Monday morning. It’s a quarter after 8. Dew drops give me the impression that it’s raining, but the sky is almost clear so I’m looking forward to a beautiful and sunny day in Lisbon.

I’ve been journaling for a lot of years. Started being passionate by writing with pen on paper, then discovered the amazing Moleskine notebooks, and finally discovered the Bullet Journal system and their magnificent dotted Leuchtturm1918 notebooks that I’m using ever since.

However, now I’m writing on my blog. This makes me go a bit beyond the mundane depiction of what happened and how I feel, providing some value to the future reader, but also pushes me to be radically honest about facts and feelings.

Yesterday I went for a walk, then read a few chapters from Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZTCF6Y/ref=clair_cor__1?_encoding=UTF8], and I fell asleep and dreamed about creating a promotion and how would that work. I literally started dreaming about marketing. That’s where I wanted to go at.

Throughout the last 10 years, I’ve built or participated in building about 8 different online products and services. None of them got any significant traction. They all resulted in failure but with a big experience package that I cashed in and used in my next projects.

That’s why I’m completely shifting from building amazing things to learning how to tell compelling stories, identify ideal customers, create offers, build awareness and generate leads.

At least this year, my number one focus will be marketing. I will learn and read and apply everything relevant on this subject.

I am confident that if I gain at least half of the amount of knowledge I have about engineering, but of marketing, it will help me in my dream of improving peoples lives not only by providing useful tools in doing so, but also in getting actual people to use them.

That being said, I started diving head first into the following books and resources:

  • Hacking Growth [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZTCF6Y/ref=clair_cor__1?_encoding=UTF8] by Sean Ellis
  • Traffic Secrets [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07M9HFLV6/ref=clair_cor__1?_encoding=UTF8] by Russell Brunson
  • Psychology & Marketing [https://www.nickkolenda.com/the-members-area/] resources by Nick Kolenda
  • SEO Sprint Course [https://thrivethemes.com/courses/seo-sprint/] from Thrive University

Rosanna Lopez [https://rosannalopes.com/] is helping me out get my marketing strategy straight. She has a huge experience in Digital Marketing and I am deeply grateful for her taking the time to help my awareness-building endeavours take shape.

I started getting active on a few communities during my breaks, just to see what people are sharing, asking or teaching:

  • SaaS Products and Marketing [https://www.facebook.com/groups/saasproductsandmarketing] on Facebook
  • r/Entrepreneur [https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/] on Reddit
  • r/SaaS [https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/] on Reddit

And finally, to measure the effectiveness of what I’m learning and applying, I’ve started studying Google Analtics 4, tracking ecommerce sales, setting up my funnels and tracking important conversion events. This is the only way I can measure how my experiments are performing.