Fanfare September 22 🎉

Basil Philipp 🎉

This is a slightly redacted version of the update I shared with the team and our investor. I removed our cash-at-hand numbers and anonymized customers since I didn't ask for permission to name them.

The September update is late due to me taking two weeks of vacation: Bad for my posting schedule but great for my mental health.

KPIs 📈

(Prospective) Users talked to: 4

MRR: $10

MAU: 4

Months to 0: 16 (by Feb. 2024) // Includes some buffer

Highlights 🚀

• Our 6-week development cycle started on September 12th. I feel that we did a good job planning it: The pitches¹ we wrote are well fleshed out, and we took care to make sure that the workload is well distributed among the team, and aligned with times we're out of the office.
• My first monthly meeting with Bea and Tom (Bea's board observer) was very constructive. It was nice to show what we got done in the previous month and to get actionable feedback.

• I had somebody reach out on Twitter:

  Hi Basil, I just came across your monthly update posted on hackernews and found it really interesting. This kind of content is really informative about the challenges faced when creating startups and I really appreciated the honesty and the content so thank you, I hope you will continue, I loved it. It made me want to discover your product.

  It was my first experience with Unsolicited Response Rate, and it validated my hunch that creating content is important for us. It also felt good.

• I learned about the concept of Unsolicited Response Rate in Outseta's marketing course². I loved the course, as it helped me focus my marketing efforts. For now, we're doing: Content marketing, cold outreach, and community outreach.

• In the course, I learned about using Zapier to send cold e-mails. The e-mails are plain text and personalized; we always attach a video clip from that podcaster's latest episode. Our response rate is above 10%, and the sign-up rate is at about 2%. Before using this approach, our cold e-mailing sometimes felt spammy to me. But now, I think that our e-mail is worth opening.
• We got the first public transcript page³ live within a week, including one iteration on feedback from our customer. I'm excited about the feature itself and the fact that we can quickly pull off new features to test them.
• Users can now buy extra hours once they run out of their two monthly hours.

Lowlights 😕

• The social media manager of one of our clients is changing jobs. I'm happy for them, but they truly were a power-user of Fanfare, delivering great feedback to us.
• One of our comedian clients started making some of her clips with Instagram's editor again. Instagram's captioning engine displays subtitles as a growing "cluster," which works better for punch lines of jokes. Our caption engine sometimes gives the joke away too early.
• I had tried reaching out to potential customers via Twitter DMs but stopped doing it. I sent out 50+ DMs and didn't get a single response.
• We didn't gain any new users in September. I believe it's due to me not sending out any cold e-mails for about three weeks while testing out Twitter DMs and Google Ads. We didn't lose any customers, though.

Team 🤗

• Some of the team (including me) took some vacations. Work progressed a bit slower, obviously, but it was nice to see that things didn't fall apart or become frantic for those in the office.

Customer stories 📣

1. "Despite these little glitches, I've been having lots of fun making the clips, as you can probably tell from my tweets. I'm hoping that being creative with these will have some effect on boosting downloads, but tbh the download count isn't a huge concern to me. It's more about having continuing fun with episodes after release. Hoping listeners enjoy reliving these little bits through the clips as much as I do in making them!"

2. A comedian friend contacted me, asking for help with the clips. She can't bring herself to do it but said she knows how important it is, seeing how comedians that post regularly can quickly grow their audience on Instagram. She asked if she could pay me to do it for her.

Asks 🙏

• Do you know any podcasters who seem to ensure they have high-quality transcripts of their episodes? I would love to reach out to them.

Outlook for next Month 🔭

• Wrapping up the following features: More fonts, multiple templates, and background images.
• Improve the process of creating personal clips for cold e-mails.

I'm looking forward to October. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions regarding this update.

Thank you!

Basil

Founder & CEO Fanfare🎉

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