Before anything is launched, the most important aspect of your product needs to be put under the microscope - your onboarding.
Open incognito and sign up for Slack, Hubspot and Helpscout Mailchimp and other companies that have spent millions on onboarding, and take screenshots of every step.
Place all those screenshots into a Figma board and match the companies together to see where they differ.
Make sure you check the forgot password flows, make sure returning users can access the product quickly, and don't forget to keep the magic link you send them in email valid for more then 24 hours.
Check out Alex Garcia for tips on what content to put into your onboarding flow to maximize your CTR.
Intercom is very expensive and still the first product we put on every venture. Why? It solves the very simple problem of communicating with your customers in the app and on the website. More importantly, the developers never complain about integrating it. We have over 8 intercom accounts - 4 of them are the companies only CRM.
Enable the chatbot in both the front facing website and send your developers the snippet to put into your application for your users. Your communication should be open for about 18 hours a day.
You want customers asking questions here instead of email because you can see which browser they are on, what pages they have visited, and most importantly if they are paying customers or not. All out of the box.
You want to get paid right? You also don't want to piss of developers that just built the product for x months? Well, then connect Stripe. Make someone in your company the "expert" at creating products, coupons, and make sure that person can talk code - so that the developers don't throw your PM out the window for asking "Why does it matter what the spelling is of the product name?"
For Day 1, you do not need to write any code. Just connect your payment flow to your checkout link on Stripe. Create a checkout link for each product. Then ask a developer to connect a successful payment to enabling their account access. Should be completed before your launch.
Verify you own your domain with Google Search Console. This is probably the most important step as you are launching a product on the internet and people are looking for products like yours every day. Be sure to connect the domain to capture both your main domain and any sub domains you have created.
Google Analytics allows you to track and understand your customer's behavior, user experience, online content, device functionality and more. Whether you have an eCommerce site or an informative site, you want to understand the behavior of your visitors to deliver better results.
Things you need to learn about Google Analytics?
I am personally checking google analytics more than Stripe for any of our startups. It tells a better story at a glance. Who is visiting today, where are they coming from and how many conversions happened today.
This is new to our toolbelt and has quickly changed our advertising strategy. This tool pays for itself, so purchase it even if you are on a low budget. There are hundreds of videos by Sam Oh which are a pleasure to watch and can teach you how the internet works.
Microsoft trades about 19M shares a day, every day, on average. They do not trade 300 today and 2B tomorrow. The theory of large numbers and regression to the mean both explain why tomorrow about 19M people will trade a Microsoft stock.
The same truths are with your SEO traffic. People are cows and search the same thing day in and day out. Your goal should be to intercept those searches with your product. When you do, you live there, forever. (Until your competitor kicks you out.)
When you look up any successful company, which you can in Ahrefs, you will see slow steady growth - year after year.
Managing Social Media for a new company you just launched is painful. You have no traction, no followers, and really no feedback loop. More importantly, thinking about posting smart content every day is last on your list.
We now use Planable. We have a team member, intern, or Upwork hire manage the account and post as required. The feature that sets Planable apart is the approval process that means the founder just has to read and approve a weeks worth of content in one sitting.
If your creating a software product there are a thousand different ways you need to protect your users and yourself. Iubenda has all thousand options and you check through a list of what your product does. By the end you have a nice T & C that you can paste to your website in less then 10 minutes. More importantly, with a few more clicks you get a privacy policy.
This is the last step and the most important and it used to take hours. With Ahrefs you and your web developer can do it in 20 minutes. After creating an account go to Site Audit and run a new crawl. Ahrefs will list out every change that is needed for your website including broken links and random pages you forgot about. We have over 378 pages for Altar and are working through this list every week as new support articles and blogs are written. People make mistakes, links become broken, Ahrefs is the simplest way to track them.
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I am writing about 20 ways to build your digital venture the right way in 90 days.
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