Shipping "12 products in 12 months" (or eleven haha) is a great way to both build a shipping muscle (learn how to get a product out the door), and try out many different ideas to see which ones get traction.
Because the truth is, it's hard to predict which idea will work. So you'll just have to try a bunch and see what happens.
So yes, I think launching a lot of products is definitely a viable strategy. You can do the same for marketing. Try out 12 ways of marketing your product in 12 weeks. See what works, and double down on that.
It really depends on your product. It looks like you're building a job board for remote cybersecurity jobs?
There's a million different things to try. I recommend the book Traction and googling for "acquisition channels". You'll get a ton of ideas you'll just have to try.
In my experience SEO can work well for a job board. This means getting relevant content and trying to rank well for them. Besides the job posts themselves, you can write "evergreen content" about relevant topics.
To get ideas on what to write about you'll first need try to figure out where your audience hangs out (websites, online communities, etc) and see what they are discussing. Don't promote your product, but siimply try to be helpful. Anything you can do to make a name for yourself and build your reputation. You'll also get plenty of topic ideas this way to write about which you can post on your company site and, when relevant, link to within those communities.
Hopefully that helps!
Some of my favorite tools:
Didn't know about Audius. Looks cool, will check it out!
Cool mashup! Are you planning on doing more like these?
Audius is an interesting project. Web3 music streaming. It works well, now they'll just need to get the content flywheel going to succeed.
I think I'd like to compose original music at some point but include sampling so it'll have those elements!
Hey Pat, again welcome to WIP! Great questions.
I think any entrepreneur, whether solo or with a large team, will tell you that's there's always more to do than there's time in a day. Always. Whether you're just starting out or been running a business for 10+ years like I have with BetaList.
The solution then is not to try and do everything, but to choose the right things to work on, and learn to accept that you can't pursue every opportunity, refine every design element, respond to every email, or even fix every bug.
Knowing what to focus on, and what to ignore, is perhaps the most valuable skill you can learn as entrepreneur. The way you'll get better at it is to be mindful about how you're spending your time, defining a clear objective (e.g. making enough revenue to cover your living expenses), and be around other makers who will hold you accountable to work on the right things.
Having looked at Mission Control, I think you've picked a very tough market. Time and time again I've found out that B2C is a horrible business to be in as a bootstrapper. Generally speaking you'll need to ask a realtively low price per customer (in your case $99/year), which means you'll need a ton of customers, to make a decent profit. And guess what, B2C customers tend to create the highest support burden. So you'll end up spending a lot of your time troubleshooting and negotiating on price.
Whereas in the B2B market customers are lot less price sensitive (e.g. you can charge $99 per month instead of per year), and they tend to be less of a support burden as well.
So that would be my advice. Pivot to a B2B business where you can charge a decent price, and solve a very specific problem that you can solve well with the limited resources you have.
As for your copywriting question, I suggest just talking to your customers to quickly try out different explanations and also see what language they use themselves. Then condense all that into the copy for your site.
Great question! We had search functionality for questions before, but it was kind of buggy so I removed it. But we should add it back and incorporate it into the relatively new search bar at the top of the site. Will make a note (or todo rather) to implement that.
To answer your other question: you should be able to re-arrange pending todos on your profile, but it's kinda clunky right now. Let me follow up in a couple of days and see if I can make it work more consistently.
I think you can build a product in a month. It's not about working fast, but more about adjusting the scope to the bare minimum so you can finish it within a month.
So,That means not too many features. Make it minimum and simple. Got it. Thanks!
Yep, focus on the core part that provides value to the customer. Only must-haves, no nice-to-haves. And don't worry about it being scaleable, etc.
For example if you're building a $50/mo SaaS business, you don't need to ship the $50/mo recurring billing system until exactly one month after launch :) (and even then you can probably just charge their card manually, rather than having it fully automated)
Ok, i understand. But can you tell me why I shouldn't be doing that? You don't think a recurring billing system is good? Or you are saying that first check whether the users want to pay for the service or not?
I'm saying to focus on the things that deliver value to the users. Ignore everything else until it becomes a necessity.
The billing system is just an example of something many makers invest a lot of time on upfront when it's not necessary yet. (Because for the first couple dozen customers you can handle it manually.)
OK, That sounds right! Thanks for the guidance. Also, ordered traction book as you recommended. Thanks a lot again.