The main focus this past month has been infrastructure and cleanup. I was able to consolidate all our docker instances running in various locations to one single VM on Google Cloud which will same some money and also streamline the process of keeping everything backed up and updated.
Other Wins
The other big thing is I setup TypeBot via Docker and cutover the different onboarding funnels to live there. This is meat & potatoes infrastructure work but the advantage of running this on our own infrastructure means saving the monthly SaaS cost and being able to offer a full-serve solution that incorporates the chatbot-based intake.
I’ve been going through a course I purchased years ago called 30x500 and I’m about halfway through it having published my first eBomb under the Stone Soup brand on how to convert your WordPress comments to a chatbot system. That’s received some great feedback in various forums where I shared it. The goal here is to use the 30x500 techniques of audience building and product-shaping to develop a feeder network across a number of relevant watering holes, bring those folks into our world and then dial-in the Stone Soup offering to serve one community type well and then stack those progressively expanding into adjacent community types.
Other smaller wins: I adapted the survey-intake process to work for both new and existing users. Previously it could only be used for new users but we had a couple instances where someone went through the whole process only to get an error because it turned out they were already in the system.
I also managed to get both n8n and Obsidian (the main tool I’m using to build Sales Safari notes) to now back up to my Github account which gives some peace of mind since both these would be difficult to recreate if they were lost at this point.
What I’m Thinking
- The 30x500 process is time-consuming and feels like slowing down but also feels like a more predictable approach for making this stuff work so I’m okay to invest the energy into it. And I can see how these techniques will be useful and transferrable to other contexts.
- The features that need to come next to make the AI intros truly useful for other communities will be messaging and notifications. Those two features are table stakes really for this to be usable so those will likely be the next feature push.
Open Questions
- Proper prioritization of the audiences and watering holes that I’m targeting with the 30x500 sales safari stuff. I’ve chosen nocoders to start since I know the space well and it cuts across industries and organization types who could use Stone Soup. Next would be hackathon organizers since I’ve done some of that as well and our fabric has immediate relevance to them. CSR departments, open innovation platforms and conference organizers would be tier three given the extenuated ties but those are likely the most high-value targets to figure out.
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
Member-to-member messaging, notifications and refactoring our message bus to accommodate truly real-time messages.
Project Success
Loosely helping steer the Message Everywhere project via weekly standups and intermittent async Discord guidance.
Events
No events planned. Helping to power the Co-Founders Hive conference slated for mid-October.
Content
This is the primary focus right now. I’m 50% through the 30x500 course and will be doing a weekly cadence of “eBombs” or atomic, high-density blog post fixes targeted around pains experienced by the various communities I’m surveying.
Traffic Snapshot
I’ll have two traffic graphs from here out given the split of the community from the underlying tech platform:
The technical roadmap as always can be found here.