Alissa and I have spent a bunch of time lately nailing down our problems and what we need to solve for users. We’re lucky enough that we’re creating a product that solves a problem we both have. This is great because we know what we need out of it and from our survey results and product feedback it seems like our interests align well with our potential users’ interests. We (read: I) are super lucky to have some strong business knowledge on our team, spoken about here, that has given us a great advantage and gives us the opportunity to avoid roadblocks that other entpreneurs can encounter early in the process of starting up.
There is something we may struggle a bit with though and that is neither Alissa or I have set up a mailing list designed for a large group of divserse users. Being an entrepreneur is a constant state of learning, which is probably one of the more exciting aspects of small business. We’ve began looking at tools to create our mailing list that will leave users with a beautiful interface and reduce a lot of the pain that Alissa discusses in another post. We’ve also started building our user base through social media, direct signups and harassing people we know. These seem like obvious steps to take when creating a venture based around a mailing list and online product but there are a lot of things that neither of us know how to do or whether it should be done at all. Thankfully we’re not the first people to try this and we have some massive shoulders to stand on.
Nathan Barry – Nathan Barry is THE man when it comes to online marketing and successfully launching a product. He originally released “The app design handbook” that scored him over $58,000 in less than 12 months. After the success of his book he’s gone on to launch other products, create a newsletter and offer coaching for people looking at similar marketing strategies that he has used. He recently coached Sean McCabe in launching his book on learning hand lettering. In two days Sean was able to bring in over $93,000 in two days. Nathan knows his stuff when it comes to launching products. His content is always great and he has a lot of resources on mailing lists and online products.
Marketing for Developers – Justin Jackson has recently created a mailing list and is in the process or releasing a book titled “Marketing for Developers”. The pre-released chapters received very positive reviews on Hacker News and continue to gather praise as Justin continues to release articles and chapters on the book.
99u – 99U is run by Behance and Adobe and covers a lot of information written by founders and market leaders. There’s a lot of great information available and I’ve learnt a lot from the team running 99u.
Ticket Loop is jumping into an area where our competitors have failed to keep up with consumer trends and that’s really great for us. We’re also lucky to have so many great resources from people that have walked this path before in different industries. Learning from these people is a great start for Ticket Loop and I’m really excited to see how great we can make this.
Ticket Loop 