Steady Steps
In 2022, I advanced on most goals I had, and even got pretty far in some of them.
I started the year with the intention to advance in my career and grow my skill set, and I achieved both:
- By the end of the year, I managed to become CEO of SchoolMaker, an LMS tool with an integrated community, and easy ways to manage Q&As, Lives and Coaching.
- I practiced the skills I need to build SaaS companies by myself quickly.
Around one year ago, I wrote that I was going to increase my shipping velocity in order to become a better writer, developer and marketer, but also that I would test ideas faster.
To do so, here are some actions I took:
✍️ Writing
✓ I wrote the equivalent of a book for SchoolMaker, a little analysis of a course sales page, and wrote a few articles.
✓ I tested a pilot video idea about software growth, which did fairly well for a test and showed me that covering this kind of topic can be promising.
⛌ I wanted to create more videos, but couldn't free up the time to do so.
⚙️ Coding & Product
✓ I followed a web scraping course and used what I learned to automate some tasks, collect emails for cold outreach, and check which YouTubers are hiring people automatically.
✓ By using a copy of the open source project RailsDevs, I built and deployed a platform to help YouTube professionals like video editors, writers, or thumbnail designers find jobs. The platform is called YT Careers.
✓ I also contributed to the RailsDevs open source project by translating it into French to thank its creator for sharing his codebase.
✓ With my new role at SchoolMaker, I now have more influence over the product, so I also learned new things about product design, as well as managing a team of developers.
✓ Did dozens of calls to talk about SchoolMaker's customers existing problems to better understand what we can do to solve them.
⛌ I wanted to finish this course, but didn't have the time to yet.
📣 Sales & Marketing
✓ Cold emailed hundreds of people.
✓ Did hundreds of sales calls with prospects and existing customers.
✓ Followed the SEO Blueprint course to learn more about SEO and started applying what I learned to SchoolMaker.
⛌ I wanted to work more on the promotion of YT Careers, but didn't have the time to do so.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with what I did, but now I think that I should start switching from testing and learning to focusing on actually building and growing projects like Software Growth or YT Careers.
In 2023, I'm focusing on growing SchoolMaker, and getting started with growing my own SaaS projects.