OnlineOrNot Diaries 21
Max Rozen (@RozenMD) / August 30, 2024
I can't believe it's been more than four months since my last diary. For once, it wasn't because I fell down a rabbit hole of building a huge feature.
Truth is, I've been meaning to write sooner, and actually drafted several versions, but couldn't find the energy to hit "Publish". I had to prioritise myself and my family before OnlineOrNot for a bit, but I'm bouncing back.
Table of contents
Targeting Enterprise
Last time I wrote to you, I was working on enterprise deals for OnlineOrNot. They fell through.
I did learn things along the way, which was the main reason that I bothered in the first place.
The Status Page MVP, wasn't viable
It wasn't viable for OnlineOrNot's ideal customer profile.
They expected more features, that did more things. I wrote about this at the end of last year, so it wasn't a total surprise. I am currently building those features, so we'll get there.
Sometimes you just need to ship
I used to be a devoted follower of marketing week, coding week. It's cool and all, but sometimes you just need to focus on shipping. It's easier to keep building a feature continuously than to take a break after each week for marketing.
Not in total isolation of course - as you release, you announce each feature to your mailing list/Discord and get feedback along the way.
At the same time, you need to market
Sometimes you learn the same lesson that you already wrote about, but in a different way. It feels strange to write the same things over and over, and I imagine it's not amazing to read them over and over either.
That being said, I'm beginning to realise that starting a business of any sort, is a search for marketing channels that work, first and foremost.
You might be in the business of "building good ships, at a loss if we must, but always good ships", but unless someone somehow finds out about your good ships, your business is dead.
The reason I can ignore marketing OnlineOrNot for a few months is because I didn't ignore it in the past, and that content still brings in users consistently.
Solving problems is SEO
So, long ago, before OnlineOrNot, I wrote a blog about React as a side project.
It kicked ass in SEO, because people were searching for how to solve their problems, and my articles would fix their problems. That's the gist of how to succeed at SEO.
Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that if I went really really wide and blogged about barely irrelevant topics like Ten Ways to Improve WordPress Page Speed, I'd catch folks early in their business, and they'd consider using OnlineOrNot. After a few articles that failed to bring in consistent traffic, I gave up and told myself "content doesn't work".
It turns out content does work.
I've started investing in content that makes sense for OnlineOrNot (like how to check if a website is online), and it's been leading to new customers. Not an "I can retire tomorrow" number of customers, but I get as many monthly trials (even during the summer holidays!) that I did during months where I would be actively trying to insert OnlineOrNot into as many online conversations as I could. I've since stopped doing that, and am focusing purely on building features, and we're still growing.
I still don't do nearly enough content marketing. It's bought me some time to build features, but I should be writing at least one article per week on top of features, so that the usefulness compounds.
When it works, like on MaxRozen.com, it really feels like you're building trust at scale.