Praveen Pendyala

@remindmeofth.is in 2 months

Can’t believe it’s been 6 months already!

I'm glad I added dark mode to Transcript LOL. I spend most of day building / dogfooding transcript - cannot look at a bright screen for so long!

Personal moats in tech are eroding fast! Are distribution and sales the only skills with long term moat?

A year ago: skilled programmer is a scarce and sought after skill.
Now: demand shifted and effective scarcity is low.

What’s your main motivation to work for yourself?

I started out just for the fun of building. Freedom is another big factor I discovered along the way.

It was rainy this weekend so, worked on Sunday and took Monday off instead 😅

This took so much longer than I thought as I also had to create new functionality (in reporting or internal tooling) to support specific sequences like:

- ⏳9 days before subscription ends
- 🤑 Unique, user specific discount codes that expire in days

I knew follow up communication is essential but I didn't want to just send off 1 filler email and be done. So, took the time to research, write & rewrite copy, implement tooling and setup the sequences.

Week 33: Email sequences - example where it really helps knowing how to code + sell 🔥

Spent a lot of time researching techniques specific to each sequence:
- 🔢 # of emails in the sequence
- 💬 Key message in each email
- ⏱️ Timing the message

💪 Powering through
Despite this, I have showed up everyday: Improved transcript for our users and tried things to get resolve the issue.

PS: The campaign is live, for now (🤞 we don't run into this again)

Week 32: Started off feeling defeated 😞

📢 Ad campaigns:
Weeks of work leading up to this moment! Launched our first Google Ads campaign on Sunday. Got rejected with an inconspicuous policy error. I have tried everything I could think of to get around this - Google is very unhelpful here!

Week 31: Bottom of funnel optimisations

Moved to Spain for the next couple of months. Same consistency in the routine just a different location.

Rebuilt the pricing page and upsell components. Focusing on the final step in the funnel:
Visitor -> User -> Key feature use -> Subscriber

GitHub - gitroomhq/postiz-app: 📨 The ultimate social media scheduling tool, with a bunch of AI 🤖 📨 The ultimate social media scheduling tool, with a bunch of AI 🤖 - gitroomhq/postiz-app

Why? There’s already github.com/gitroomhq/po...

Cloudflare won’t work for this?

Who Is Your ICP? An onboarding survey can capture this! Inspired by @TallyForms I'm adding this. But...

I don't want to overload the path to key feature usage. I plan to show this right after user requests their first transcript and waiting for the result. Are there better ways to gather this?

In Transcript v1, I have done this well using my learnings at SwiftKey. While building v2 from ground up, I haven't paid attention to it because I know I can always revise later. Sketched out the current flow to create a transcript for a new user. Spent this week to optimise this funnel.

Week 29: No one cares about your product...

It's your job to convince your users to care! We have to get users to the wow moment as quickly as possible! In practice, this means: keeping the funnel to key feature usage as short and distraction free as possible.

Not just brand perception. Need to find a scalable acquisition channel. You can’t control word of mouth so, hard to scale it!

Week 28: Marketing, marketing, marketing

Word of mouth has been good but not enough for the growth I want to see in Transcript. This week's focus has been on doing some ground work to test new marketing channels. Excited to hit the ground running by next week!

Sleep hard, work hardly

Week 27: Marketing work

Been doing some groundwork for a consistent marketing push. Need to crack the distribution problem well or everything else I’m building is for nothing

Also, I have finally taken a few days off this week with a long weekend trip to Norway.

The stabiliser is my hand 😅

Recharging 🧠 with this little boy 🐶

Week 26: A slow week 🐢

🔢 Dashboard to track conversions per channel
📢 Prep for Ads and organic experiments
🚀 Fixed bottlenecks with database

The look and sound of real luxury….

I’m grateful that I get to wake up to this and build my company on my own terms.

Daily: Respond to support requests
Weekly: Evaluate product feedback
Monthly: Send detailed product updates

This is in addition to special announcements, onboarding flows, promotions etc.

Just because I did not take outside investment, doesn't mean I'm absolved of most communication responsibilities. You must constantly stay in touch with your users. This is everything I do each month:

I will give investor updates bootstrapping.
I will give investor updates bootstrapping.
I will give investor updates bootstrapping.
I will give investor updates bootstrapping.

As for coding without AI:
- Definitely doable with first principles
- Harder and time consuming
- Not worth doing in this age

✅ Optimised the auto-scalar (love algorithmic challenges)
🚀 Built a Zapier extension for Transcript LOL
⬆️ Cleaned up & upgraded dependencies
📝 Prepared release notes for monthly product updates

Week 25: I survived a week without AI 🤖 Here's what I learned...

Thanks to @EE I'm practically cut-off from internet this week so, I challenged myself to build offline!