It Ain't Easy. First Roadblocks. - Issue #2

Hope y'all are happy and healthy.

When the world keeps giving us lemons, 🍋 have the juicer ready.

Question this week: How have you failed recently?

Would love to hear from you.

Creation Is Not the Problem. Distribution Is.

Last week I shared that I'm working on turning my first online course ramen profitable.

So far, so good. Now comes my Failure of the Month.

32 people have signed up. Some have paid more than others. But not a single one has completed the course.

This is a typical early-days business challenge. It's not working and you are trying to figure out why.

To add a bit more color:

• The course is a self-paced online course
• It's ~5 hours of video
• The course teaches how to build and maintain successful brands (more context here)

My problem: I don't get data points.

No completion means I don't know what (value proposition) is useful and to whom (target customer).

Rest assured, I'll be doing a couple of experiments in the coming weeks.

I'll be documenting my troubleshooting attempt in the twitter thread below 👇

Automating Freelance Finance

This topic is tangential.

To be able to focus on product development and distribution, I want to save time wherever I can.

This week: uploading invoice attachments from GMail to GDrive

As a freelancer I incur deductible expenses.

I have 2 separate freelance businesses. Invoices for both need to be separated (i.e. not a shared folder).

In order to deduct those, I need to:

1. Identify the relevant bills
2. Collect them in a folder
3. Send them to my accountant

I set up a Zapier automation to send attachments to 2 dedicated GDrive folders. Here's the Zap I set up.

It's a small fix - probably saves me 10-20 seconds per invoice.

You gotta start somewhere.

• Do you have any accounting-related tips on your own?
• Do you want to talk about this?

Hit me up.

...

Anyway, all of you are legends!

Have a great rest of the week and hope to hear from you.