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Intro
Hey, hello 👋 I'm Hugo, French Canadian 🇨🇦 living in Portugal 🇵🇹
What are you working on these days?
Lately, I've been getting back to building things, starting with a personal template to help me ship faster, though it's taking longer than expected. My goal is to turn business chaos into relaxing solutions for entrepreneurs, but I have a lot of demons to fight from past experiences.
About 10 months ago, I stopped working on my first profitable product (ended up selling it) for a "golden opportunity" with a mentor who never delivered on promises, leading to some sort of burnout due to toxic relationships.
This experience reminded me to trust more my intuition and value my mental health. Since this experience exhausted me, I need to learn to recharge and handle my inner demons.
What can the WIP community help you with right now?
What is very interesting is that I used to work in marketing (conversion optimization, and growth hacker) but always struggled with promoting my own projects. I never liked to talk about myself and don't want to feel like I am "selling". This caused many of my projects to fail.
I have no issue going on calls with people, and I've done marketing for other people quite well, yet, when it comes to marketing my own products or services, it has always been a challenge and feel overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done.
If you have any advice or strategies to help me overcome this internal barrier that is preventing me from achieving the results I want, I would greatly appreciate it.
What can you help others with?
Since I can do so many things, because I'm extremely curious, I've always had an issue to describe what I do... But, I can help with software selection, tools integration, workflows automation and optimization. Bottom line, I like to turn complex business problems into manageable solutions.
In any cases, whatever challenge you have, you can always feel free to reach out, I'm always happy to help.
Something else you want to share?
Since my youngest years, I've been experimenting with all kinds of things and hacking things together. Built my first website in 2006, at 12. At 14, I started a podcast. By 15, I had taught myself web development (CMS, PHP & MySQL), web design (Photoshop & Illustrator) and server management (Linux).
MVC and frameworks scare me... I prefer coding in pure PHP and plain JavaScript. I used jQuery in the past but always tend to avoid it as much as possible. Only recently, I started using Tailwind CSS, and I try to use as much pure CSS for interactions instead of JS.
Besides being a product addict and solution maker, I love self-sufficiency (one of the reason I moved to Portugal, since Canada is not great for growing food due to long winters). I like the concept of hippies for communicating from their heart (from a place of love) and anarchist disrupting society bringing more freedom and changing economical practices. I am also what people would consider as spiritual (in a non religious way) and I'm practicing some sound therapy instruments (didgeridoo, handpan, shruti box, tibetan bowls) as well as throat singing.
I believe in pushing boundaries and reimagining what's possible, both in business and in life. If you're into optimizing everything and challenging the status quo, let's connect!
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Hi Hugo, welcome to WIP!
What helped me a lot is realizing that "selling" is just helping people solve their problem. As long as you believe in your product to be a good solution, and the customer to have the problem it solves, you should feel good about selling it to them.
If you have doubts on whether your product is any good, I think it helps to just talk to customers who are already using it and getting value out of it. And if you don't have any customers yet, just try to find a few people who will use it for free for a while (e.g. during the beta phase). That way you don't feel the pressure of asking for their money.
That's very true! My main issue is mostly related to doing the marketing for customers to know about the product. There's a part of me that is scared of talking about me (what I do) which make it hard to even find free customers.
This has been an issue for a while, so now it's less intense since I've learned to surpass it, but still somewhat present.
What are some of your "favorite" channel for marketing? I'm curious.
I feel like Reddit can be great but you need to understand how it works, and then there's content marketing (SEO, short videos, etc.) which is a bit easier but requires a lot of consistency.
For me it's Twitter and (programmatic) SEO. Those are channels that come natural to me. They are somewhat predictable and I enjoy working on them.
I try to avoid building products that require other marketing channels.
That make sense, especially if it's something that comes naturally for you. Twitter can work really well if your audience is there, especially that the build in public is strong there. :)