The sales acceleration project has been a real flop.

BIGF Method

My biggest effort was on the BIGF Method and it did not really pay much: one extra paying customer and only 26 free customers.

I reached out to my contacts, got a post about my ideation method published in Spain, run ads on Quora and Google…

There are a few factors to consider for this flop:

  • The original landing page that I contracted via Fiverr did not work at all. Too much text to read, it was hard to get what BIGF is about. I later edited it and still it got now sign ups via ads, which makes me fear that…
  • … I’m preaching in the desert and there’s no real interest about it. There are a lot of people asking for new business ideas to be given to them, but maybe there are too few interested in doing the work needed to come up with their own.
  • My energy and motivation are low. I’ve been struggling with this since the summer and it is not getting better. Part of it is linked to the change of season, but I think that it mostly comes from not finding anything that works (too many commercial flops?), not having a business challenge that motivates me more.
  • I suck at scheduling and taking into account festivities, visits, kids and myself getting sick… Still, better to have a tight deadline than an easy deadline.

I should not be outsourcing copywriting, it is my thing.

I could not run Facebook Ads because it took me weeks to figure out how to add all my pixels to my ads account from the business manager. They have done some interface changes that made the help pages irrelevant. I’m happy I’ve managed and that I will be able to run more tests with them in the future. So far my best ads experience is with Google.

Coworking courses

I did not really work on the promotion of the coworking courses (which is related to my lack of motivation). Some signups are trickling in for the free coworking course, but only one person has signed up in the last couple months for the coworking community course. At least that person has helped me debug some issues with Stripe (who suddenly stopped taking payments) and the forum and social plugins for the students.

In view of the interactions with my Coworking Handbook social media and of a previous test in running evergreen posts multiple times, I’ve set up a queue of about 150 posts to run on a loop and help the people that are really engaging with my social media: those that are discovering coworking and that have just started looking into the business.

My biggest issue in this area has been Mailchimp freezing my account because a lot of spam bots where signing up. I had to uninstall a plugin that I was using to make all posts available as a free PDF download, which was responsible for 98% of the signups and the trouble. I also set up the list to send a confirmation email, added recaptchas a gogo, and timed the welcome message so that it will come one hour later than any download.

It took me a few weeks to solve this because of Google deciding that the email with the response to my appeal was spam… Too bad that info was not displayed in the Mailchimp website. They should at least say that a response has been sent to email instead of leaving the same message that you get when you submit your appeal about them replying when they can.

The interactions with them have been great though, and they are really good at helping understand what’s going on and how to fix it.

Life goals OKR

On top of the previous two, I also tried to move forward with a non announced challenge to track my life goals using OKR. I did have a really nice conversation with Javier Martin (OKR expert) which has been really helpful. I have a first draft of the tracking spreadsheet but I’m struggling with the more personal objectives, like being a great husband and father. The few things that came to mind my wife took down because I’m basically doing them (which is good! 🙂 )

Next: Olympic Pistol Time

One of the things that came out during my Mastermind hot chair was that the other entrepreneurs thought I should spend more time and effort on my olympic pistol website. This is a niche that interests me a lot, where I can help a lot and have an impact while placing the blog as a worldwide reference. I’m already making some money with the Target Shooting Journal and getting great feedback.

Ideally, I should make enough revenue from this site and related publications to pay for my sport (coaching, competitions, equipment…) and they will help me become a better shooter and one day become a coach. The most expensive and thrilling part of shooting sports are the competitions, followed by coaching (there’s a coach I want to work with but I can’t really afford it now).

The focus is going to be in these areas (in no particular order, they come directly from my BIGF Sheet):

  1. Registration service for competitions.
  2. Pistol training exercises book.
  3. Pistol Coaches Directory.
  4. Map and contact possible sponsors.
  5. Publish more content.
  6. Poster with degrees and measures to help find shooting position for pistol shooters.

There’s a lot in this list, but I think that being related it should not be too hard to juggle. I will start with the coaches directory, the content, and the sponsors. Then I’ll move to the registration app (I’ve already started asking around how to do it), the book, and the poster (which I will try to outsource). I won’t be able to finish the app and the book, but I should be able to get the work started, figure out how to do it and make a rough draft.

Another thing I have to do is evaluate the first year of the challenge. This is not a priority for this month, so it is in my to-dos but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it.

Deadline

November 13.

Expected results

  1. Mapped and contacted marketing departments of main manufacturers.
  2. Published coaches directory and reached out to get more coaches to sign up.
  3. Published four new useful articles / pages and promote them.
  4. Poster outsourced and on sale via my Gumroad and olympicpistol.com.
  5. Chose how to do the registration app and what to do as MVP.
  6. Drafted book with structure, found more sources (I have already done a lot of research).

If you can help me with any of these it would be greatly appreciated 🙂