Mar 17, 2021

It Ain't Easy. First Roadblocks. - Issue #2

By Art's Newsletter 🧠 • Issue #2 • View online

Hope y'all are happy and healthy.

When the world keeps giving us lemons, 🍋 have the juicer ready.

Question this week: How have you failed recently?

Would love to hear from you.

Creation Is Not the Problem. Distribution Is.

Last week I shared that I’m working on turning my first online course ramen profitable.

So far, so good. Now comes my Failure of the Month.

It ain't easy.

32 people have signed up. Some have paid more than others. But not a single one has completed the course.

This is a typical early-days business challenge. It’s not working and you are trying to figure out why.

To add a bit more color:

The course is a self-paced online course
It’s ~5 hours of video
The course teaches how to build and maintain successful brands (more context here)

My problem: I don’t get data points.

No completion means I don’t know what (value proposition) is useful and to whom (target customer).

Rest assured, I’ll be doing a couple of experiments in the coming weeks.

I’ll be documenting my troubleshooting attempt in the twitter thread below 👇

Art Lapinsch 🧠

@artlapinsch

Course creation is not the problem. Distribution is.

Launched my self-paced course 2.5 weeks ago. 30+ ppl signed up. Not a single course completion.

$$Rev aside, it is difficult to collect data and improve the product.

Something needs changing. Here a couple ideas 👇

9:43 PM - 17 Mar 2021

Automating Freelance Finance

This topic is tangential.

To be able to focus on product development and distribution, I want to save time wherever I can.

This week: uploading invoice attachments from GMail to GDrive

As a freelancer I incur deductible expenses.

I have 2 separate freelance businesses. Invoices for both need to be separated (i.e. not a shared folder).

In order to deduct those, I need to:

Identify the relevant bills
Collect them in a folder
Send them to my accountant

Formerly I used to click on the "add to GDrive" button but it would require too many clicks.

I set up a Zapier automation to send attachments to 2 dedicated GDrive folders. Here’s the Zap I set up.

Art Lapinsch 🧠

@artlapinsch

@_karimelk Ok, thinking out loud here:

Ideal Scenario:
1) Bill is paid
2) Receipt is sent to a dedicated email address (email+type1@gmail.com vs email+type2@gmail.com)
3) tagged automatically
4) uploaded to GDrive

9:30 AM - 10 Mar 2021

It’s a small fix - probably saves me 10-20 seconds per invoice.

You gotta start somewhere.