I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode
This is what happens when you ban yourself from coding
Let’s set the stage:
The Lagree Buddy app has enough quality features that this is an actual, useful thing that I feel comfortable promoting & charging money for.
There are more features I want to build, but they’re bigger features and are still weeks from releasing (because I need to QA them in the real world).
Since the hard paywall and overhauled onboarding (discussed here), there has been a noticeable increase in purchases (woohoo! see chart below)
Given the information above, I figured I should try an experiment.
What if I spent every business hour on marketing/distribution instead of coding and building more features?
That felt so uncomfortable to even say out loud because it meant spending a week on social media and talking to people about the app. But it also meant not hiding inside the code.
So here’s a detailed (but slightly stream of consciousness) recap of how that week went.
Day 1 || Monday, August 25th
If any influencers out there want to give me some tips on how to IG correctly, please do. But my current thought process is to craft a story arc for one day. And then to break that arc into 4-6 posts, to be posted every 3 hours or so.
I do this because I don’t want it to feel salesy or spammy. So I at least inject some sort of narrative. So today’s story arc was:
Working on new feature at home, but oh no! it’s broken!
Thought I fixed it and took it to class, but oh no! still broken!
I found out why it was broken, explained it, and took it into another class …
FIXED.
FIXED 2.
FIXED 3.
I also spent the day reaching out to new studios & trainers I saw wearing Apple Watches. Sent out 10 today and got 2 responses.
Day 2 || Tuesday, August 26th
I bought a Microformer last week, so let’s use the thing for some content!
I signed up for Lagreeing at Home, found an instructor with an Apple Watch, snapped a lot of photos, and got busy creating and scheduling another story arc.
I almost immediately got a response from Lagreeing at Home about collabing, and I’d have to say… that’s a pretty big win. Lagreeing at Home was born out of the pandemic and has been an incredible presence in the Lagree community, so hearing some affirmation from them is a fantastic feeling.
I wanted to do more cold DM’s to studios and trainers today, too, but sometimes the Apple Gods say “try again tomorrow” (wheel of death! see below).
Day 3 || Wednesday, August 27th
It’s only been two days, but I’ve been struggling with the actual creation of content itself. Struggling might be the wrong word… underestimate? I underestimated the amount of work it takes!
I planned everything out on Monday. But then you have to obviously create the stuff, and all of that takes so long! So today, today is going to be an FAQ series. But the question is how to create it creatively so it’s not just social media slop.
And after playing with a basic Q&A and not liking how it looked (aka ugly and sales-y) ... I went hunting on Reddit and found this incredible tool (Postfully) to create fake text messages and came up with this for my Q&A instead:
Day 4 || Thursday, August 28th
I signed up for THE Sebastian Lagree’s class on Sunday. Three reasons why:
I want to show him the app in person
I’m running out of content and I need some photos of a new studio 😅
I’m getting sick of social media and wanted to do something in real life loll
I needed a break from creating content, so I cheated and repurposed my IG stories into TikTok videos. But I didn’t want to give up on my mission, so I fell back on cold messaging studios and trainers.
Getting any response is a nice feeling, but this message back from new studio Hold Fitness was incredible! She saw my original post on Reddit from 6 months ago!
Day 5 || Friday, August 29th
I am absolutely ITCHING to get back to the code!!
But I am trying to stick to my mission for the week and am racking my brain on what content to come up without sounding repetitive or spammy. Thank goodness I went to class yesterday and took a bunch of b-roll footage because an idea quickly formed that felt different enough from everything before it this week.
This might have been the hardest day to stick to this challenge. Because everything inside of me was screaming:
“CAN WE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET OFF OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE LIKE BUILD MORE FEATURES.”
But the thing that I had to constantly remind myself of is that this is productive.
Build it and they will come is a fallacy.
You have to tell people about the damn thing. It just doesn’t feel productive because you’re over here churning and burning things that feel like they have a shelf-life of 24 hours (if even that). And sending out cold DM’s and hoping for 1 or 2 responses.
Day 6 || Saturday, August 30th
Day of rest.
Sorry, not sorry.
But I did not code, so the challenge is still intact.
Day 7 || Sunday August 31th
Sebastian Lagree day!!
I drove to Brentwood to take a class from SEBASTIAN LAGREE himself. I was pretty nervous because I wasn’t sure if he was going to think my app was stupid or if it was weird, but he honestly couldn’t have been nicer.
He’s also an insanely good instructor, which seems obvious, but when you only see someone on IG as an “influencer”, you’re not entirely sure what to expect.
But his class was f-ing legit. But be warned, it may or may not be 60 minutes long 😂. Most classes I’ve taken are 45 minutes, but if you like to get there early (like I do), he will start the class early and end the class late and have you BURNING. My max HR hit 172, and I was sore for a week.
It was excellent.
I also had an entire plan of going home and editing/posting the content from this day, but like I said, I was sore for a week. So, the immediate aftermath of this class was me just lying down on the couch. No content was edited, posted, or thought about for the rest of the day loll.
Footnote: Because I’m always looking at people’s wrists for Apple Watches in class now, I couldn’t help but notice the lady next to me. Most people wear a fitness tracker in class or nothing at all. But this lady next to me was rocking this:
End of Week Results & Takeaways
Cold DMs actually work (sometimes). I sent maybe 30-40 messages total and got 4-5 meaningful responses. That's not amazing, but it's infinitely better than the zero responses you get when you never reach out at all.
Marketing opens doors that code never could. Sebastian seeing my app in person matters more than any feature I could have shipped that week. You can't build your way into someone's awareness - you have to actually show up.
You can't analytics your way to relationships. The numbers didn't move (see chart below), but the connections did. Having Lagreeing at Home and Sebastian Lagree be aware of the app and the person behind the app should pay dividends in the future.
Content creation is way harder than I thought. As an engineer, I assumed making an Instagram story would take 10 minutes. Turns out creating something that doesn't look like garbage takes a couple of hours. And doing it daily? Forget about it. I planned a whole week of content on Monday and ended up creating everything day-of because I completely underestimated the work involved.
