So we kicked off our #growthsprint with a hiss and a roar last week.
Having a the whole team pushing toward a (seemingly impossible) target is really exciting. It's not like we've been lacking that startup hustle vibe before now, but last Monday felt different – everyone slightly nervous as we lined up along the cliff and dived off together.
And that excitement wasn’t just limited to our internal team. It’s been really cool to see clients, friends and family jump on board with the big mission.
To help keep you guys, our support team and internet-friends, in the loop, we’re going to post an update each weekend for the next six weeks so you can track our progress. Hopefully if you’re our mates, this’ll help you see the impact your support is having. If you’re a startup looking to do your own #growthsprint, we can share the things that are working and point out some rocks and pitfalls to avoid on your own journey.
Sales and Marketing:
First off, despite a very promising start to the week, we didn’t quite hit our goal of two new subscriptions per day. Disappointing, but then again, we’re this close to signing off some clients that’ll more than catch us up so we’re feeling optimistic. Also, it was totally still our best week ever!
Marketing-wise, we really ramped up the content marketing. We’ve moved up to three blog posts per week, and started seeding out content on our new Medium profile.
At some point we want to implement a clever concept that’ll tie-in with our AskNicely NPS survey and help give the users who want to refer us, a simple and interesting way to do that. In the meantime, we’re asking those people to help with #growthsprint by sharing about Weirdly on their own blogs or social profiles. While heaps of people are keen to do this (they love us, they really love us!), it takes AAAAAGES to actually get it done. The impact is worth it though. We had a pretty significant spike in traffic this week and a few sign-ups directly off the back of a small mention in this article – posted by one of our most awesome users.
We spent loads of sales time in meetings last week. This ended up being good and bad. Good, because we’re this close now to getting two really big clients across the line. Bad because it meant we really struggled to find time to ring all our new sign-ups.
Like heaps of fresh new startups, our best conversions come as a direct result of calling every signup and having a chat about their business. This gives us the opportunity to help them understand how to get the most out of Weirdly, or, in some cases, prevent them from wasting too much time if we can’t actually deliver the service they’re looking for.
We simply didn’t have time to ring people last week. It’s something we’re trying to remedy next week - partly by rescheduling all meetings that aren't 80% likely to result in a close, and partly by upping our man(lady)-power. Which leads us nicely to our next section:
The team:
We signed up a new three-day-a-week team member, starting on Tuesday.
Sarah is an awesome, amazing customer success manager and she’s going to do all that ringing people we couldn’t get to last week. If you’re a Weirdly user, Sarah’s going to be your best friend. She’ll answer all your questions and generally help make sure our software is actually working well for you.
Product updates:
Dan was away for most of last week but that didn’t stop Seb from churning out one of our most exciting updates yet; the new Weirdly 30second quiz generator. Seriously, this thing is awesome and we weren’t alone in thinking it. We even got this totally unsolicited, unbiased feedback from on of our adoring fans.
"Even if I wasn't married to you, I'd still think this was the coolest shit I've ever seen" - honest feedback on our new quiz builder.
— Weirdly (@WeirdlyHub) July 21, 2015
Seriously though, it’s cool and it garnered us heaps of signups. Great joint UX-effort by the whole team but it's not the end; We’re launching stage one of another HUGE feature this week too so stay tuned!
And that’s it. One week down, five more to go! Click below if you'd like to talk to someone about integrating Weirdly into your process.
