CoStarting Week 2 – Progress is Slow! But that’s ok?

Wow, I can’t believe another week has gone by so quickly. I mean, I can… because my ADHD constantly has time sneaking up on me, and when I got a chance to catch up with my grandparents this morning my grandma graciously reminded me that losing track of time was never a new thing for me. (Thanks grandma! 😆)

Anyway! I’ve been working a little bit here and there throughout the week on the goals I set for myself in my last update and while progress is slow… some progress is better than no progress! Or that’s what I hear. 🤷‍♂️

This Week’s Goals

This week my goals were to:

• Create a couple wireframe pages of the user dashboard
• Decide how I want to go about pricing a beta trial for users

Progress on Wireframes

Not amazing, but also not a total miss. I don’t have any actual wireframes done, but I did spend some time researching other dashboards for similar types of sites to see what I did and didn’t like in terms of layout and design. I also got a chance to play around with some dashboard builders which helped me decide which one I’ll be building out the Underdog Sites dashboard with.

The builder I chose is WordPress based, as is the entire Underdog Sites platform, and it will allow me a chance to control more of the design, features, and overall experience users of the platform will have. I was originally considering using something more “out of the box” as far as design goes, so it looked “prettier” from the start, but I think going this route will work better in the long run because of how much I can control/tweak based on feedback from users.

This does mean the design will be extra simplified to start because I’m not much of a designer, but worrying about design can be a distraction and sometimes detract from the usability of a site, so I’m hoping beta users will choose to see that as a positive thing since the whole goal of Underdog Sites is to make the tech side of starting a business simpler for freelancers, VAs, etc.

Progress on Beta Pricing

I’m still not 100% sure how I want to go about this and it’s starting to bug me. One idea I did come up with since last week was to “split” the possible approaches of offering a lifetime deal vs a heavily discounted subscription, and I’m definitely interested in hearing the thoughts from my friends in the industry and the other cohort members.

The split would be to offer a lifetime deal to either a limited number of users or offer the lifetime deal until it’s officially time to open for beta testing, at which point we’d switch over to offering a discounted subscription. I kind of like this approach because it rewards the users who are willing to invest in the idea and vision of Underdog Sites when there isn’t an opportunity to try it out first, and when beta is officially open people can still get a good deal on a subscription.

This Week’s Challenge

This week’s challenge really was figuring out the pricing structure for beta and pre-beta purchasers. I recognize this will be an ongoing challenge for me (pricing and pricing models) because I genuinely love helping people with their tech and I would honestly help them all for free if I could!

But… I also realize that in order to help more people I also have to cover the expenses of running a business in general, plus my own personal bills, especially if I want to be able do this long term.

Next Week’s Goal

Next week I want to have the basic pages built within the user dashboard. The pages I want to have built are:

• My Account
• Pages (for website pages)
• Posts (for blog posts)

There are others I would love to have done as well, but I’m limiting myself to just three for this week. That should be enough to snag a few screenshots or short videos to provide a few visuals for a beta pre-sale page — which would keep me right on track for my goal at the end of the cohort of having a pre-sale page up and available for people to start checking out the concepts of the platform and make some form of purchase 🙂