Howdy everyone!
Josh here, Founder and CEO of Knackmap. Excuse the mug shot in the blog image, but figured it’s always good to see a face when it comes to a reflection.
Big things have been happening around here. It’s been a busy 2016.
We have raised a second round of capital, launched our first product, subscribed our first 200 users. We’ve completed an accelerator program through the Little Cities Skyline Accelerator program, which had a focus on tech and globalisation. We’ve also repositioned ourselves as “a social media marketing company which helps businesses better tell their story online”, rather than a one product wonder.
We’ve had the privilege to go on the wild and wonderful rollercoaster that is starting a SaaS company, and learnt a number of very valuation lessons.
We’ve had our mind blown on what we are actually offering the world, and allowed us to be able to launch two additional products on top of our enterprise software, as well as have other products to be released early in 2017.
– HouseQ – Social Media Marketing Automation for Real Estate Agents
– PlanGram – Instagram Scheduling
– VinoSocial – Social Media Marketing Automation for Wineries
– Planr – Planning, Approvals and Scheduling for Agencies and Brands
The team has been working tirelessly to complete this transition, and I’m so proud to see what we have achieved as a result. I’d like to take this time now to thank everyone for there efforts thus far. From the designers, developers, customer success team, our social media manager, and of course our wonderful clients who were willing to give us a go!
For those who are also spending this time of 2016 to reflect on potential shifts in your operation for 2017, let me provide you with a quick few things that I’m looking at rolling out:
- Get Organised: In the world of growing something from nothing into something, a lot of the ‘need to do at some point’ tasks get left for the ‘absolutely essential’ tasks. The problem is that if you are constantly in the world of ‘this has to be done right now’, then there is no way to forward think. This can lead to many things being done just because you were bull headed about it, and the fact is that they were unessential. With a plan and a tasklist, you can still be pragmatic but it forces you to think ahead.
- Growth isn’t overnight, so invest in what you know will be beneficial tomorrow: Traffic is important to me. Traffic has a direct correlation to enquires, sign ups and paying customers. As a new company it is often the mindset to push for instant relevant traffic. The problem with this is that to do this you need to have an ad budget, and if you are only spending ad budget to get traffic, then when the budget dries up, you have no sustainable resources to continue to drive traffic. Whilst we were strategic in investing in what our website had to offer, to ensure that we are a good resource for visitors all year round, we’ve been able to sustain a strong foundation of traffic and visibility. However, from here moving forward, we are looking to invest time into creating truly valuable content in a wide range of formats to help our customers. This content will aim to guide users through their journey of telling their story online and reaching their goals both utilising our products, or in social media generally.
I truly believe that these two points are at the core of our success in 2017. Of course, there are many other things that will drive us to our goals, but these two points I wanted to share.
That’s a wrap for my reflection today – I’ll be sure to put something together for all of those who are interested in what we’ve been up to. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the final sprint of this year, and getting off to a smashing start to next year!
Until next time.