolution 5: More conversations
Getting down in the trenches and starting conversations with people, is by far the best sales method I’ve tried, so far. It’s hard work and time consuming (seriously time consuming, goodbye Netflix). I have a ton of Twitter chats saved in my calendar that I’d like to attend and I need to devote more time to joining conversations and learning about what our target audience are looking for.
So, what’s next?
Nudge is still in its infancy, and there’s lot of exciting updates to come over the next few months. As a founder, I’m going be learning a lot along the way and I’d like to share every detail with you.
My goal is to be as transparent as possible, I’ll be posting updates about our growth, product development and revenue, frequently. I’ll talk what we’ve done right and where we trip up along the way, too. I’d love it if you’d join me on the journey, it’s an open invite and you don’t have to use Nudge to come along for the ride (though you’re more than welcome to try Nudge for free, if you’d like).
If you’d like to receive updates and lessons from my startup journey, simply sign up on the form below this post.
If you have any questions or anything you’d like me to write about from my experience of founding Nudge, please hit me up on Twitter or post a comment below.
Thanks so much for reading.
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