week 7: testing and building

Dear board, first of all - thanks for making the time.

This week has been great.

Version two is starting to take form, and should be ready within a week or so.

We are in a phase where we’ve been focusing on retention, which means that there have not come a lot of new users this week, but we are not losing many either.

Our daily open rate has continued above 70% which is almost 2x the industry standard. The other day, our open rate was 81.5%.

The pitch

On Tuesday I’m pitching Jared to a Danish investor, and I am looking forward to it.

I like pitching, and I’m curious to hear what he thinks about Jared.

It was also a good exercise for me to stitch together our pitch deck. It forces you to take a step back and look at what you’ve achieved, and the potential that is there.

It gave some fuel to the fire.

If we are being offered any money, and/or decide to take them they’ll be used to hire a part- or full-time developer to help Frederik move the needle faster.

And, also to experiment more with paid channels and user acquisition.

But the product is still the main priority.

Product updates

We’ve had a lot of requests from users wanting to change their interests, and this will be possible with version two within the next few weeks.

A marketing experiment

I’ve been experimenting with organic Reddit growth hacking this week.

Turns out is not that easy to go all-in on Reddit with a new account, since there are a lot of restrictions to what and how much you can do when you are just starting out.

The strategy was simple; find relevant posts related to problems with news consumption in today’s world, and share Jared in an natural way.

It’s gonna be a longer process to test since I’m restricted in my output, so I’ll keep going. If you have any experience growth-hacking on Reddit I’d love to hear from you.

Our numbers this week