November 20th, 2022

A lot of it has been basically hoping that Complice will somehow get picked up by someone with a really popular productivity blog, they'll write about using it, and then that'll bring in a huge influx of new people without me having to do anything. That may yet happen, but I'm done banking on it.

Prior to that, one of the main elements of my growth strategy was using my strengths as a coder and an interface designer, and building three different integrations into Complice:

The Beeminder integration allows people to commit to using Complice regularly, and it also allows using Beeminder through the Complice app, easily tracking anything that you can set intentions for, tracking numbers and time, tracking reviews, and so on. I'm friends with the Beeminder folks, and I've written a few blog posts for them, which have also brought in people. A lot of the most consistent Complice users came from Beeminder, which is no surprise given that Beeminder is about consistency!

The WorkFlowy integration allows people to do project breakdowns or weekly planning outside of Complice, somewhere where it can safely go stale without building up inside Complice. I built this in part for a friend and myself, but many users have come to use it as their primary workflow for setting intentions. I hoped to get a bit of publicity out of it too but that didn't really happen... but there've only been a handful of people who've arrived this way, mostly via the userstyle I wrote to make it prettier.

The Less Wrong Study Hall was an online chatroom where people did pomodoros together. I built a wrapper for the video chatroom that kept track of the timer and what actions people were working on, and then eventually built my own video system to replace the flash-based applet. This meant that other groups could now create their own video coworking rooms. Last summer I added some new features, including the option of having audio during breaks or all the time.

Beyond that, most Complice users came from people clicking through from my blog or from word of mouth, either direct or via others' blog posts. I haven't really had many other sources.

I periodically tried doing things like recording podcasts where I mentioned it, or pitching my writing to various outlets, and those might have worked if I'd had hits at enough scale, but the podcasts had limited reach and the writing never really got picked up anywhere. I may yet do more of this.

, particularly one like Complice, while being

< something around struggles with motivation that are more related to feedback loops & efficacy >

There are a lot of other resistances that I've found when I investigated. I'm planning to write another post shortly exploring these and how I've integrated them.

I'm also planning to write another post exploring what my new strategy is going to be.

GCIs: complice.co/event/gci?mocom=CompliceGrowth

#meta okay, going meta for a bit, what's going on with this post?

I actually feel like I've written a pretty good collection of thoughts on why/how writing about marketing strategy in public can be in service of doing marketing but good-noncoercive tho

I have other posts I want to write on related topics:

...I initially thought I was going to include those in the first one

but I feel like they'll be richer if I do them separately

so what does this first one want to be?

okay, so one thing I could actually do is split the 2 sections of this post as WELL

okay, 3h showtime. 3h should be enough to get a bunch of stuff laid out here, especially since I basically already have an outline

and I want to be 100% focused that entire time on just things that move towards getting this published

basically I am setting the intention to let this go live in 3h whatever state it's in (as a showtime should!) unless there's something like an emergency that keeps me from working on it

Broadly my resistance can divided into two categories:

There was a small amount of resistance here that was simply about having more money and the idea that that might cause people to treat me differently in some way I wouldn't like (like try to get my money). But overall I like being generous and I expect that if I suddenly had a bunch of people trying to get me to contribute to their things, I'd do a good job of figuring out how to manage that.

Most of my money resistance was a lot weirder. As far as I could tell, if I imagined Complice's revenue increasing substantially without me doing anything in particular (eg it gets picked up by a huge blogger or podcaster) then that seemed good... the resistance was more to the idea that I would have a good enough grip on the relevant levers that I'd be able to intentionally make the number go up. Weird.

Marketing is only one thing to call this. This was resistance to taking intentional actions towards growing my business by getting more people in the front door. (Growing the business by making a new integration with another app like Beeminder or whatever has been comparatively easy for me.)

Learned Helplessness

Part of what has discouraged me from working more on growth is how aware I am of various ways in which the product could be improved, and as a one-man company (approximately) I've sometimes felt like maybe I need to work on those first. But there are lots of people who love the app as it is, and fewer than 15k who've ever tried it, so clearly there's lots of room for finding and onboarding more customers without major changes to the system.

or a more general situational assessment, that would also include stuff