Here. we. go. One year of these bulletins is done. I went back to the first one, and oh boi did I have more hair there.
ArbTask
In November, we focused on the business side of ArbTask a bit more. It started by me begging for a business partner to join ArbTask on Venture Arena stage. There were few new connections that I made through the event and many more old ones I reconnected with.
The main goal was to find somebody to work with me, though, and so far, most of the meetings either didn’t happen or fizzle out.
With the getting partner to go with the outgoing sales kinda route the plan B is to try few more of the inbound kinda strategies.
First up, we tried a simple low-budget Google Ads campaign. That somewhat works in driving people to the website, but leads to no bookings of the demo.
So one transition we did was to change the Call-To-Action button on the arbtask.com website from “Book a demo” to “Try now”. So instead of submitting a form the visitor can get straight to the tool. I’ve also build a system that sends me an email on new signup so I can follow-up with that person.
This already feels like a way better approach as I got notified about two users in the first week or so, and that was after we stopped the Google ads campaign. We will refine it some more and probably try again.
One last thing related to ArbTask this month was the continued discussions with the great folks in the Philippines. When I was over there meeting Allan John Garsuta for the first time, I sent bunch of emails to interesting organisations.
One of these threads led me to Christian Jake Geonzon with whom we had more talks on the topic of bringing ArbTask to the Philippines markets. This might be quite fun initiative, so I can’t wait to see how that develops 🙂
End of something great
We had the final event related to the Scaleup Launchpad Program. This time we went to Helsinki to join the Slush event while also going through the final workshop and we said farewell to the other friends/companies that were in the program.
Not only did I have fun times participating, but Beaver Codes actually grew quite significantly. If you are curious there is a bit of a retrospective video interview for more interactive vibe.
But to sum up, I believe we grew 30% revenue-wise, and the team went from just me to 2 full-time people, and as stated above, looking to expand that even more.
The slush event itself was nice. Although as I am more of a bootstraper that isn’t looking for funding, I was not exactly the target audience. Especially cool to bump into more Czech startup folks out of all places 🙂 Some talks with David Novak made a bit melancholic about my university city of Brno!
Other
- We’ve got another climbing video edited after a long pause.
- Part of our Google Reviews app flow, we sometimes scrape reviews from Google sites. They have implemented some anit-bot measures that I spend time getting around 🙂
- In the Czech e-commrce AUKRO integration we continue pushing forward. Now we have 4 tester accounts and stuff is starting to be pretty stable. One example edge case I was looking into is that one of the testers changed their credentials that our integration is using which caused a wave of angry automated messages from my monitoring. So I’ve added a nice warning screen for the user and made the webhook handlers more understanding.
- I realised Beaver Codes website has actually strong domain authority, which I am not taking advantage of. So I will start again duplicating the bulletin there in hopes that the links will help the SEO for projects I mention here.