Welcome to 🚀 Progress. My weekly update where I share my stories and behind-the-scene insights into my journey playing the Internet game and seeking to provide value for this world as an entrepreneur/creator. Every Sunday I will transparently show my growth from the beginning on.
Who is this for?
For people who want to play the internet game and learn from my story.
Because I’m going to win this game.
You think I’m a dreamer? That I shouldn’t even try and give up?
Remember: Quitters never win. Winners never quit. Play the long game.
Who am I?
I am Jan. 28 years old and in the prime of my life. I’m a studied engineer currently working as a product manager.
My journey on the internet started when I was 14 years old. Earning income through a regular job appealed boring to me and I started to learn new skills with the free knowledge of the internet: graphic design, learn programming, building websites, search engine optimization. The time of acquiring new skills was incredibly. I learned so much valuable things.
When school life ended, I took the regular route. I studied and slipped into working life as an engineer. I gave up building an online business. Now nearly 10 years later I’m back learning what has changed during the time on the Internet. I am ready to start from scratch. This is the starting point. Let’s go ✌️
Topics
🎯 Audience vs. Product? What to focus on first?
🦋 Building a brand
🎇 Plans for 2024
Weekly recap
I think it’s very interesting to have an overview over some KPI’s while doing this blog and being motivated to update it every week. The question over what KPI to choose is not easy. I will build this KPI overview up in the next articles.
| KPI | Numbers |
|---|---|
| ⌛️ Time invested | not measured yet |
| 🏟️ Audience | |
| Website-visitors | 0 |
| X | 68 followers (few of them are spam) 7,137 post impressions (in December) |
| Youtube: | no account (but planned) |
| Instagram: | 0 |
| 💸 Income: | 0 € |
Question: Do you have a recommendation for a free time measurement software?
🎯 Audience vs. Product? What to focus on first?
Audience first, product second
If you don’t know what to focus on, create content that excites you. Understand what gets the most attention and why? Test new ideas and build a reputation using data.
Since May 2023 I’ve tried multiple things published on X:
– Training insights about my last marathon training block
– graphics with a quote or text on it which inspired me
– Wrote about my experiences
– threads
– startup ideas / questions
– photography with text on it
– though about creating Sub3-marathon course
– Notion template with
Product first, audience second
Instead of focusing on building the product first, you can write content about problems and desires of potential customers, and learn from your writing. Writing is a reflection of your thoughts. The end goal is not to create content, but to create requirements for the product.
I was 14 when I bought my first Apple product – an iPod Touch 1st generation. From then on, I was enthusiastic about their products. The aesthetics of the products, the attention to detail and the way Jonny Ive said that the word aluminum.
I love good design, textures and materials. I think that I know what good design needs but I don’t think that I’m especially creative to realize good design. It’s my dream to design my own product. As an engineer I have theoretically all the skills to do this.
🦋 Building a brand
LOVE THE PROCESS. Somehow this claim resonated with me. It’s about finding joy, fulfillment, and meaning in the journey rather than solely focusing on the end goal. As we all know, the happiness of having reached a goal doesn’t last long. This is the hedonistic treadmill. The human tendency to quickly return to a stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or changes. I believe that this statement can be applied to many things in life: Building a business, lifelong learning, training daily for a goal in sports. It is everyone’s desire to take their happiness level to a higher level, even if it is certainly not easy.
Ideas for brand development:
#1 Develop ads with love the process in it. Make content where these are spreaded on posters and banners in the city. Maybe design some cool clothes or stickers.
#2 Search for quotes from famous people and link them to the brand.
#3 Make the logo appeal to other people and characteristics. Find characteristics that fit into your audience. I choose the butterfly back then because it stands for a long, hard transformation process. From the caterpillar to the chrysalis to the butterfly, from which something beautiful emerges in the end. Nevertheless, I think the butterfly tends to stand for beauty and, in my view, has more feminine characteristics. This is maybe not something that resonates with the people that I want to attract. I want to build something that I admire, that suits the things I want. Write and sell to yourself is the motto.
So there is some work to do to develop the logo and brand. At the moment I’m thinking about something like a burning heart.
🎇 Plans for 2024
I am working in a full time job ~40h a week. Besides this I am an ambitious athlete in endurance sport working out for ~10h hours a week. For some that would mean that building a business is nearly impossible. To make this project possible, I will use the time before work and before bed to invest time in this project every day and more time on the weekends. In everyday working life, this means getting up at 6 and working until 7 and in the evening from 9 to 10. Sleep. Work. Sport. Repeat.
I don’t think too much of goals but these are somethings I would like to do. Otherwise I do what seems most interesting.
– 52 of these blogposts every week
– learning short form video editing and shooting
– Learning what is needed to create a product
💡 Startup ideas
💡#1 A supermarket sorted by recipes
Every supermarket should have a section where you can find the right products for a recipe. How much easier cooking would become for lazy people. They would no longer have to search for ingredients, but would shop by recipe. I really liked that about the Picnic app (a supermarket on wheels).
💡 #2 Sales information portal for technical products as a SaaS for companies in B2B-business
The main objective of such a portal is to optimize the sales process by enabling companies to easily access comprehensive and up-to-date information on their technical products. This can help sales staff to better inform customers and support potential buyers in their decision-making process. Many companies struggle to get the information in front of their customers. This is especially true for companies with very complex technical products They send out emails with a lot of PDFs (offers, analyses, data sheets, …) which confuse the customer. These can be sales information like be offers, reviews, data sheets, price lists, configurations or similar. Sometimes the salesperson doesn’t even know what information to provide and forgets important things. The idea is to create a portal for the customer where they have all the information at their fingertips.
💡 #3 A website or a SaaS which simplifies for businesses to build up a KPI system
Every KPI has its own meaning for the company and must be built up. Where does the information come from, how is it collected and who evaluates it? There are an infinite number of KPIs that can be interesting for companies to monitor the progress. The step of implementing these in the company and working according to them is often a very big one.
🔎 Interesting Internet things:
Here’s a collection of interesting finds, tools and people that I have discovered this week in the depths of the internet and that I think are worth seeing:
🔎 #1 That’s the moment we’re all working for, right?
– The astonishment and disbelief of others who did not believe in you before.
– The joy of the parents at what their children have achieved.
– The time spent working on it in secret.
🔎 #2 Unique pricing technique
This is one of the most interesting pricing techniques I’ve seen for a digital information product. The price increases with every 20 purchases. The most curious thing is that the product is not even available yet. It’s just for pre order and it has made 84,345.68$ without a rating. Also the claim is brilliant: A new pair of “Internet glasses” that help you understand how to navigate the vast web.
Internet Pipes by Steph Smith
🔎 | #3 MambaMentality – Nike advertising
I so much resonate with the stuff that Nike is doing in their advertising. I especially like the new videos they published on Instagram. This is the style of short clips that I want to build for my own brand.
MambaMentality – Instagram
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