Ever stuck for what to write or what marketing to do to grow your project?
I have hand written a question prompt for every question you need to answer to engage new users and customers. One question delivered to you every day, and all the tools to share your answer and build your audience.
I was a designer > Marketer > CMO > CEO.
Now I write and illustrate children's books with various publishers.
But then of course I started seeing gaps and issues in the process, so now my side project from illustrating for kids is a marketing platform for the more creatively minded :)
https://www.getlouderlines.com/artists/
Hi HN, I have been working with this company and developed this service as a skunkworks project within the team.
It is free a daily email alert to notify e-commerce businesses if there are delays with shipping and delivery.
It tracks issues with Carriers, Traffic, Borders, Strikes and weather and alerts shop owners and customer service.
Just the UK and Europe are being covered at the moment but I am hoping to expand that pretty quickly.
Future plans would be better personalisation so you can choose just the areas and carriers that affect you and also a feed so you can integrate it with your own support systems.
I would be quite technical.
I have a bare bones setup that does not satisfy all my needs.
BUT!
This is because I constantly have to weigh up the time and cost to implement and set up each piece of tech.
Time and money that is being taken away from sales and marketing activities.
I would suggest that non tech people are making similar choices.
I honestly beleive taking this approach puts you at an advantage and a better chance of success. Everyone else has done the ground work for you and educated the market. Just do not be worse than them and you have a good business.
Isn't it crazy, you spend so many years training and building your experience to become great at your job. So much so that you get rewarded with a promotion to management. A position you are given no training for. It is a hard transition and most people have difficulty with it.
First of all, congrats on the promotion.
You need to ask yourself, was coding what made you leap out of bed in the morning or was it that you were building something?
If it was coding then you need to go back to your old role. Please repeat to yourself this is not a failure despite what popular media and the start-up bro culture tells you. If you find a job and role that you love you are beating 90% of the workforce and win at life!
If it was building then you might still be able to make this CTO role work, just in a different way than you are used to.
Forget about technology, you are now a people manager. People are now your tools to build something. Fighting fires and dealing with everyone's crap is usually a sign of some kind of micromanagement. Have you placed yourself in the middle of everyone's decision making process? Are you their road bock for getting stuff done? This is often a result of giving your team tasks to do instead of goals.
Activities describe how people spend their time, whereas goals are the results that they seek.
Give each team member a goal and some kind of structure on how they can make their own decisions to achieve their goal. For example you can tell everyone any decision that takes less then half a day to implement they can decide. Anything that takes more time than that they should discuss with you.
Your goal is to set their goal and then get out of their way. You need to run interference between them and distractions from other parts of the company. Check in with them regularly to mentor and coach them to achieve their goal.
Can you empower team leads below yourself to do some of the mundane management?
When I worked for a performance management company I posted this over on Quora on goal setting. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-goal-an...
Setting a goal changes the conversation from them coming to you with problems to coming to you with ideas and solutions.
One lesson I learnt when dealing with other managers, departments and up the line is that you have to over communicate. Everyone is mad busy in a start up and they will not remember what you discussed and all agreed last month. You almost need to market yourself, your team, goals and achievements to get their buy in. Run some regular workshops to get further buy in from them.
Your depression may stem from the feeling that you are not doing a good job more than the role itself so keep that in mind.
I have gone through the painful transition myself from doer to manager and I have made all the mistakes :) Design and marketing is my area, not tech.
Happy to answer any questions you might have alan at spoiltchild.com
We all study for years, gain great experience in various jobs, and if we are good enough, we get promoted... to a role we were never trained for and have little experience of.
Some of us make better managers than others. Some make it while others go back to their old role.
But management skills can be learned. We put together this tool to rate your leadership skills and spit out a customised report with advice on how to tackle your top three issues holding you back.
I have written two books so far and have a third outlined.
They are marketing ideas and how-to books.
I made a few thousand euro from them so far(They still sell) but perhaps more importantly they helped open a few awesome doors for a me a couple of months ago when I was looking for a job. I ended up with some great job offers.
For my second book the learning was about making time to aggressively market the book and having a plan in place.
I found after the hard work of writing the book I did not have the energy to do the marketing straight away. I should have taken a break before launching.
While in college i chased a small design studio you have never heard of to take me as an unpaid intern.
I learnt loads just watching them run a studio and work with clients.
I do not see how they could possibly have justified paying me for the little value i gave back.
Still gratefull for the opportunity they gave me.