Well, just like the title says, I dont feel like I got much done outside of some thinking. Had the normal Wednesday developer meeting, did some thinking and spent part of the afternoon at the park with the family. Going to the park can be super helpful when I need to talk stuff out and think. Its cathartic.
Developer meeting went ok. Finally got the new homeowner app over to Testflight to test and it seems to work well. Few small tweaks that I saw and we can release it later this week or beginning of next week. Software is still coming along. I’m not sure how long we will keep all of the members on the team which is a great thing about agency developers. You only pay for what you need. Again, I’m not sure how some of these companies have so many developers. I feel like we can go down to one coding person and a 1/4 time QA person and be fine.
Still stressed out about getting more homeowners onboard. This is where the walk at the park with the family and talking things through with the wife really helps. We talked about all of our current thoughts and plans to get more users. We consolidated it to app promotion with the reminders/warranties sections. Instant gratification for homeowners to use the app the day they download it and we also have some services for them to poke around and see what it is and how it works. Next step is paying people to get a quote. My FB ads guys came out with a great line for those ads which is “we pay you for your time”. This seems to resonate with me because most of the time, its annoying waiting for someone to show up. Even though we aren’t paying out a ton of money, its a mental shift of “at least Im getting paid to wait” idea. Last but not least is our referral program. This doesnt work unless we really seed the machine though. Listened to a podcast about a guy that owns Pudgy Penguins and he talked about having to do local advertising with things like radio and what not to promote his physical product. We may have to follow suit.
Looked over the backlinks we are getting from our SEO guy Scott. They are all HARO links which offers great high quality backlinks on sites that are not that easy to get links on. We have 11 over the last month. I think its a great start, especially with all of them being over DR80. Our page authority score is slowly going up. Hopefully we keep pushing that direction. This should put us at a huge advantage for SEO against local service businesses. Gotta check on the Google ads though. We need more movement.
Also still pondering Ycombinator or something similar. I worry that we use an outsourced partner for development and the Ycombinator guys are very pro cofounder or CTO. We definitely cant afford a CTO here in the US. WAY TOO EXPENSIVE. Our system is built (80%+) and we are moving along fine. I don’t see the true value of a CTO unless they are super affordable and doing the coding. I know we (the owners) don’t have a high tech background but we hired out that part. Heck, I feel like the agency members are part of my company. They are great. Heck, I don’t know if I wrote about it, but last week the agency owner came to visit me. He stops by once to twice a year to just catch up. Would a CTO really benefit us?
