Week 11
Joensuu, Finland

Sometimes, to be honest, I get paralyzed. In particular when my life is in at least one of the following situations:

a) When there is MUCH to do, it is just overwhelming. It is worse when I do not know how to start, result I get paralyzed.
b) When I do not know how to start to tackle a problem, then it gets HUGE and I do not know how to start, result I get paralyzed.
c) When I feel down, confused, lost…. then everything turns challenging, and I get paralyzed.

The challenge when one gets paralyzed is, at least me,  I feel I am dying inside. I am not a stagnant type. I want life, and I am aware that life brings life.

There is one topic that has been really on my shoulders for years now, ant that is to be visible. I am not the type of person to be in the center of the stage. However in our era, we should make to some noise so that others can listen.

Thus, finally today I took “the bull by the horns” in reference to the visibility topic and I start to setup the “visibility-infrastructure” for our startup.  The result, it has been interesting and entertaining in a positive way.

Since long, I wanted to try the steps given on the blog: ” How I got my First Customers without having a product“, and now I  will do it.  As I read elsewhere: STOP waiting.  So let’s do it!

Week 0:  Monday 13.3. I started to do the investigation.

Note: I have no idea about marketing and similar. 

Last year we have a student doing his master with us in reference to marketing and I read something of his thesis to illustrate myself as well. There I learned that it important to pay attention where the servers of your providers are located, mainly for law regulations. I am oversimplifying this, but it is wise to keep in the same region. Thus, in my case I want to stay in Europe.

Next, I needed to “understand”  the different types of companies that offer marketing emails. There are interesting reviews out there of different services providers as you can see in  this post: the top 10 MailChimp Alternatives for Small Buisness Email Marketing. Also I looked for wordpress alternatives and I found this: 7 Free WordPress Plugins to Build Your Email List  (Note:  I feel more confident to use WordPress than Joomla to play around).  In quora I found a very good thread related to: Is there and EU-based alternative to MailChimp? which was relevant for me due to privacy issues.

Then after some enlightening time on this topic I decide myself to use: SendinBlue.

Next to make things work in the way I wanted, I downloaded Ninja Forms,  which works smoothly and this a good video to guide you in the basics.  It works fine, but its connection with SendinBlue was not as smooth as I wished. So after playing around with it, I decided myself to stick with SendinBlue and I download that plugin.

ah! in this journey I also learned new terms such as:  Opt-in_email.

There is much things out-there in this world to make you “visible”.

Then after almost the whole day online and can say that 50% of the
visibility-infraestructure is there.  Need to figure it out how things work, create the content, and… do it!

Also in my list of tasks for “visibility” is to check google-analytics.  Somehow as I learn more about this, I get more excited as a researcher! it sound crazy, but it is true, is so much interesting things to research out there!

It has been a very interesting learning day!!!  🙂  confirming the importance of moving!!!

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”  – Pablo Picasso