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Part 6: It's a lot harder than I expected

It's been months since I wrote and I'd like to apologise for the silence. I have no excuse besides that its freaking hard! Everything's much harder than I thought it would be and here I was thinking there wasn't a punch I couldn't take. 

What distinguishes a startup from traditional businesses is growth. A business can be profitable and all, but if it's not growing rapidly then it's not really a startup. So with that in mind, I built the foundation which is Asaqeni, a web platform to link aspiring entrepreneurs with useful startup tools. Since I'm starting from a zero-budget, my plan was to get users via organic means such as SEO, social media and blog posts.

I started with LinkedIn since it's the network for professionals. After about 4 or so months, we're still stuck at 7 followers.(What are you laughin' at? #angryFace) Facebook is also a great starting point, considering I have close to 1000 friends on the platform.  However the page is stuck at about 36 followers. Instagram is the one showing some signs of life with about 26 users, but the difference is most of those are organic.

Needless to say, I'm not a fan of the marketing part of the job, but I do understand that it comes with the territory. My good friend, did offer to pay for ads, but I've been somewhat reluctant to take him up on that offer. Mainly because I want to achieve product market fit before I flood the media channels. I also feel any paid growth at this stage would be misleading.

However all of this is intended to get traffic to the site. The more visitors we get, the more money we can make, so the one metric I'm concerned with is Monthly active users. All of those social media channels are meant to feed into that metric. So on that front, we aren't doing too bad. Yes, it could be better but its decent. At the time of writing we have reached a total of 299 users. In my head I expected us to be at around 10k by now



Maybe because my first app took off on it's own, I underestimated the whole process and took a lot of things for granted. I have however been more thorough in laying the groundwork. I believe I've done a stellar job on SEO, and despite the lacklustre showing on social media, I've done more than I thought I would. So it all gets frustrating when I post and then when I check my analytics dashboard I realize there hasn't been any movement. Just to be fair, we've also gone after some very difficult keywords e.g. start a business etc. Thought I'd put that out there.

The metrics are important because they are my greatest indicator of traction. The numbers, and in particular the growth rate, will determine whether this is viable or not. If decide to go it all alone, or choose to bring on-board an investor those numbers are still necessary and they are the basis for the decisions I'll make.

I believe another cause of my frustration is the disconnect between the romanticized startup stories where companies become unicorns in months and my current situation. I have no doubt that I'm on track, but it is the rate at which we are moving that concerns me.

This has also been a stark reminder that I'm definitely no Superman- as hard as that may be to believe. I need a team to help me grow this baby. Hiring in a startup is a bit more different than from conventional businesses. The main difference is that at this stage my biggest bargaining chip is equity. Anyone coming onboard will get a chunk of the company and so I have to be careful who I choose to get in bed with. I've been doing a lot of research in that area, and while I'm confident I have a decent understanding of how to go about it... I'm still a bit nervous.


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