Making Two People Happy (Apr 2024 Retro)
How making two people happy can be the key to a successful MVP, why smallball comments can outperform high profile marketing, and learning from hatemail
“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterward that makes it right or wrong.” — Miles Davis
I’m a bit late on the April 2024 retro. Unfortunately, I missed my goal to get 3 new paying users by end of April.
In this monthly retro, I'll review:
The sales that I did get and how it affected my prioritization for the month
My YouTube video and Reddit post on Alexandra Botez and how it performed ok in terms of views and engagement but underperformed in terms of conversions
A silver lining for the missed goal and my thoughts on strategy adjustments
Early April Sale And Hate Mail
Since 50% M/M could be achieved with a modest three new customers, I was elated when, almost immediately, in the first few days of April, I got a $99 lifetime sale. The catalyst was a Reddit post asking, “How did you first get into poker?” My initial response didn’t mention my product, but was highly upvoted, as I was introduced by the best friend of one of the greatest players of all time. A follow-up question asked what I was up to now, and I mentioned the product.
This person asked for a feature I call “Custom Charts.” My product takes a set of poker charts, maps them to flashcards, and lets you review them. There are nuanced reasons why people might want to tweak my charts.
Funnily enough, the first time I heard this feedback was from a few months ago, with quite a bit of hate:
Noticed your app on reddit. Tried it out and thought that it's a great idea, but it's extremely limited. Signed up and thought that maybe that way there would be more features available, like adding my personal range charts for studying (which is the most important feature in range trainers tbh) but then in settings I only saw a textbox requesting money and an errored text box (see pic)
While the idea is good, the app is in an extremelly early stage and already mentioning monthly subscriptions. That just sounds greedy and in really poor taste. I get a buy me coffee link, or patreon and then move to a freemium subscription when the app is complete, but this...
Believe it or not, this was only. a third of the email, which included more rants about how my app was “barebones”, and a bunch of legal threats related to GPDR.
Perhaps I’m immature, but I did not respond kindly to this email.
Of course, Thomas Frank is right. While calling me “greedy” , my app “barebones”, and legally threatening me was rude, it was notable that he thought custom charts was an important feature.
So my ears perked up when someone who voted with some confidence and spent money asked for the same feature.
I’m a massive believer in listening to feedback, especially in prioritizing the feedback of people willing to open their wallets. If one person will pay for it, others will too.
One idea I’ve been toying with is the concept of making two people happy. When building an MVP, if you build for just yourself, it’s easy to build something super personalized. But if you talk to dozens of people, you might feel it’s impossible to please everyone and stay minimal. But if you build something that makes yourself happy and a stranger happy, you can stay minimal while making sure it’s not too hyper-personalized for yourself.
Custom charts involved a lot of complex UX interactions, since there was way more user input than most of the existing features on my app, so it took a lot of development time this month, which preceded other goals.
Alexandra Botez YouTube Video
Alexandra Botez is one of the most popular creators in the chess world. She started streaming chess on Twitch while attending Stanford and has since amassed a massive following, including 1.4M YouTube subscribers.
She recently developed an interest in poker, and of course, online poker sites have welcomed her with open arms and big sponsorships. So I decided to ride on some of her popularity as well and made a video doing a deep dive on a hand she played in a $25K Triton Poker tournament.
The post did reasonably well, getting over 100k views on Reddit. On YouTube, it did get less views than my previous videos at only 1.1k views, compared to almost 3k on the other 2 videos, but it did increase my subscriber count from around 80 to around 125. But it just didn’t seem to track into any meaningful conversions in terms of signups to my sites.
I’ve learned over and over, that the big posts are both a lot more work and have a lot less impact than the small, random comments.
I talked to one of my recent paying users, and he mentioned that he found me because he was new to poker, searched on Google with “site:reddit.com poker term” and my name kept popping up answering questions. This ties into my theory that one of the most underlooked forms of SEO today is just to post on Reddit. Today, up to 25% of Google searches include the word Reddit and people are often more likely to trust content on that site then on your own site, and ultimately it may not matter if people find your product on your site or via Reddit.
Responding to some random thread might take me ten seconds, whereas the Botez video took closer to 15 hours in terms of finding a good video to review, analyzing it in the solver, putting together the footage in DaVinci resolve, and tweaking it. This is before I actually do all the massive video editing improvements I need to make my videos more engaging.
My 30-second dropoff on YouTube is below average, and I need to make my videos more visually engaging to really grow on that platform, which will take a lot of experience.
Still, I think there’s still some “brand awareness” and credibility established with these strategy posts. And I’m generally a bit enamored with the long-term potential of YouTube, especially since I’ve discovered a content niche that I enjoy making and that has at least a tiny audience. I also think improving my video and audio skills can pay dividends in many ways, such as preparing me to make a quick video “mini-class” on poker theory.
I’m just second-guessing if it’s the best use of my time if I’m trying to get better product adoption in the short term.
Email List Fail
Whenever someone signs up for my app, I acquire their email, and I’ve accrued about 700 emails, 550 of which are confirmed.
I was hoping that after I finished the custom charts feature, I would email the list and get my last few paying customers.
I did bump the price from $99 to $199. That might be a bit high. I’ll admit a small part of it was influenced by the fact that I might be helping my own competition at the poker table - still a non-negligible source of income for me - and just feeling hesitant to commit to giving indefinite access for what I felt was too little. I do also want to leave room for discounts, promos, and sales, without dipping too low. But maybe $149 would have made more sense.
Unfortunately, the email got zero replies, 0 conversions. It also got 6 unsubscribes, which is about 1% and not a huge number but a bit higher than a target of 0.5%.
Silver Lining
I was a little demoralized after this since I did set a goal and failed to hit it.
There is a lot of stuff I can still do to grow this product, including:
Features people have asked for like finishing my native app as some people feel more comfortable with subscriptions on iOS due to a clear cancellation flow
Lots of SEO work to be done
Reaching out to existing Poker YouTubers for partnerships
Finishing a poker mini-course
Paid ads (a commenter here recently asked me if I had run it, it’s still on the TODO list!)
Most of this hasn’t been done simply because I juggling too many things.
But there was one silver lining! In early May, I got a $199 lifetime sale, again from a Reddit comment found via a Google search.
So, there is a double entendre in this newsletter title because I have acquired two paying customers in the last thirty days, hopefully because I made two people happy.
This new person is basically my “ideal customer profile,” as he has a software background, is familiar with chess study tools that use spaced repetition, and wants something similar for poker. Spaced repetition is a well-known concept in software circles and some pre-med circles (my doctor has an Anki sticker on her phone because she credits it to her success on the MCAT and Board scores), but most poker players have never heard of it.
This person has a ton of feedback for my app, and I again feel a little validated that if someone will spend $200 on my little MVP, it does have some value.
Strategy Adjustments Going Forward
While I generated a respectable $300 in revenue and acquired some paying customers, the growth in paid users has not quite been on the trajectory I was hoping for.
Ultimately, I didn’t set out to build a poker app, and certainly not a broader poker coaching brand. I set out to build some sort of online business that could generate $10k in revenue a month. Live Poker Theory has some momentum, but I am getting a little bit of B2B FOMO seeing people with B2B projects growing revenue a bit more easily.
One of the ideas I initially had was that if I could sell any type of online product, even if it made a tiny amount of revenue, then I would technically be an online business. And then I would be able to solve a problem for an online business owner, and myself at the same time, and thereby, make two people happy.
So I might pivot away from a complete focus on Live Poker Theory into a related project, such as a marketing-tech tool that would help grow Live Poker Theory, which would be a standalone project.
Right now though, it’s a bit early for that. I feel strongly that I should finish some things I started. To me that means launching this React Native app, making a mini-course on poker theory and it’s application to winning at live poker games in casinos, improvements to my landing page, improvements to my SEO, and an ad campaign during the Las Vegas World Series of Poker.
I hope to accomplish all of the above by mid-July, at which point I’ll consider more strongly whether to continue focusing on the project or pivot.
Key Takeaways
Try to build stuff you want and that another person said they want, and will ideally pay for. Making just yourself happy, or just one stranger happy, might create too niche a product. Making ten people happy while staying minimal can feel impossible. Making two people happy - yourself and a stranger - can be an ideal compromise.
Rude feedback often contains valid criticism, and you benefit from emotional maturity to separate the two
Prioritize listening to paying users under the assumption there are more people like them
Reddit comments are an underrated form of SEO as many Google searches include the word Reddit or site:reddit.com
YouTube content needs to be highly visually engaging and exciting in the first 30 seconds. It’s a massive platform with massive opportunity, but a long-term battle to establish a meaningful foothold
Content marketing can be a roundabout form of growth compared to other alternatives, so think hard if the ROI is there and make sure to experiment with different channels
$199 lifetime sales can be easier than $10/mo subscription'
Thanks for reading, as always feel free to reply to me directly or leave a comment on Substack with feedback.