Exploriter

Explo(r|it)ing Knowledge for Wisdom

Making Exploriter

This business changelog is updated regularly. It tracks progress and records milestones for Exploriter. The good, the bad, and the ugly. If you have ever been interested in what goes on, day-to-day, while growing a business and brand of this sort, this may provide some insight.

Log #48

  • Purchased 2 domains for future projects. One is exploriter.email to house the newsletter. Need to work on the value prop.
  • Wrote and published the first three IG posts in the ‘experience’ series.
  • I finished compiling my notes on the Sensemaking course I took in June of 2020 and translated it into a short Twitter thread.
  • Started organizing post #2 about learning slowly.

Expenses:
$28

Log #47

  • Had a blast tapping into my creative side today and built a 51-post Instagram art campaign around the word ‘experience’. Something to populate the new Instagram account.

Log #46

  • Updated all the logos, headers, and other assets across the web to the new design.
  • Signed up for Instagram.

Log #45

  • Exploriter v2 is live!
    • Much, much happier with this.
    • Huge inspiration from the wonderful Julian Shapiro.
    • Lot’s more to do but now I have a base that I’m genuinely happy with. Perhaps now I can finally put my head down and focus on content.
Here’s v1, for posterity’s sake.

Log #44

  • Another 12-hour design marathon.
  • Purchased a year subscription to Icons8 for their illustrations. Better than using Unsplash for images.

Expenses:
$119

Log #43

  • 12-hour design stint.

Log #42

  • Designing all day.
  • Bought Tailwind UI for the redesign and some future projects.
Expenses:
$249

Log #41

  • Well, I had a feeling it would happen…I’m unhappy with the design but glad I got everything published. This week I’ll be doing an intense redesign with an update to go out by the end of the week.
  • Tested a Twitter Followers campaign since people now have something to see—the site is live and the first post went up (design issues aside).
    • Here’s what $350 got me…
      • 456 followers
      • 0.89% follow rate
      • $0.77 cost per follow
Expenses:
$350

Log #40

  • Published a version of the first blog post on Medium to help me get a sense of how Medium works.
  • Created an editorial calendar for the blog with 9 posts lined up. Must. Now. Write.
  • Sent out a Twitter Thread version of the first blog post on building a writing habit.

Log #39

  • Committed to the yearly ConverKit plan so I am not tempted to tool-hop.
  • Built a way to add income and expenses as metadata to these logs. If a day/log has any income/expenses, I’ll add it up and it will show below that particular log (you can see the ConvertKit expense below).
    • Includes a widget for the sidebar that shows the total income and expenses for Exploriter.

Expenses:
$290