[UP 004] - Choose your shit sandwich / Gates, Boards & Sprints / Party within a Party

Here’s your weekly dose of UP: Unrelenting Progress

Thanks for being here! Now without further ado, let’s go.

Personal Growth: Choose your shit sandwich

I was listening to a course this week and was reminded of this huge idea.

Basically, the idea here is that for the most part, any endeavor we pursue will absolutely suck for the most part.

There will be rejection, failure, travel, long nights, sleep deprivation, low bank balances, pounds put on… you name it. All as a trade for pursuing our big thing.

And even after all of that, there is no guarantee that we ‘make it’ or get the thing we’re seeking. The only thing that is guaranteed is the struggle!

So, therefore, what is your favourite type of shit you’re willing to endure?

Work this out and you’ll know what you’re likely to be better than others at. This is a huge competitive advantage that you’ll need to remember along the way.

Business Growth: Gates, Boards & Sprints

This week has been a bit of an admin week, getting our ducks in a row. I feel like I’m slipping behind with a couple of things like customer interviews and chasing up additional suppliers.

Anyway, rather than get overwhelmed, I’m trying to organize my thinking. I’ve put things in terms of the following buckets and then focused on just one thing per week.

Audience capture - Planning out content topics (we’ll start on IG and repurpose for TikTok & Youtube Shorts) ✔

Community building - Familiarize with the Harry’s referral strategy & sketch the UI of a similar two-step landing page that generates referrals to a free 7-day challenge. ✔

Product development - Research the top two UK (our first market) best-rated competitor products in detail, looking at Amazon reviews. ✔

Logistics & Supply Chain - Research into some UK & European possible third party logistics companies we could use. (Today and tomorrow) ⏳

Technological - (Decided on Webflow (designer’s preferred platform) as our storefront. Shopify as our backend.) Shop for a highly aesthetic storefront template we can use for opening day. ✔

Customer Support - Identify the top questions we need to have pre-answered for opening day for our store chatbot (Today and tomorrow) ⏳

When it comes to managing a project, this isn’t bad but I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Let’s look at what’s already widely used for a new product development project like this.

The big options are to go for either an agile-based approach or a stage based.

Stage-based (or gate-based or phase based) is where the product development process is completed step by step linearly. The main project management framework for stage-based frameworks are waterfall methods.

And what’s a stage? It’s a natural end point where we can assess the success of the stage and fix things before moving on.

Here’s a free template for you that I had began to use.

I originally was taking a more careful, gated approach as I was going to bring something completely brand new to the market. Plus food is quite a regulated industry with certain requirements needing to be met so I was leaning on the side of caution rather than speed to market.

But we’re not innovating that much now for product one, so I’m opting for more of an agile approach.

What’s so good about agile?

It ensures you’re continuously improving through small experiments and updating your product and standard operating procedures (if used across the business).

This is an awesome diagram that shows the major difference between the two.

There are a host of different agile methods that are commonly used but the main two are;

• Kanban - aiming to continually reduce the work in progress (‘how to do the work efficiently’)

• Scrum - aiming to use meetings to complete sprints of work (‘how to plan the work effectively’.)

My company buckets approach is taking more of a Kanban framework and I think I’ll continue it across the product development cycle too.

Here’s what I’ve set up inside our company Notion. (I’m thinking of making it public and sharing it. Let’s revisit that idea after we launch!)

Community Growth: Party within a Party

Reddit.

I’ve never really been a user. I think subconsciously I still hold an outdated view that it’s a platform preferred by a certain type of individual that I don’t see myself as.

But with 1.5 billion registered users and passionate subreddits (mini communities), I know that it could be a great opportunity to get in front of our target market.

So this week I approached it with new eyes.

(Remember last week’s quote! - “When you change the way you look at things the things you look at will change”)

In particular, I wanted to understand how, as a brand, we could go to where the party is and start our own party/ subreddit.

Turns out it’s not as straightforward as making a Facebook group.

There are some steps to complete before you can start your own subreddit I’ve learned (thanks to this helpful guide).

1. Join relevant existing subreddits

2. Be an active and valuable Reddit user

3. Reach 50 ‘karma’ and be active for over 30 days

If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’ll focus on Reddit. Yet.

In terms of audience capture, I will stick with paid meta ads, and for community building, I’ll use a Facebook group due to its media uploading and live streaming abilities.

Also, I won’t lie, this part of the guide definitely didn’t help 😐

Alright, that’ll do for this week.

Have a great weekend, catch up with you next Saturday.

Peace!