🚨 Exciting News 🚨
After a few months working FT on Failory...
I've recently joined
@withdaydreamco
to lead growth and our clients' pSEO acquisition channels 📈
+ I'm moving to from Argentina to SF as soon as I get my Visa 🇺🇸
Here's why I joined:
🥳 Today, January 8th, 2024, is the first day ever working FT on Failory.
I finished university in mid-Dec and decided I'd dedicate FT to the project.
The goal for 2024: Make the best newsletter for startup founders.
WTF is wrong with
@webflow
?
They're forcing me to pay $15,000/year, up from $468!
A 32x price increase overnight!
And they gave me 1 week to decide if I want to upgrade or move the whole Failory site to another CMS!!
🤯 This thing Stripe does is crazy to me…
They send personalized gifts to their customers when they achieve certain milestones 🎁
I spent a few hours researching about how this worked.
Here’s what I found:
I'm sure Webflow knows this is an abusive practice.
I've already asked 5 times to the sales rep to share pricing and timeline details over email.
She said, "No because you'll tweet about it" 😂
It doesn't feel like even
@webflow
believes their pricing is fair.
@webflow
This is an abusive practice.
It's not easy to migrate to another CMS. They know they have you trapped inside.
Then, they downgrade their pricing plans, as they've recently done, and force you to pay for their Enterprise features.
Bandwidth was not a limit when I created
WTF is wrong with
@webflow
?
They're forcing me to pay $15,000/year, up from $468!
A 32x price increase overnight!
And they gave me 1 week to decide if I want to upgrade or move the whole Failory site to another CMS!!
🚀 I'm working on Failory's
#1
online course, launching on September 30th.
It's called "Pre-Sell to Validate". It's about strategies to validate startup ideas by pre-selling them.
And yeah... I'm pre-selling the course as well. You can get it here 👇
Launching my personal website 🥳
Built with
@NotionHQ
and
@super_
(what a great tool, btw).
I'll be writing short articles every day throughout the whole year. The first 4 posts are already published 👇
I've just followed
@harrydry
's step-by-step landing page guide (on
@GoodMarketingHQ
) to re-design and re-write
@hellofailory
's product-market fit eBook page.
Here's the process 👇
I have to move out of
@webflow
quickly.
What CMS should I move to? I'm hearing suggestions.
I don't think
@framer
is an option, unfortunately, cause they also have really tight bandwidth limits.
Maybe something custom built?
WTF is wrong with
@webflow
?
They're forcing me to pay $15,000/year, up from $468!
A 32x price increase overnight!
And they gave me 1 week to decide if I want to upgrade or move the whole Failory site to another CMS!!
🥳 Today, January 8th, 2024, is the first day ever working FT on Failory.
I finished university in mid-Dec and decided I'd dedicate FT to the project.
The goal for 2024: Make the best newsletter for startup founders.
November open report for
@hellofailory
💵 Revenue: $3,961 (+87.02%)
💳 Expenses: $1,202
👁️ Pageviews: 175,281
✉️ New email subscribers: 225
Here are some more details 👇
Working from a Cafe today:
🎨 Improving Failory's
@passionfrootxyz
sponsors page
📑 Creating a database to track the performance of each newsletter issue
📩 Improving our
@beehiiv
welcome and re-engagement automations
✉️ Finding potential sponsors for the newsletter
🚀 I'm starting a new startup along with my brother.
It's a productized headhunting service, connecting Argentinian talent with startups.
And I'm building in public in this thread 👇
All gifts are extremely personalized, having references to each customer’s life and company.
A perfect example of Paul Graham’s concept of “doing things that don’t scale.”
🧪 SEO experiment I'm running (using Lean SEO's framework, by
@thepatwalls
):
1) "Failed startups in {PLACE}"
2) "Failed {INDUSTRY} startups"
Actually, I can't believe we don't have these pages on
@hellofailory
yet.
🚨 Launch alert!
After 4 weeks of work, I've just launched
@hellofailory
v3.
It's a complete re-design plus a new project: the Amazon Cemetery, where we analyze Amazon's failures.
It's live on Product Hunt 🚀
🤯 This thing
@beehiiv
does is crazy to me...
Every quarter, the Beehiiv partner with the highest number of referrals gets an all-paid trip to a beach destination 🏖️
I spent a few hours researching why they do this.
Here's what I found:
@paulg
First time founder = focus 90% on product/research
Second time founder = focus 90% on talking to customers/marketing/sales
Long hours only pay off if you're focusing on the right thing
I've never seen a better onboarding than
@lunchmoney_app
's one.
▫️ Great UX
▫️ Descriptive images
▫️ Friendly tone
▫️ Asks just the right amount of information
▫️ Suggests inputs
Congrats
@lunchbag
!
.
@perplexity_ai
has launched it's pSEO strategy: Pages.
They allow all of their uses generate content pages around any topic, using AI, web sources, images, etc.
According to
@ahrefs
, they have 466 pages already indexed, getting them 43.5K org. users/mo 🤯
🤯 Amazing numbers in today's
@hellofailory
's newsletter!
Recent improvements that have led to growing open and click rates by 100%:
▫️ Moving to
@ConvertKit
.
▫️ New email format, with more text & links.
▫️ Focusing on building relationships.
▫️ Limiting to one sponsor.
I spent the last week analyzing how startups like Shopify, Zapier, and Gusto are using Programmatic SEO.
I broke down their process into 4 steps.
Thread 🧵
This is crazy 🤯
@webflow
has updated their pricing plans to charge $60/mo for 100GB more of bandwidth.
Cloudflare is charging them $10/mo for the same.
@nicocerdeira
@webflow
Most of the things that webflow charges for costs them almost nothing. Bandwidth being the exception here.
Since all the pages that webflow creates are static files, they most likely store them on a CDN.
We can run some comparisions to find the upcharge
Webflow charges
@mrwebreviews
@webflow
Yeah, I learned it the hard way.
@webflow
used to be a cool company. It seems like their abusive business practices started with recent fundrising.
I literally don’t need any of those features other than bandwidth.
It’s crazy to me to have to upgrade to a 32x times more expensive plan only for bandwidth!
My wife and I shut down our startup 6 months ago ❌
After 5 years of bootstrapping 💪
And it was one of the hardest times in our lives 😢
But then we got a surprise from
@stripe
in the mail 👀
A custom book telling our whole story 😳
And it helped us find closure 💙🥲
Just found a gem 💎!
With the whole Webflow thing, I was thinking that there had to be some place with real quotes from all opaque-pricing SaaS vendors.
Then I came across this great site launched only 3 months ago, which is doing exactly this.
4/ Expenses
▫️ PayPal fees: $95
▫️ Gumroad: $165
▫️ Freelancers: $794
▫️
@thepatwalls
's SEO course: $79
▫️
@jackbutcher
's Permissionless Apprentice course: $34
▫️ Other: $35
I'm young so I can (and I do) re-invest all Failory's revenues again into the project.
2/
Shopify has created 26 Engineering as Marketing projects, which you can find on their /tools page.
One of these projects is a "Business name generator". It is ranking pretty well for thousands of keywords.
It's built 100% without code.
I used
@webflow
,
@Jetboostio
(what a great tool, btw!),
@placidapp
,
@typeform
, and
@zapier
.
I had some holidays so I was able to dedicate full-time to it and managed to get it built from scratch in less than 4 weeks.
.
@perplexity_ai
has launched it's pSEO strategy: Pages.
They allow all of their uses generate content pages around any topic, using AI, web sources, images, etc.
According to
@ahrefs
, they have 466 pages already indexed, getting them 43.5K org. users/mo 🤯
1/
First, some definitions:
- Programmatic SEO: Programmatically generating hundreds of pages from a set of data, focused on different long-tail keywords.
- Engineering as Marketing: Building a stand-alone product or service to attract potential customers to your business.
Yesterday, I launched Failory’s second weekly email. It’s called Behind Tactics 🧠.
Every week, I’ll break down a specific tactic from a startup.
With two emails per week, this means I’ve doubled our ad inventory. For February, this means I’ve doubled our ad revenue 💰
I feel like the new newsletter feature on Twitter profiles can have an incredibly high conversion rate, mainly because:
1) It's really new which means it draws profile visitors' attention
2) It's frictionless to subscribe
I'll track its performance during the following 30 days.
I just published a 3,000-word guide detailing a 3-step process to do Side Project Marketing.
Startups like Ahrefs, Shopify, and Hubspot are using this strategy and getting thousands of customers per month.
Every time someone subscribes to
@hellofailory
's newsletter, he/she receives an email with three questions:
1) Who are you?
2) What are you working in?
3) What's your
#1
business obstacle right now?
It's an incredible way to really understand who are our users.
Two ways in which you can apply something like this:
1) Celebrate customer milestones:
Add a notification in your CRM for when a customer reaches a key milestone.
Send them a personalized gift, video, or message congratulating them.
@jmitch
@webflow
Yeah I know that but:
- If you want to move to another no-code CMS like Framer, you have to build everything from scratch.
- If you want to build to something custom, you still need to hire someone to build a solution that integrates the CMS with the rest of the site's code.
🚀 I'm starting a new startup along with my brother.
It's a productized headhunting service, connecting Argentinian talent with startups.
And I'm building in public in this thread 👇
When validating startup ideas, you must be careful with the "niceness gap".
This gap is caused by the people who will tell you they love your idea and want to buy it, but then disappear when it's time to pay.
Read
@robfitz
's "The Mom Test" to learn how to deal with it.
Monday is the only startup I've seen billboards from in Argentina.
In 2020, they spent 95% of their revenue in ads. I'm writing a
@hellofailory
issue on why (being sent tomorrow).
🤔 Question...
Are there any other startups employing such big OOH advertising campaigns?
While
@hellofailory
's organic traffic was hit by Google Core Web Vitals update, these two Programmatic SEO projects keep growing in terms of clicks and impressions, already bringing +500 users/day.
How to run a business while in college:
▫️ Be super goal-oriented when deciding what to work in. Have few goals.
▫️ Focus on strategy. Delegate the day-to-day running, by recording videos explaining how you do the tasks.
▫️ Reject 99% of collaborations, partnerships, etc.
@geertjansloos
@webflow
It's worse than that.
I've referred multiple clients to
@webflow
both through Failory's blog and consulting work I've done.
Now I feel bad they'll all go through this at some point 😅
10/
If you're interested in reading further about how startups are using Programmatic SEO and how you can copy them, here's a 3,000-word guide I wrote.
👇👇👇
🤯 EquityZen, a marketplace for trading shares of pre-IPO companies, has programmatically created thousands of pages that:
- Rank for 80k+ organic keywords.
- Generate them 150k+ organic traffic per month.
All of these pages have the same style: “[Buy/Sell] [Company] Stock”
Programmatic SEO is amazing.
We came up with a content idea with lots of articles to be created within it.
We created 3 articles in less than 2 hours, published them on Failory, and waited one month.
These were the results. Not it's time to scale the project!
In 2023, media startup The Messenger generated $3M in revenue.
In that time, they spent $8M (!!!) in office space
Including a 42k-SF office on this well-known building at 195 Broadway, NY.
The startup shut down last week.
I did some research and found 5 crazy things...
🌟 Today we're launching the largest collection of startup pitch decks... +350 of them!
A lot can be learned from these startups' copywriting strategies, design hacks, and data presentation techniques.
7/ December plans:
▫️ Finish university exams.
▫️ Launch a new website design.
▫️ Launch the Amazon Cemetery, a collection of Amazon-owned products/startups that have shut down.
▫️ Keep working on Failory's blog.
▫️ Think about Failory's next digital product.
And that's it 👍
9/
Wrapping up:
1) Find a head term (1-2 hours)
2) Analyze the head term (15-30 minutes)
3) Launch a validation test (2-3 hours)
4) Wait one month
5) Collect data to scale the project (10+ hours)
6) Programmatically create the pages (2-4 hours)
Travel data startup Journera shut down yesterday 💀
It had raised $36M since its founding in 2016
Founder said the use cases of their platform "couldn’t bubble up to be the highest priority” of their clients
= No PMF
34% of startups fail due to lack of PMF (
@hellofailory
) 🔥
🤯 This thing Stripe does is crazy to me…
They send personalized gifts to their customers when they achieve certain milestones 🎁
I spent a few hours researching about how this worked.
Here’s what I found:
Failory's newsletter referral program was launched today (cc
@SparkLoopHQ
) and we're already starting to see some referrals! 🥳
1st reward after referring 3 friends: Access to our exclusive monthly newsletter where we deeply analyze one startup failure.
It's been a rough year for startups 🥵
I've analyzed 30+ failed startups on Failory this year.
Three common themes I see:
1) CleanTech & HealthTech are suffering a lot
2) Startups are struggling to secure new funding
3) Having sustainable growth is now more important
The rate at which US start-ups are going bust is more than seven times higher than in 2019, threatening millions of jobs and risking spillover to the wider economy.
A little bit late but...
January's report for
@hellofailory
▫️ Revenue: $1,887
▫️ Expenses: $219
▫️ Profit: $1,668 (-12%)
▫️ Pageviews: 193,708 (+9%)
▫️ Email subscribers: 7,880 (+96)
Here are some more details 👇
For the past 4 months, I've been doing Programmatic SEO for this
@withdaydreamco
's client.
The results: 40K monthly organic users (and growing fast!)
The power of Programmatic SEO 🚀
Excited to announce our first case study with a daydream customer 🤩
In the last 4 months, we’ve increased OpenArt’s monthly visits by 40K 🚀, here's exactly how we did it:
@trends_vc
is one of those newsletters you can't wait to open.
Getting
@DruRly
to consult me on Failory, on the side, has been one of my best business decision
Hadn't been because of him, Failory's PMF eBook would have never been launched!
🚀 Launching today in Failory a collection of +750 unicorn companies.
Filter by country, city, industry, valuation, funding, amount of founders, and more.
@DruRly
@passionfrootxyz
@beehiiv
It is! And the same table we sat on 😁
I’m optimizing for engagement of the sub. I want to explain them who I am, what’s Failory, what are some of our best resources, and what they can expect from me.
This works because:
- It builds strong relationships between Stripe and its customers.
- Stripe gets exposure in social networks.
- Stripe gets to show they care about their customers → Everyone gets to love Stripe.
Failory's
#1
acquisition is done 🥳
@usePhoenixDown
is merging with our site and
@danidiez_
is joining me to work on Failory!
The merge made sense as both of our projects have the same mission: make learning from entrepreneurial failures possible.