The power of a Linkedin post

Oh boy, we were supposed to be making a grand announcement about the product launch in today’s issue but here we are 🚬 

Hold up, there is a grand announcement. We are having our first guest session for our Discord community and it’s a very special guest (running-a 9-figure-bootstrapped-business special) 🥳 More on it later.

In today’s issue

• More on the guest session + the power of a single Linkedin post

• Items to get in order before we’re ready to launch

• How far we are

• And why you should care

• Hold up, what exactly are we building?

Let’s go.

How he bootstrapped a 9-figure business

The he:

Who’s Jeff?

• Founder of VisualCapitalist, the company that made Voronoiapp

• VisualCapitalist makes $16.6M ARR

• There is no record of them ever having raised any money

• Voronoiapp currently has 50K+ downloads on Play Store

• Most important: You have probably come across one of their visualizations at least once in your life

It’s the perfect example of a business that … just exists. No noise, no fanfare, just quietly existing and serving customers and making money.

Now I realize that’s majority of businesses and that’s exactly what I want to highlight. Nobody ever talks about the majority, it’s always the big wins.

And this one in particular is going to be super interesting:

Keyword: Near-death experiences 💀 

And yes, it all began from a single Linkedin post !

I just … randomly made a post, and Jeff commented on it, and then I just bugged him to share his story until this happened:

If you want to be a part of this conversation, then get in our Discord server:

I will share the link to the livestream in the server and any member can join and ask questions.

Ok enough good news, now it’s time for bad news: how did we overestimate ourselves …

Launching a product is hard

Apparently, launching a product is hard work. Emphasis on hard. And not of this sort:

There’s a shit ton of things you have to do in the shortest possible amount of time to make sure that you’re ready to ‘announce’ it.

What stuff? Glad you asked. Here’s what we’re dealing with.

On the product side:

• Testing all the user-flows for any critical bugs

• Payment integration (obviously)

• Last minute UI fixes

• DB migration from testing to prod

I could go on but Junaid would give you a better list. On the marketing side:

• Making a landing page

• Setting up socials (not that important but … yea)

• Creating a GTM plan

• Lining up the post-launch content so that we are not scrambling at the last minute

• Designing all the marketing assets

• Finding directories to list the product

• Actually listing the product

And so on and on. 10000 things I cannot even think of right now.

The common theme is: It’s bitch work.

And it’s incredibly important.

Some of the stuff we probably don’t have to do before the launch. We’ll be fine without it. But it’s a Ship of Theseus problem:

On the surface, either everything is important or nothing is. But everything in the pre-launch phase is a hypothesis. It could either work out or flop gloriously. So while listing on directories may not seem like a pre-launch activity, who knows our Ideal Customer (one that needs the product and will actually pay for it) is lurking around a directory somewhere.

The simple rule of launching a product is:

In our case, the critical activity on the marketing side is:

• Getting a landing page up (ppl need to sign up somewhere)

• Having a GTM plan

Just 2 out of 8 from the above list. But you can probably tell by looking at the nice-to-haves that we’d really save ourselves from a lot of pain if we do them too before launching.

How far are we

We are done with the critical stuff. Mostly.

Now only the nice-to-haves remain. Good news for the cohort members:

We’ll be releasing the product for beta-testing for our cohort members within this week. Only 3 people though. Too many people will break our brittle cute uwu smol MVP.

Anyways, I forgot to mention the most important thing:

I MADE MY FIRST LANDING PAGE !!! 🎉 

Ok technically, I have hacked together pages from templates before (*ahem* I hope you haven’t seen ertiqah.com), but this time it’s special.

I made it all from scratch. In Figma. I can now put UI Designer on my resume. Here’s a screenshot of the design (and a product teaser):

I have yet to add embellishments (mesh gradient, some details etc.) but if you ask me — and I might be biased — it’s looking pretty darn good already.

Having real challenges with the copy though. Anybody wanna help us out? I’ll give you a shoutout on Linkedin. Promise 🤞 

Hold up … what are you building

Glad you asked. It’s called LiGo. Should’ve clarified it a while back. I know Junaid wrote about it last week but he didn’t explain what it was .. on purpose but now I can.

Basically, we are creating just another content creation system for Linkedin.

What differentiates us though is our approach.

I’ve been making lessons on our approach for the cohort members. So the OGs will know. But in simple words, we believe in:

Authenticity > Virality

Unlike our competitors (who shall not be named — you are stuck with us now), we are not making this system for content creators or influencers or marketers.

We are making this for … busy people. People whose lives do not depend on being on social media 24/7.

For them, social media is just a place to talk about their work. They don’t usually do that, because it feels fake or they just don’t have the time. But I want you to pause and think for a second:

That’s what we want to accomplish.

And more of actual people doing good work and sharing it with the world. As transparently and comfortably as they can.

I know I still haven’t explained what the product actually does so here’s a very very simple summary:

1. You create a “content theme”, i.e., what do you want to talk about, who are you talking to, what are your key insights about it etc.

2. You generate ideas based on your content theme.

3. You generate a post based on the ideas that you have approved.

4. Finally, you edit it, add some details that AI could not have known, and then publish it.

It’s that simple.

Of course there’s a lot more bells and whistles but this is the crux of it. And if you ask my opinion — and I might be biased — it’s extremely fun to use!

You’ll know it when you see it. Swiping through ideas, combining themes. Hell, I’ve been generating most of my posts using it. Here’s one example that I did not edit at all.

See how it doesn’t sound like AI? You can thank Junaid for his prompting skills. It’ll only get better from here.

There’s a lot more to say about it but I’ll reserve it for the launch. Don’t wanna bore you with the details.

Why should you care

If you’re a part of our Discord community, you’ll get a special offer on the product. If your biggest hurdle in writing on social media is:

1. Writers block

2. Not having enough time

3. Not knowing what to write about

4. Not that good of a writer

You are the person we are making this for. The ‘special offer’ will get you started to a point where you’ll have enough momentum to keep going — hopefully, without the product. Just join the Discord already:

Anyways, this is enough for today.

See ya on Wednesday folks. Exciting stuff ahead.

Rassam out.