From 0 to 10K users | Team-GPT Getting Ready to Scale

Revenue: $80,000

Net revenue: $ 47,819.58

Time: 170 days

Users: 9597

Here's some eye candy before we get into the real article.

And the other one:

9198 users 4 days ago. 9597 as I started writing this. 9611 as I'm reading the article for the last time. At the time of publishing (it was scheduled for the next day) 9702.

The business is going well, thanks for asking!

But...

I want to talk about something else: Getting ready to scale.

I think it is all about providing as much information as possible to others, so they can make better decisions about and around Team-GPT as a project. The more they know, the better informed decisions they'll make.

But I have no time for this.

Time has become my absolute enemy.

As the number of people in the project is growing it is becoming impossible for me to communicate with every team member. Some people I still haven't met.

It's quite sad and I don't want it to be that way... but there is no other way.

The team itself is quite solid and I trust that I'm not always needed.

This article is not about 'How we got 10K' users.

It's about... a startup CEO, trying to communicate better, as Team-GPT is preparing to scale.

Why?

As the CEO, by default, I'm the owner everything.10K users is quite a milestone and I must become more and more strategic.

I've learned that my job is to:

• tackle the issue with highest priority
• find a new owner for it
• and move forward

So far:

? MVP + Validation

? Go-to market strategy

? Financing

? Dev

? Product

Finding a new owner for a big topic means: hiring the right people.

I know very well that:

• 1st time founders focus on product;
• 2nd time founders on distribution;
• 3rd time founders on the team.

I've been a founder 3 times already. I've made most mistakes, so I get it. Truth is, you have to focus on all of three. And in the span of Team-GPT as a company, I've focused on product and distribution simultaneously for the first several months. Now I'm almost out of product.

My current challenges are distribution and team. I'm tackling them together and bit by bit, the right people are falling in to the right places.

One of my co-founders (Yavor) often likes to ask me:

What is your focus now?

An amazing question that every team member should ask themselves.

My focus now is:

?? Marketing - our marketing is amazing but it is not scalable. We don't have a single full-time marketer in house. This is really bad. But I need to find the right person. Currently, we are growth hacking the s*it out of this. 10K users without a marketing hire.

?? Education - our users need to be educated + my comparative advantage over the competition is precisely education. This will be huge for us.

?? Sales - I'm already focused on the Enterprise sales. I need to improve and I'm reading a lot on how to do this properly + getting mentorship. I have some experience but this is by far my weakest skill.

And here come some of the things we've been doing to prepare to scale and solve many of the problems that we've faced or will face.

1. Onboarding videos

See Loom videos HERE

Videos: 22

Duration: ~ 4 hours

On 3 July 23, I sat for about 2 days, recording myself explaining in depth what Team-GPT is and what are we going to do with it.

I expect every new team member at Team-GPT to watch them.

All team members need to know the history and the planning, so we can reach the future.

Some videos are 1 min long, others are 20 mins long.

To this day, I send the onboarding videos to every new person coming to the project. No matter if employee, investors, or else.

Those who watch the videos make the initial cut to join the team.

These videos literally contain all our 'secret strategies' about the future. A gold mine for competitors.

But they don't have our team.

2. Building in public on LinkedIn

Follow me HERE ... or click here!

Step number 1 of the journey was building in public on LinkedIn. This got us at least $4000-5000 in revenue. I know LinkedIn is really helping sell more.

One of my co-founders (Ilko) suggested the #buildingpublic and I've been doing it ever since.

I quite like it. And it is very useful to me.

I've had to communicate so many things to so many people, that I often just write in public channels and then copy paste to LinkedIn.

Like this one big article.

I'm happy to update anyone on the Internet: users, investors, partners, enterprise clients, or just.. friends.

Plus, I barely have any secrets nowadays. I don't have time to think about 'who knows about what'. No time for drama, mama.

Being 100% transparent and genuine at all times is really helping me build trust.

Even if I get into conflict with someone, it's helping us move faster.

A bit of conflict is never bad because it gets real 'words and emotions' out. You face them and you go through the problems.

3. Recording myself building the 'ChatGPT for Work' course

See YouTube playlist HERE

I'm preparing a course on ChatGPT for Work.

I've spent 6 months gathering information and learning how to use ChatGPT properly. I'm ready to teach it.

And I know I'm damn good at it - I've got 1.2M students on Udemy.

Apart from this, many people have asked me how to create a good course.

How to create a course + Build in Public + Transparency + ChatGPT =

I decided to stream the whole thing.

(weird I know)

SEE HERE - How to create a course about ChatGPT with ChatGPT.

I've recorded 15-20 hours of video content filming myself while thinking about the course 'ChatGPT for Work' and coming up with ideas about it.

Why?

I have to transfer this information and knowledge. For others who want to create a course. And for my team. Some of them want to know as much as possible because it helps them do better work (being in sync with me)!

Best part?

I'm using Team-GPT while doing it. This is 'practice what you preach' 101.

And it works, people! I'm 20x more productive. ChatGPT is truly amazing.

Actually many people have watched bits and piece of it. It is so unfiltered that I actually recommend it.

Deep within the lectures, I leave 'Easter eggs' for the true fans.

My wife said: 'some day you will regret doing this'.

4. Phone calls

This actually works quite well for me.

I call people on their cell phone and it helps us sync. It is not old-fashioned, it is pretty effective. I highly recommend it.

Typing has become too slow for me to convey information.

I normally walk Lucky, the best dog, while syncing with different people.

Works quite well for my stress as well.

Walking is actually super beneficial for people who have high stress and/or work on a computer. 45-min walking with the same tempo gets the who cardio-vascular system to work and helps recover from all the stress and strain.

Highly recommended.

On average, I walk for about 11,000 steps every day.

That's the time to sync with my team. Walk and talk :)

Heard it from Tim Ferris.

Tim, if you are reading this, I would love to meet you some day.

5. Meetings schedule

I'm scheduling all my meetings in these 3 days: Mon, Tue, Wed. On these weekdays, I have opened for anyone and everyone in the world.

Here's my booking page created with my other startup: 3veta

I'm taking all the sales calls with Enterprise clients, so I need to be available. At least in the beginning I'm probably the only person who can sell the Enterprise software. Head of Sales is a highly needed role and I hope to soon have a solution for this. But still... in the beginning FOUNDERS have to be the sales people. I must do it. Good thing is, I'm receiving a lot of support from Jeko, a friend of mine, who has negotiated deals for $60M. Our sales super pro.

Thursdays and Fridays are blocked in my calendar.

I reserve these for important LIVE meetings, where I need to travel across the city or do something out of the ordinary. I try to use this time for deep work. I've started booking deep work inside my calendar.

I'm very productive when working on my own and I need to have this time, so I can create more.

I don't want to become a CEO who never touches actual work.

I'm a maker. I like implementing stuff.

It's where the magic happens.

Paul Graham, founder of YC, said (and I'm butchering this, he said it way better): people who are makers should not have any meetings on some of the days. The problem is that by just 'knowing' you have a meeting you are stressing out and cannot chill to start creating and making. Here's how Paul Graham put it in Makers vs Managers.

6. Documentation

Needless to say, almost every call is recorded so others can watch it if needed.

Also Notion is heavily used. We create a lot of our internal documentation and processes there. OneNote is also a favorite of mine - all my meeting notes are there.

Most of the tasks are in Trello and we try to document there as much as possible, too.

All information is open to everyone, as long as they want to read it.

You need help with something? Me or someone on the team will record a Loom for you. Then we will upload it on YouTube.

That's how our knowledge base is getting built.

One Loom at a time!

P.S. Then we take the Loom transcription, feed to Team-GPT and write the prompt 'Take this video transcript and create a how-to style guide with steps 1 to X, based on the information shown in the video.'. Always repurpose content in as many ways you can think of. You've already created it, time to reuse it.

7. Async Looms

I'd often record Looms at weird times and send them to teammates. This is saving me so many meetings.

So many words are spared, you can't imagine!

I say it once, whenever I have the time and then others can see it, whenever they have the time.

It's a fascinatingly simple concept, which has changed my life.

Definitely use Loom.

8. Slack messages

I think Slack messages are underrated.

Writing in public Slack channels to update people is super important and everyone should do it.

Give your teammates information and context and you'll do better stuff together.

DON'T just chat on Slack.

Write actual informative texts.

9. Reuse, recycle, reduce. Repurpose

If you can create texts, videos, and other stuff that can be reused, do it. In marketing we call this 'repurposing content'.

Create content that can be shared with multiple counterparties:

• Record a Loom video for a teammate or client? Don't say their names or anything personalized and just upload on YouTube later or send to others.
• Showing someone how to do something on a Zoom call? Record the meeting and add to the team knowledge base
• Have a good chat with ChatGPT? Use Team-GPT to build your library with good chats and prompts (while collaborating with your team). Then let others reuse it. Okay. I'm selling software here, sorry. But really, this whole article is, anyways. Jokes aside, Team-GPT is actually an amazing product and deserves to be taken seriously by you. It's free for small teams.
• You write a Slack Status Update for everyone... post it on LinkedIn

That's what I'm about to do too. Here's my latest Slack messages to the team.

Some numbers that I'm looking into

10. MRR - Our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is growing at 66%

Just 30 days ago we were making $2100/m and right now we make $3500/m. Note that this is till not much, however, the numbers are growing steadily.

11. AppSumo sales

$27,500 so far (for us) out of which $6747.30 in September alone.

More than 50% of our sales so far have come from AppSumo.

These sales are in AppSumo and they are our LTDs.

People from AppSumo are early adopters and we want as many of them to use the product as possible. This is our initial user base and they battle-test the system every day.

Thanks to AppSumo people, we know when we have bugs, when system is down, etc.

Most recently, we have 3 Enterprise clients who are interested in us, who learned about us from AppSumo.

This was the plan all along to convert them from B2b to Enterprise, where the real money is.

12. Total users

Our total number of users have grown to 9597.

This is very close to 10,000 and this will be a huge milestone.

10K users is serious shit! Just think about how many apps of people you know have reached 10K users.

Once we have this many users, we can start thinking about community building, referral programs and all other types of stuff.

This can help us have a good Product Hunt campaign, launch a mini product better and much more.

We are in their inbox and can communicate directly to them + they usually love the product

13. SEO

Our SEO is extremely good. We have been adding most of the people to our system through AppSumo or SEO.

Our initial efforts from April-May have paid off tremendously and people are actually finding us on Google a lot.

We've got a total of 18.3K clicks and 329K and our organic traffic is growing steadily.

There is nothing better than organic growth and organic ranking - it pays in the long run 1000x.

In one of the images you can see a list for our best keywords. But we don't only rank for them.

We rank for 690+ different keywords and our DR (domain rating) is 15. This is still not high but out of the 'scammer zone'.

We will improve this with time and this will help our SEO even further. Most of the words we rank for are in the US and GB which is ideal!

Our SEO team is still struggling a bit and getting behind but I think we are almost there. They've published 4 new articles and will be publishing another 12 by the end of October.

Once we get a marketing hire (I hope we found 1!), we will also push more content onto the website.

The more text and information we have - the better.

14. Website traffic

Here is our website traffic overall.

75,000 users.

Imagine 75K people know something about us.

Once we can focus more resources on marketing, we will start retargeting these (we already are doing it but not very aggressively).

We will retarget them with hundreds of videos that we are currently publishing all over social media. And they'll remember us.

Many of them are actually using the product itself.

Our overall analytics tracking is not amazing. We don't have the proper person in place to fix this and I don't have time.

We improve this area.

15. Accepted in Paddle AI Launchpad, Microsoft for Startups, and AWS Build Accelerator

Everything is so dynamic that while I'm writing this update at ~11.29PM, my co-founder Ilko is joining with another piece of news. We are accepted in AWS Build Accelerator.

We are already in Microsoft for Startups ($5K credits) and Paddle AI Launchpad ($25K cash prize).

Every bit of credits or money we can get our hands on is needed.

We are bootstrapping and have to be as efficient as possible!

16. Product analytics tracking

~2300 active users

In terms of product analytics, we are very good. We are using a service called 'June.so' and we have some pretty good data on what's going on in the app.

Every day we are hitting higher and higher usage.

Daily active users are ~1000 right now.

But the proper metric to look at is 'Weekly active users'. Most real users actually use ChatGPT 2-3 times per week. Therefore, daily usage is not so relevant.

2300 active users is some very good engagement and we should be thankful that so many people are finding the product useful.

ChatGPT has so many more features than us - images, speech, pdfs, whatever.

And yet these 2300 people prefer to use Team-GPT because it solves a much bigger problem for them: collaboration and knowledge sharing.

17. Social media!

Finally, some reporting on our social media.

We've created 100 social media videos with Simona (Head of Product). We are posting 1 each day for 4 months.

CLICK HERE -to check them out

I'm sending the report which I sent to the team which is dealing with the social media stuff.

I'm just copy-pasting, so there are also comments for them also some tasks (for them ). It's in Bulgarian because we just speak in Bulgarian with them.

(don't worry guys, I used ChatGPT to translate, haven't fact checked 100% but ... no time, remember)

Looking at the success of the videos so far, I notice the following.

• Instagram

Almost all videos have around 50-70 views. Exceptionally few. We need to change something.

Probably Kali was right that we shouldn't spam there. I think she suggested we post 2-3 a week to let the algorithm show them.

Something like that, right? Please try whatever you deem appropriate on Instagram to get more visibility.

Once you've figured it out, write it down here (or even better in a Trello card) so we know when we made the change and can track the results of the experiment.

• Twitter

We aren't having much success there either. However, I think we don't need to change anything. Let's focus on the other channels, as they have more potential.

• Facebook

Facebook seems to be going well in my opinion. The Reels have around 200-500 views on average. Almost no videos without views. That's a success for me. 100 videos, averaging 350 views, are 35,000 views.

Good enough. Let's not make any changes there for now either.

• LinkedIn

I post these videos on Saturdays and Sundays. People really enjoy them and it's not bad, but I try to post less often so as not to spam them. There it's not from the company account and it feels a bit strange.

Overall, it's good content that complements the things I usually write.

I will experiment there and if there's anything more interesting, I'll let you know.

• YouTube

Things are going very well on YouTube.

We already have about 200 subscribers, 14K views and a generally stable viewership of around 200-300 views per day.

We aren't mega viral, but we're mega stable, which is important. The subscriber count is growing every day.

Generally, we'll be posting more and more things there.

-- Kali had the idea to post Shorts, which I rejected before. It was very important for me to have horizontal videos. And it's still important to have them - that's why Tsanko makes both horizontal and vertical ones (thank you!).

Despite that, I'm open to trying out Shorts and see if there will be any success. I'm attaching an image of our most popular videos.

• Our Massive Mistake - TikTok

TikTok is the network with the highest potential. There we have videos with varying success, 300-500 views. One of them has 7,000 views.

The problem is that our content is perfect for TikTok, yet we're not handling it well. We recently discovered that our TikTok is based in Bulgaria. Because we created the account from Bulgaria.

This is a rookie mistake, but "what can we do" overall - no one realized. Right now, I've started the process to "create an account in the US" or something :D

In the worst case, next month when I go to the US, I'll do it. The scheme is for the account to be created in the US and to release all videos to an American audience (or at least some English speakers"), not in Bulgaria.

In short: We will create a new TikTok account and start from scratch.

Sorry folks, but better a month late than never to realize.

• Future social media

Just a little info for the future: in 2-3 weeks we want to start running ads. To boost some posts and primarily to retarget the people who have visited our site with these videos.

I'm thinking of starting with the Meta ecosystem and then YouTube, somewhere around the beginning of November.

It's a wrap

Yo! ??

Abrupt ending.

Sorry for the long read.

Don't know if I'll write another.

But if you finished reading this, drop me a line on LinkedIn.

That's how I know you are up to speed with Team-GPT.

It could be useful to know.