Happy Monday folks,
Finally, back to a regular cadence and you can expect the Monday morning weekly update from now on. Let’s jump in:
Update and story of the week
It was a short week because of the holiday last weekend, and a busy one with a lot of calls and demos.
What I usually find is that coming back from a holiday or even long weekend can lead to busy days, because you’re a) playing catch up with work itself, and b) have a backlog of calls booked from all of the extra days off.
The solution?
Good question – I don’t know if there is one, other than putting in a few extra hours to get caught up and back into your regular routine asap.
The good news is we had a handful of leads convert to clients over the last week, and we’re really starting to see some good adoption of our immigration tech platform. We’re also continuing to listen to our users and add new features based on their feedback, so the product is only going to get better.
Maybe it’s a topic for another email, but I think the key to making a tech product work is:
1) make sure it’s actually something people need and are willing to pay for first
2) build the most basic version and start selling it
3) improve the product based on the feedback and needs of the actual users
I’ve seen it too many times – even read a Reddit thread about another situation last night – where people spend 1+ year(s) building a product they haven’t tested, and things inveitably go very wrong. In more ways than one.
Maybe for the next email.
Key takeaway
I quickly learned, coming from a law practice into the tech world, that building a tech company/product should be treated far differently than a service-based business.
The key difference is the startup time/cost.
If you want to start a service business – agency, law firm, consulting, lawn mowing – you can get started right away, and they’re usually services people are used to buying.
If you want to build a tech product, it usually takes either time or money, or both, to build what’s called your MVP – minimum viable product. And you have no idea if people will be using to use and pay for it.
Heck, your target market may not even be very good at using technology, and you may have to do a lot of teaching first.
The key is to do a heck of a lot of market research and product validation, and/or hacking together your MVP with no-code tools/AI first, before spending more time/money to custom build a tech product.
Books
I’m still reading, but on the last 50 pages, of The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty. As mentioned in my previous email, this is actually a fiction/fantasy novel, as opposed to the usual business/biography books I usually read.
So if you’re not into fiction/fantasy then I’d ignore this section. But if you are, it’s a great book – a solid A in my books. And I’ll report in on how it ends next week.
Recent Content
Episode 9 of the Grind Mastermind podcast just went live, where good friend Chris and I share our journey building our businesses (Chris runs his own copywriting/UX agency, I run an immigration tech company).
Every 2 weeks, we share progress from the last 2 weeks in business, books we’re reading, tools we’re trying and more. This week we talked about:
- getting FB ads up and running
- Youtube channel growth strategies
- AI tools we’re using
- email list marketing
And more. You can watch or listen to episode 9 here!
That’s it for me – have a great week, make sure to stay up-to-date with my latest content here, and keep grinding.
– Josh