Welcome to My Build Log

Where I recap the previous week, what I’ve been working on, and more

Week 3 - Brand Building 👊🏼

Notion for the Masses

It’s been a pretty wild week. First and foremost, work has been ramping up so I’m spending a lot of time and brainpower on that. I had some fun stepping away from my normal technical documentation system design to work on an Agile system for engineering teams. It was a breath of fresh air.

When I get stuck on page layouts, navigation systems. and the overall design of this technical documentation template, I often hit a wall what feels like days. Something just seems off, but I struggle to put my finger on it. So this time, I stepped back and looked at the bigger picture: A system designed for everything Agile that could plug in a good technical documentation tool.

This was rather eye opening for a few reasons:

1. It gave a greater context as to how the system should work with teams.
2. I realized that I was too focused on some very niche aspects that won’t add a lot of value.
3. Technical documentation for teams often won’t have a starting point…

The third bullet was the most eye opening. I originally wanted to provide the best starting point for everything from coding standards and best practices to team dynamics, but it’s just not needed — especially for the beta teams.

So with that being said, we’re pushing on.. but with a little less of a focus on perfection and a little more focus on value.

The Community is Growing

I started posting on LinkedIn about a month ago now. I made this post showing some stats, and it’s received a lot of awesome feedback. Here’s the numbers:

🤙🏼 Added almost 275 followers

🤙🏼 37,000 impressions from my posts

🤙🏼 Just over 500 page views

🤙🏼 8 Notion Systems Sold 🤯

🤙🏼 12 signups to my first free coaching cohort

🤙🏼 2 Webinars booked to cover Notion for Salesforce Professionals

What’s wild is that since that post, the numbers have been pretty insane. I’ll cover that in next week’s recap.

Mark Your Calendars : Notion Webinar #1 🔥

I just got the official date and invite for the first webinar next month. So mark your calendars. I’ll hope to send out the invite as the date nears.

April 11 @ 6pm EST

In this webinar, I’ll be covering Notion for the Salesforce Admins out there. I’ll likely go into the ecosystem, Salesforce as a profession, and some other topics as well. It should be fun, and I’m stoked.

In an effort to keep this one shorter, I’m going to wrap here.

Until next time ✌🏼

Week 2 - Community 💬

Navigating New Norms

I came across a blog the other day about the different go-to-market strategies required for various types of products. The relevant category here is simply a new product that solves a problem the target audience has not yet identified. This approach requires good content and organic outreach, which has been a heavy focus of mine these past few weeks.

I’m proud to say that I will be collaborating with a few great Salesforce influencers over the next two months to showcase the Notion templates I have built. I will be posting that information here once we lock everything down.

In the meantime, here are the numbers from last week:

• Added 60 new LinkedIn followers from organic content
• Added 35 new connections to my LinkedIn network
• Reached 12,489 people with my content on LinkedIn

What Does This Mean?

Organic growth and thought leadership have been my core focus. Yes, the idea here is to monetize my audience in some form; however, it’s also one of the best ways to get visibility into the problems I am solving with Notion. A focus on continued growth only opens up more opportunities to provide value to the community.

Coaching Cohort #1 Announced

I also announced my first free coaching cohort, kicking off on April 1st. With a limited number of seats, we may actually fill this class up. This is something that I have wanted to do for a long time. When I was coming up in the Salesforce world, I struggled to find real mentorship in more technical areas. I didn’t know anything about deployment best practices, the vast career opportunities, and so much more. This is the gap I am looking to fill with these free cohorts.

I heard a quote this week that really sums this up well:

You are perfectly positioned to help the person you once were. - Lewis Howes

As long as we can keep filling the classes, I would like to run 8-10 per year. This would equate to approximately 200-250 people coached every year, adding value to their careers and giving them a network to grow within.

Template Progress

I made some good progress on the Advanced Technical Documentation template. I expect to release the first version to my beta group early next month. This has been my core focus at the moment. It’s the one template that I believe will bring the most value to Salesforce teams globally. So this next week is heads down design work. Let’s get it.

Until next time ✌🏼

Week 1 - The Launch 🚀

The Big Reveal

And we’re live! What a monumental task this was… and a huge weight off of my shoulders. I knew hitting this deadline was going to be rough, but then you throw in being a father of two young girls under the age of two (one is not even 12 weeks) and major life events… oh man. Boy was it worth it though.

Any time you introduce a new solution into a community, it is difficult to get traction. I essentially took the systems that I have built for myself and my teams and packaged them up into templates that could be used by anyone else in the Salesforce ecosystem, in consulting, or running a team. I know the value. I mean, all of there were originally designed for my personal use. I realized that I would be hitting a nerve a lot of people didn’t know existed, but the response has been fantastic. We even made our first sale within 24 hours 👏🏼.

The Obvious Challenge

Just like any new product company, the best way to sell the product is to navigate the slow and steady road of organic social media growth. I have tapped into quite a few Salesforce communities on Twitter and LinkedIn, with the latter being the obvious winner in terms of return on effort. That’s something I plan to continue to do going forward. The goal is to best express the problem statement and why it’s a no brainer using my Notion templates. The return on investment is there.

What’s Next

The big opportunity I see right now is in platform documentation systems. I am currently working on designing the most advanced Salesforce technical documentation system in existence. This is something you will see over the course of the next few months as I wrap it up. This idea has already been validated with companies reaching out asking to collaborate on documentation systems that they can ship with their products. I’ll keep you updated on how that goes over the next month.

All in all, this has been fun. The project feels like it’s just starting. I look forward to seeing where I can take this over the next 12 months.

Until next time ✌🏼