Starting something new is hard. It is scary. It is fraught with danger. I might fail. They might laugh. So mostly we don’t start, we just make excuses about why it is a bad idea. But excuses get you nowhere. Sure, not every start will be a win, but 100% you will learn something every time you throw yourself over that ledge and commit to something.
This fear of starting is not alien to Digital Noir. We have dozens of internal projects that have never seen the light of day. It’s not fun to be a hypocrite! We spend so much time dishing out advice to clients about the importance of ‘shipping’ and often fail to take our own medicine.
Well, this week in the studio, we are going to make an example of just what we mean by starting, shipping, committing.
We have a tiny little app project that David developed during a quiet spell a few months back. The app is called Snapcheck and is about as simple a product as you can imagine. It allows you to test your Snapchat Geofilters using your phone’s native camera. Every time we have run a sponsored Snapchat Geofilter, we have thought, “wouldn’t a simple app to test this be a great idea”. So we made it. Then did absolutely NOTHING with it!
Now we may not be immune to the fear of starting, but we are immune to delusions of grandeur. We know this app is not going to make a million dollars. It does not have a good business model behind it at all. BUT it may be useful for some digital marketers out there. So this week we are going to start to the hard process of ‘shipping’.
Our plan:
In 5 days can we accumulate 10 active users of the app?
“10 users”, you say? Why set your aims so low? 10 users is a start. It is a realistic and achievable first step. I have seen so many startups fail due to their founders having unrealistic expectations of what would happen when their products launched. 1 million users is a pipe dream if you can’t start with (and be happy with) 10.
So throughout this week we will discuss and demonstrate some of the digital marketing strategies that we will employ to begin building the ‘Snapcheck’ brand and hopefully achieve our goal of 10 active users!
