Changing Blog Pace, The First Paying Customer & Your Comfort Zone

Changing the pace of the blog

Welcome back to my blog! As you may have noticed, I haven't written in the past weeks.

It's just too much on my plate - working a 32-hour job, working on AlbumCoverAI, trying to stay healthy, working out, and going outside every day.

The "long form" blog posts I wrote earlier are too much work. For each, I need to create a detailed sketch, write the post, and edit it - it takes 3-4 hours per post, hours that I don't have.

But, I am currently reading "Traffic Secrets" by Russel Brunson - a popular book on generating traffic for your business - and he recommends publishing something every single day. That way, you gain credibility, which is especially important if you want to work together with other creators - to market your products, for example.

It's not a secret that writing a blog, recording a podcast, or uploading videos can have amazing results. It's also not a secret (to me, at least) that I've struggled with this for a long time.

Back when I was playing concerts for a living, I always had it in the back of my mind that I should be more present on social media. But I never actively followed through. It was too much of an afterthought, not a priority, and I didn't want to do it just because "everybody's doing it."

Here's my new attempt: Publish a blog post daily, with 500-1000 words. I'm even shooting for the lower end for the first few posts. They will help me to get in the habit, and they'll barely be read by anybody. Taking out the annoying work - lots of editing and sketching - hopefully makes it fun. So here we go!

AlbumCoverAI progress

In the meantime, a ton has happened with my ai-generated-album-covers service.

It now has a name, and it's now launched and on the intrawebs (yes, that's just the internet).

Right after the launch, I restarted the Google ad campaign.

When clicking the button, I almost wished nobody would see the project. I think my subconscious didn't want to be responsible for the user's experience or be exposed to the critics. The human psyche is funny. I launched anyway, and after a few days, I felt comfortable with the ad being up.

The results mirrored those from my validation campaign: Lots of page visitors but barely any purchases (back then, barely any subscriptions to the waitlist).

One person did buy, though! That makes him my first paying customer. Thank you, Giovanni Salvatore (not his actual name, but almost). Giovanni was unresponsive when I asked for feedback, though. So far, nobody else has purchased.

The next few days, I invited my musician friends to try the app. I set up Zoom appointments and watched their screen while they tried to generate a good album cover.

This was eye-opening!

So many user flows that I took for granted, such as clicking on a page-progress bar to navigate, were completely ignored by my friends. "How do I navigate back?", "What do I do next?", "If I click this, can I try it again?" and more questions. I tried not to respond during the interviews to see if my friends could find answers themselves, but I diligently took notes and fixed the issues before the next interview.

None of the questions showed up again after the fixes, a clear sign of improvement.

The main benefit of these interviews wasn't the progress in UX, though. It was me gaining confidence in my product. The big, scary moment of a user trying the software and running into new bugs or absolutely hating the app had happened; it happened comfortably with my friends. I fixed the bugs and received positive feedback (albeit from biased people), and gained a lot of momentum and an actual desire to promote the app due of that.

That is the core takeaway of this post: It is completely normal to be scared to release your product. Instead of self-sabotaging, pretending you aren't afraid, or stifling yourself by aiming too high, go for the next small step outside of your comfort zone.

Launch that campaign and see what happens. Show your product to the world, starting with your closest friends. You will grow because of that. Things that seem scary now will be your usual business in the future.

I also recorded a demo video, launched an Instagram campaign, and collected testimonials. But that's for another day. Hope you enjoyed the post.