I’ll have a regular March update post later this week, but I’ve been thinking about what’s next and wanted to get it down on paper.
I’ve spent Q1 working mostly on features and integrations, and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, but going into Q2 I really need to prioritize sales and marketing. The alternating marketing week/coding week thing isn’t cutting it.
Rather than just saying “I need to do more sales and marketing”, which is what I’ve been doing, I want to be more specific about exactly what I’m going to do.
Clean up marketing site
Right now there are some dead links and missing pages on the marketing site. I need to finish those up and get the site ready for launch. Specifically, this means:
- Clean up the features section of the homepage, remove lorem ipsum, make sure they’re up to date
- The integration pages were just roughed in, so I need to finish those up
- I need to add a documentation page for each integration, at least stubbing out the content
The great news is that ChatGPT can help with this now!
Reach out to agile communities
There’s a discord and some subreddits for agile that I’ve been lurking in, and I should probably at least introduce myself and ask for feedback.
I should also DM some LinkedIn connections who might be interested, share what Teaminal in Slack communities I participate in, etc.
Do a semi-official launch
The app has been available for signups since early last year, but I haven’t put out a press release (I’m thinking of using Loganix) or done a “Show HN” or Product Hunt launch. I don’t expect much out of those, but you never know, and at minimum they’ll hopefully garner some links.
SEO and content marketing
Related to the launch and getting links, I think there’s some low-hanging fruit in terms of SEO and content marketing. I recently paid to have Teaminal submitted to a bunch of startup directories which will hopefully help a bit with domain authority, and any links I can get from launch will help too.
Next up I’m going to look at backlinks for competitors, specifically looking for blogs that are listing agile tools, and see if they’ll add Teaminal to the list.
Then I’m going to write some bottom-of-the-funnel content:
- Comparison pages for Teaminal vs. other tools
- Listicles about related tools
- How-to guides for using Teaminal
Get into the various app stores
For more links, and maybe some organic search traffic within the app stores, I’m going to submit Teaminal to the Slack, Atlassian, GitHub, etc. app stores.
I previously submitted to the Slack app store, but it was rejected because they they didn’t like my privacy policy and don’t have a “sign up with Slack” link on the homepage, so I’ve been putting off fixing those things and resubmitting, but it’s time.
Try Google Ads
SEO is great, but it takes a long time to see results. So in the meantime, I’m going to try Google Ads and see what sort of results I can get.
With the little bit of reading I’ve done it seems like I’ll need to set up Google Tags and funnels, optimize my landing pages for their query groups (so like “planning poker”, “agile planning”, etc.), write a few different versions of each ad to test, etc. So it’s a bit of work, but I think it’ll be fun to tweak those knobs.
Improve the onboarding experience
If or when I start getting more traffic and signups, making sure they’re activating becomes the next priority. Namely I want to emphasize to new users that:
- Integrations are key and they should really turn them on
- You need to invite your team to actually use the app
I’ve had a number of folks who sign up and just kick the tires, which I understand and is just part of the freemium business model, but I want to make sure it’s painfully obvious what they’d get if they did those two things.
Add more integrations
After cranking out GitLab, Asana, and Monday integrations this month, they’re easier than I thought they’d be, so I’m going to keep going with that. Next up is Trello and Clickup.
Build Labs for marketing projects
I have some ideas for little apps I could build that might get some clicks or links, and would let me keep launching stuff. These are going to be “Labs” projects because I don’t want to add them to the main app’s codebase, so they’ll live at “labs.teaminal.com” instead.
This is an absolute last priority, but I want to give myself a creative outlet so I don’t get burned out on SEO and PPC and copywriting and all that stuff.