Taking my business to the next level in 6 months.

It's been a year and a half since I locked myself in a hotel room to learn to code for 2 months.

Now, I'm trying the experience again but for 6 months. I rented a super comfortable place with a gym in the same building

But first I need to finish my guide on Facebook Ads for SaaS that I pre-launched a couple of weeks ago.

24/02/2024

• Woke up: 6:00AM - Sleep: 5h !! - Gym: No (still sore from Yesterday)
• Goal of the day: Record chapter 3 of the course

Went to bed late yesterday because I took my GF to the airport. She's going back to the US, so I will be alone for the next 6 months. This is mainly because she has some work in the US and I can not afford to live there yet. And even after, even EU or even Mexico (the good/safe areas) are too expensive.

I swore myself I would never have to leave her again like that because I don't make enough $.

I know no one in Bangkok, and it's fine. I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to take my business to the next level.

Let's get started.

25/02/2024

• Woke up: 5:40 AM - Sleep: 8h - Gym: Yes
• Goal of the day: Fix bugs

I was tired the whole day yesterday because of the lack of sleep (and I avoid coffee whenever possible). I still ended up recording + editing + publishing the new chapter, as well as launching new ads. Crazy how much you can achieve in the worst conditions when you are focused.

Now, being focused doesn't mean you should raw-dog work all day long. I often take lots of breaks (especially when tired like yesterday). I either watch stuff on Youtube/Netflix or play on my Steamdeck (love that thing).

As long as you can stop after 10-20 minutes it should not be an issue and you can get back to work focused (anime are perfect for that, they usually are 20 mins long)

I want to wait for feedback + ads results before continuing what I did yesterday, so today I will try to fix some bugs that made me lose users in Talknotes. I also need to do some groceries and other stuff.

Oh and yes, it's Sunday. Most people stop working on Sunday "just because". I don't believe in that. Work as much as you can and rest when you're tired. Doesn't matter if it's a Sunday or a Tuesday.

--

I wasn't able to reproduce the bug, so I guess I'll have to skip the bugfix today until customers get back to me. I guess I'll continue. the course then.

26/02/2024

• Woke up: 5:50 AM - Sleep: 7h - Gym: Yes
• Goal of the day: Finish Chapter 4 of the course

Not much to say, I realized yesterday that I won't be able to fully focus on Talknotes until the course is finished. I just can't do anything efficiently unless I fully "dive" in it, and having other tasks break the focus. So I will skip bugfixes for now and finish it, that way it's 100% done and I can mentally move on.

I just work better when I mono-task.

--

Chapter 4 completed and uploaded, and even did half of Chapter 5.

27/02/2024

• Woke up: 5:30 AM - Sleep: 6:30h - Gym: No
• Goal of the day: Finish Chapter 6 of the course

Not much to say here, just the usual boring day routine. Wake up, gym, read one Daily Stoic chapter, then work until the evening.

--

Almost done with the course. Just need a few more videos and I can focus on Talknotes.

28/02/2024

• Woke up: 5:50 AM - Sleep: 7:00h - Gym: Yes
• Goal of the day: Finish the course content

Last straight line and I can finally start growing Talknotes. I'm finishing the course content today.

--

And. I'm done! Just need to tweak a few things and add a rating system. My brain is fried so I'm going to run errands outside to cool off a bit (and playing God of War).

I think I can be done by the end of the day (17:10 right now).

29/02/2024

• Woke up: 6:20 AM - Sleep: 6:00h - Gym: No
• Goal of the day: Finishing back-end + Copy crash course

Ended up not doing errands and making the feedback system instead. I finished at 10:30PM or so, but at least it's done (I usually go to bed at 8 or 9).

The bonus Copy Crash Course is almost done and I'm waiting to get feedback from some users. Then I will make some tweaks and pay someone on Fiverr to make a nice ebook design, that way I can focus on Talknotes today.

My first focus will be to fix bugs and reduce support. Going to pull out all conversations with my AI chatbot to see what people complain about then improve the reference doc.

--

I started working on some bugs, and tried to fix the churn, but then I realized... My churn is low. I do not have a bug/features problem, I have an acquisition problem. The only messages I receive are about features and bugs, so it feels like the app is full of bugs, but it's a minority of users.

So, I'll keep bugs and features in the background, but it won't be my priority.

--

20:12

Needed to walk a bit and went to do groceries. Seeing all this food properly organized helps me think somehow.

I think my main issue with Talknotes is that I do not have a clear identifiable target. I have no fucking idea who are the customers. I have managers, lawyers, executives, students, etc. It's everyone. It create some kind of analysis paralysis. I want to reach everyone so I reach no one.

I guess some solutions could be:

• Keep trying different channels/ad setups that appeal to broad audiences until I find something that works better
• Try to make landing pages for specific audiences (ex: One for students, with use cases for them, etc)
• Run ads with targeted creatives on the audience landing pages
• Make free tools for specific audiences

Damnit, there are just so many things I could do. I guess a good night of sleep will help with decisions.

01/03/2024

• Woke up: 5:45 AM - Sleep: 7:00h - Gym: Yes
• Goal of the day: No fucking idea

Sleep didn't help lol.

I think I will try to export all the data I collected from my customers and see what I can do with it.

Goal is to see what job-paid users are, and the main use cases for them (questions I ask in the onboarding).

Then I tried to feed it to ChatGPT but it gave bad results. I tried with Google Gemini and it ended up a bit better. However, it's not precise. I ran the same prompt a few times and got different numbers, so it means it doesn't count properly. But it's ok, it gives an overall idea.

After couple of hours of braimstorming, I think I got a few nice ideas. Problem is none are proven at all, those are just things I think could make sense. The #1 being to create landing pages and ads for specific use cases / persona. I guess that should be do-able with programatic SEO.

I don't like because it's not linked to distribution immediately (Need SEO or Ads to send people on those pages)

But I guess it can help me make more efficient ads. I guess.

--

Alright, took some time to brainstorn more and I'm going to do focus on one single part of my audience to start with. I will add features for them, make a landing page for them and a few other things. Then will run ads targeting them. If that doesn't works for this audience, I'll move to the next one. Then rinse and repeat until I find something that works.

02/03/2024

• Woke up at 5:30 - Sleep 6h30 - Gym: No (blocked back)
• Goal of the day: Make a landing page for a specific audience

Sleep still sucks. Time to get started. The new ad setup I tested failed miserably. Will try again with more relevant audiences/ads, and more creatives. Lowered budget a bit for now.

I wanted to make a fully programatic SEO landing page I can easily duplicate for other audiences, but I will bother with that later, for now I'll make a landing page manually for one audience and see from there.

17:50 So, I made the landing page copy + figma design and worked on some new features to appeal to the audience I'm targeting, but my brain is fried already. Been working for 10 hours (not counting breaks) so I guess it sort of make sense, but still, it used to be more than that.

03/03/2024

• Woke up at 6:30 - Sleep 7h00 - Gym: Yes (cardio + legs only, back blocked still)
• Goals of the day: Add new styles, add the markdown editor, and if I'm done start the landing page code.

Today is Sunday, so I will be a bit less strict with food. I eat a lot of rice + chili this week since I cooked a huge batch (1kg of meat).

But today's goal is to build some features that hopefully will unlock better marketing for a new audience: Markdown editor, more custom styles and a few other stuffs.

Exceptionally I will take coffee today because I feel brainfog already.

--

Ended up only making the Markdown editor and few small features, took longer that I thought but I also added new features and improved the UI, looks 10x better now imo! I wanted to work more but I noticed I started being super unproductive o I'm just going to stop here for today.

04/03/2024

• Woke up at 6:30 - Sleep 7h30 - Gym: No (back still blocked)
• Goals of the day: Try UI library and start working on landing page.

A bit boring but I think that will x3 my dev time. I need to pick a component library, since I know nothing about it best is to ask on twitter

Got tons of reply, mainly ShadCDN, NuxtUI and TailwindUI.

I'm sure all thos options are great, but my friend Tim from Pally use NuxtUI, so I know that:

• It's production ready
• Probably easy to integrate to an existing project

And since it's made by the Nuxt team it's definitely compatible with Nuxt

Maybe another one would be better for me, but I think a big part of entrepreneurship is accepting that you may not always make the optimal decision.

I'm just going to go for that and see how it goes instead of wasting the day trying all of them.

--

Turns out, since I edited Tailwind config to use my own values (p-2 etc) any component library I want to use will looks like shit, nice.

I hopped to finish the landing page but I wasted so much time on trying to make a carousel that's responsive. It's 80% done, just need to make some finishing touches and it should be good to go. Then I will start hiring content creators to make ads for me, then while they prepare the videos, write some SEO stuffs.

05/03/2024

• Woke up at 7:00 - Sleep 8h00 - Gym: No (Woke up late + blocked back, might go later)
• Goals of the day: Finish the landing page

I finally got 8 hours of sleep, pretty insane the difference it makes, I feel so energized even after waking up! My main issue is that I take ages to fall asleep. Need to find a solution.

06/03/2024

• Woke up at 6:30 - Sleep 6h - Gym: No

Finished the landing page and managed to merge the mobile app with the webapp so it's easier to maintain. Now trying to focus on the marketing to bring traffic to the new landing page.

Ads are starting to tank. As much as I'm used to it in 7 years, it's always a massive source of anxiety. There is also so much stuff to do I don't know where to start. I feel like crap like I'm not going anywhere.

I should only have one focus: Bringing traffic to the specific page. Nothing else matters for the next 2 weeks.

07/03/2024

• Woke up at 6:30 - Sleep 5h30 - Gym: No
• Goal of today: Make at least 3 ads ready to go and find magnesium.

Feel like crap since yesterday. Bad sleep doesn't help, so I'm going to buy magnesium and melatonin to see if that helps.

Now, I hoped that locking myself in a nice place would help, but I now realize the main issue is that marketing is not a linear process, unlike learning to code.

Learning to code is easy: Wake up, watch the course, understand the notion, and you're done.

Coding is easy: Wake up, write coloured letters in VsCode, see if it works, and you're done.

But marketing doesn't work like that. You can't see the results immediately. And the lack of results is a result itself.

All that means that not only you don't have a clear exact roadmap, but you also can't know what will work and what won't for a long of time. And then, sometimes, something works and you can keep repeating it.

It means that until then, you're gambling your time to find a repeatable process.

And IMO this is the hardest part about entrepreneurship. The lack of certitude. You waste all those hours looking for gold, and you will never get them back.

--

Managed to find some motivation to brainstorm, create ads and launch them. 5 different ads for a total of $100/day. I'll let it run for 2-3 days and see how it goes.

I doubt it will work but who knows. Never try never know.

08/03/2024

• Woke up at 5:30 - Sleep 8h00 - Gym: No
• Goal of today: Errands

Had to go to immigration to extend my visa. I took magnesium and melatonin yesterday and it knocked me down so hard I was still tired this morning. But hey at least I fell asleep quickly!\

I made good sales during the night. Probably just luck tho.

Not much work today, just went to see Dune 2 and eat out. Will work tomorrow.

09/03/2024

• Woke up at 5:40 - Sleep 8h30 - Gym: Yes
• Goal of today: ?

I just had one of the best sleep in one year or so. I feel pumped like a gorilla after the gym. As expected, ads results got worse, but still decent. Will see a few more days but I don't expect much. Apparently, FB has technical issues at the moment so it doesn't helps.

No idea what to do today honestly. I'll just go with the flow, and probably do some UI improvements.

--

Ended up remaking the navigation. Lots of effort for not much, but it's now way better on mobile in my opinion. Tomorrow I'll start focusing on a free tool for SEO. First step will be to search for a good keyword. Then build the tool, then launch on PH

Ambiance music here

10/03/2024

• Woke up at 5:30 - Sleep 8h00 - Gym: Yes
• Goal of today: ?

14/03/2024

My content management system got a bug and I lost the last 4 days

To keep it short:

• Got on a call with a customer, and found big opportunities
• I spent some time digging my stats, and I only made 3 sales from non-branded keywords since I started, what a joke. Big source of traffic but mainly get spam traffic. Will give another shot at it but I don't think SEO will work for me.
• Spend 2 days writing a bigass blog article for a low-competition keyword. I also heavily improved the UI of the blog. If that doesn't rank I'm not doing more content SEO, no time to waste.
• Delayed the free tool to the end of the week to launch on ProductHunt to see if having the backlink is enough to rank on the first page of Google. Starting to work on it today.

I also wanted to see if running ads on SEO content improves the ranking faster, so I launched ads for the new article I wrote yesterday.

By launching the ad, I realized it's an amazing way to split-test for SEO. For example, you can launch the ad with multiple headlines, see what performs best and rename your content with it.

Coffee + Metal music = Code fast. Was able to make the new free tool from scratch in the afternoon. I will wait sometime before launching on ProductHunt, just to see if there is a bump in terms of traffic after I launch there.

16/03/2024

Didnt do much yesterday other than launching a new experiment with Google Ads and fix bugs. So far I get cheap clicks and little conversion.

I think I will launch another page with free trials to see how it goes this week. But brain is fuzzy today and I feel like doing nothing.

18/03/2024

I didn't do anything yesterday either. I forced myself to play video games until I got bored of it. Now I'm a bit more motivated to work again. That's usually a safe bet, whenever I have zero motivation to work (which usually means there is very little important work to be done), I play game for 1-2 days. No work at all. I usually get ideas during the day I want to execute, but I force myself to play still.

Goal of today: Working on the "clone" app for the new niche. Define the MVP features to have, and ideally start the code a bit.

I like to plan my projects with 3 folders: "Product", "Market" and "Distribution".

• Product = Anything related to the product like features, etc.
• Market = Anything related to the ecosystem: Competitors, media, customers, etc.
• Distribution = Anything related to distri channel (ads, affiliates, etc)

19/03/2024

Goal of today: Making the recording process

20/03/2024

I remade the basics of the app from scratch yesterday to fix some issues there is with the current app. I'm probably going to copy the new code into Talknotes.

Goal of today: Finish the core of the app (recording, transcription, and anything that doesn't include auth, payments, etc)

25/03/2024

Been in cave mode for the last week, almost done with the new app. That was the cleanest code I've ever done, but probably unnecessary.

Focusing on the branding today, going to publish a private version of the app and send it to the customer so he can start testing it.

26/03/2024

I wasted yesterday on fixing bugs and doing customer support, I fucking hate that. Hopefully, I will be able to finish the branding and important parts today. I want to be done and start working on marketing stuff asap.

28/03/2024

Was completely knocked down yesterday after one whole week of crunch and doing a big gym session so I wasnt able to work properly. I only did half the landing page and didnt worked for the rest of the day. Today I'm finishing the landing page and few tweaks and start focus on marketing. If this thing works out, it could be my big win. It probably won't tho, that will be another failure to my list. Way more than 30 in 7 years. But that's what it takes, I don't care how many times I fail, I only need one single win.

03/04/2024

The app got published on the app store and everything is ready. The contact I have will start talking about it this week, and will see how it goes at the end. Now the part I hate the most: Waiting

In the meantime, I'm working on a micro app because I noticed my sales popup got lots of attention on Twitter and I want to avoid someone else launching before me.

03/04/2024

The new app got its first subscription! 😍 Without me doing any marketing, that's dope!

Finishing the popup app today so I can launch it on Sunday before going to Korea.

05/04/2024

Almost finished the Sales Popup app, focus of today: Making the landing page

Then I will launch this Sunday, go to Korea and focus on Talknotes a bit, I have plenty of features and bugs to fix.

Then I will launch new ads, and focus back on the other app.

I already see the struggle of juggling between multiple projects. But the ads course and sales popup are long-term investments and should be minimal on-going efforts.

I really hope I can push the other app to a good MRR and sell Talknotes, that way I have fewer projects to handle but a nice amount of cash. Then I can focus on this while growing my marketing-oriented products and eventually sell it too.

11/04/24

The app's MRR kept growing, my Facebook ads keep making sales, and i keep getting business ideas. It's 00:45 AM and i just cant sleep, I think way too much about how things could be in 6 months.

I could focus on making marketing products, or making existing products but scale them with ads, or making an agency. There are just so many possibilities...

10/04/2024

Crazy few days, SalesPopup.io ended Product of the Day on ProductHunt!

14/04/2024

Back from Korea. I moved my flight to come back one day earlier because the hotel was shit. It costed me $200 more but that's what I make in a day, and it means I can start working one day earlier, so, worth it imo. Back to the grind.

Since I'm done with SalesPopup I can focus back on growing my main apps soon. Plan of today: Fixing a few bugs with SalesPopup and then I can start working on the rest. Talknotes needs lots of UI improvements and tweaks to reduce the churn.

I think that will be the goal this week.

Then, I can start focusing on marketing the new app

16/04/2024

I spent the last few days refactoring many things with Talknotes to improve and clean up the code.

I added some of the most requested features + permanent passwords, since one-time passwords generated lots of support from people saying they did not receive the code.

Much needed work.

—

17/04/2024

I woke up with sales going 70% down because the demo was not working anymore on the landing page. 

Then, started to get tons me emails from people who could not login. A bug slipped into the mobile app and I had no way to fix it. 

That was the most stressful day I had to far, ended up being completely fried mentally after. When I was done fixing the bugs, I laid down on my shower for 30 minutes to evacuate the stress.

:embed-tweet{url="https://twitter.com/nico_jeannen/status/1780923502465540272"}

18/04/2024

No work today, my brain is still fried, I’m going to stay in bed and not open the laptop.

20/04/2024

I could barely work for the last 2 days, the complete mess from the other fucked me up badly. I also skipped gym, I went this morning but didn’t push a lot because I felt like throwing up even with light weight. 

Having a hard time working too. I want to avoid doing nothing for the whole day so I try to do 1h of work and 1h of break, and mainly small tasks. Slow af but better than nothing.

Bugs seem to be fixed on Talknotes, I haven’t received much more complaints since then. 

22/04/2024

Forced myself to not work and eat a bunch of junk food yesterday. My logic is that if I start getting unmotivated and craving junk food, if I eat too much of it starts to get boring and I don’t want it anymore for a while.

So I watched the whole Fallout show (masterpiece ) and ate mainly chocolate and Mcdonald's. Had to force myself to finish it, I don’t want to hear about McDonalds anymore now.

Feeling motivated by the idea of working on the app again so it’s a good thing.

My goals for this week will be to reduce support as much as possible for all my apps (so, fixing as many recurring issue I can) and make an affiliate program for the new app. I need to make it before May first, since the customer I'm talking with has a big meeting on this date where he will promote the app.

Also need to re-launch some ads for me and my buddy Marc.

Goals of today:

• Launch new ads
• Find a definite solution for affiliate
• Fix an issue where a welcome email is not sent for MakerAdsGuide

—

The affiliation tracking system is online. Whenever a user opens the landing page from an affiliate URL, the cookie is stored for 7 days. If during those 7 days, the person signs or subscribes, the account will be created with the tag “invited_by” and the ID of the referral. 

Now I just need a system to generate affiliate ID/Accounts and send payouts. I will do it manually at first then automate once I see the system works.

24/04/2024

Basic affiliate system is done for now. It’s manual but it should works!

I could have spent hours making a fully automated one but no point for now until the app takes off.

Next focus: Improving the conversion rate on Talknotes. I suspect it went down recently both because I got less qualified traffic, but also because the new people I’m reaching expect “more”.

That will be the focus for the rest of the week I think.

Some ideas:

• Show the user’s country flag saying “We support X language”
• Better demo (the current one is a bit dated)
• Showcase most popular use cases

25/04/2024

Turns out, the onboarding asking users to pick a plan was not working for a week, so people could just skip it and use the app for free 🤡 No wonder why revenues were a bit down. Fixed it now.

Focus of today: Improving the demo on the landing page.

29/04/2024

I spent some time improving the landing page design, and then started a course about video editing. I want to launch 2-3 videos on Youtube to see what happens. Worst case, video editing is a sick skill to have for advertising, and it's really fun to see how it uses similar mechanics as copywriting to keep the user watching. It's like 3D copywriting. You have visual, but also sound, motion, etc.

But, for now I need to fix my ads. Results have been absolute garbage for my account this week, so I'm trying a different setup. This is the good old manual targeting setup from 2018 and so on. Everyone says it doesn't work, but let's see.

The only way to know is to test it.

03/05/2024

As expected, the manual setup doesn't work that well. But, something is off. The ads are decent, there is demand for the product, so there is no way it costs me $100 to get one sale. And the most odd is that one day I get $600 of sales and the next one $100. It doesn't make any sense, it should be at least somewhat consistent

And by digging out, I found that tons of people visiting the landing page used the demo wrongly. They clicked "continue" without recording anything, which made it bug. I suspect that might be one of the reason. I fixed it, let's see how it goes.

Video editing takes a shitload of work. Will probably takes me 2 more weeks to finish the video.

03/05/2024

I just sold Talknotes for $200,000 ! I recorded the rest of the journey instead of writing it, video soon.