One Month Into a Brand New Blog

Time flies. It has been over a month since I started this blog and I have learned a lot already. I am crushing Zack as part of our blog growth challenge, which you can catch up on here:

Challenges

Here I undergo challenges, often with my main cofounder Zack, on everything startups. This includes, marketing, sales, ideation, technical challenges and more. Challenging myself publicly is an excellent way to stick to my ‘build in public’ mantra and provide engaging and interesting content to you!

Kyle PlattKyle Platt

My key focuses were really just around getting caught up on what makes a blog successful these days, managing my usual startup work with my writing processes, and then trying to organically grow my network. Hopefully, these catch-up posts can provide some insight into the process.

The Stats

Here are my base traffic stats.

As is very apparent on that graph I hit two very noticeable spikes. At the 2 week mark, I was around 80 unique users. I talked about how organic search and SEO efforts take a while and that I needed to focus on manual networking. Well, that paid off for sure.

That first spike was actually one of my lovely subscribers sharing a post of mine on IndieHackers. That alone brought in over 100 unique users over a few days.

The massive spike was from me sharing a post directly on IndieHackers. This one to be specific:

Instant Landing Page - Killing a Startup Idea Quickly

How we investigated a startup idea around instant landing pages, went through our validation process and decided to stop pursuing it in just a few days of work.

Kyle PlattKyle Platt

I am very happy that it was so well received as I really felt it was valuable content. At its peak, that post brought in 250 new users in a single day. I also gained several new subscribers out of it which was awesome!

Unfortunately, after that crazy spike, I hit a wall with some writer's block so my numbers came back to earth as I didn't release anything new. I have some stuff in place to hopefully avoid that in the future.

You can also see here that I am slowly but steadily building momentum with organic search. It takes a while for things to get indexed since this site is so new, and everything ranks poorly right now. I will continue to work on that.

What I Did

Writing

I wrote some startup focused and behind the scenes stuff that I think is useful

Building A Microtool Suite - Why We Are Trying It At Tactycs

Your first question is probably, “what is a microtool suite?”. Simply put, it’s just a collection of small very specific tools and a suite because all of those tools have cohesion. Tactycs is an all-in-one tool that has many challenges that may be solved with a microtool suite.

Kyle PlattKyle Platt

Instant Landing Page - Killing a Startup Idea Quickly

How we investigated a startup idea around instant landing pages, went through our validation process and decided to stop pursuing it in just a few days of work.

Kyle PlattKyle Platt

Startup Mistakes - Being an Engineer and Not a Founder

It is your job to get your business off the ground and businesses have a lot of moving parts. When you factor in marketing, design, sales, management, accounting etc. the engineering portion of your work becomes a relatively small percentage of what makes up your business.

Kyle PlattKyle Platt

I am most excited about my new series 'Startup Mistakes' where I discuss in detail mistakes I have made, mistakes my team has made, and mistakes that I see other founders making. There is a ton to uncover here and I think the content is going to be valuable.

IndieHackers

As I mentioned in the above section, IndieHackers provided the majority of my recent traffic. There are constantly lots of great posts over there so I would strongly recommend checking it out. I am making a conscious effort to be more active so I can continue learning and hopefully also provide value to other members.

Startups

The majority of my time is spent working on Tactycs right now. Alongside ramping up a new developer, we are well under way on our 'microtool suite' tests. This has included switching to entirely new tech stacks for the sake of development speed which is always a challenge I enjoy tackling.

Keep your eye out for our first microtool addition, the Testimonial Creator, in the coming weeks. It has been a smart choice to start with as it is well scoped, tests our new technology out, has been fairly quick to make, and is genuinely useful.

How I Feel About It

Positive vibes over here! Having that huge spike from indiehackers, alongside the discussions I was having over there was really nice. Its a strong motivator to try and get back to numbers like that but consistently. Me and my team are in the process of iterating on and building so many new things that the content is going to be flying out in the coming year!