I did an 8-day sprint to launch my Build a Ruby Gem email course and documented my progress through this series of blog posts.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Weekend Update Summary

Alright, back at it! I didn’t quite hit the 5:00am goal I had, but was early enough to accomplish what I was shooting for. (Setting my alarm for 11:58pm because namecheap.com had hourly Cyber Monday coupon codes didn’t help…).

What I Accomplished today

Today I wrote the first post out of 5 and it went relatively smooth. Yesterday I created a rough outline for the course content using Evernote. I’ve used it mainly as a place to spew out the ideas that are not necessarily organized, but just general notes about things I want to make sure get covered (imagine that, using Evernote for notes?!?!).

Writing my entry for the email course caused me to realize that I had to make a few changes to my blog to facilitate the course (ie. hide newsletter signup at the end of each course). Those changes probably took 10-15 min. However, I got them out of the way so I won’t have to worry about it anymore for future courses (I know, fat chance a web developer leaves something alone for very long…).

What I’m working on

There’s been some weirdness with my Mailchimp sign up form, mostly around signing up for multiple groups as an existing recipient. I’ve submitted a support request and have been reaching out to people that are far more knowledgable than I using email lists and hope to have it resolved by the end of the day, at which point I’ll notify my existing email list of the course.

My new timeline

I made a few changes/additions to my project timeline as you can see below:

• Day 1 - Overall topic and organize what content goes on which days, setup GH project and ready tags, write WOH day blog, why gem discussion (ref. open source blog - pics of GA)

• Day 2 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

• Day 3 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

• Day 4 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

• Day 5 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

• Day 6 - Write content and WOH blog (notify subscribers)

• Day 7 - Setup auto responder and way to capture for the course, write emails for each day of sequence (depending on the content). Proofread all course posts.

• Day 8 - Launch with new landing page and notify subscribers

I realized I needed to separate out time to proofread previous email course content posts. After writing for over an hour, I don’t feel like I’m in the best position to be critical of my writing. I think editing after the fact will also reveal some places where content can be removed due to wordiness.

Marketing

I wanted to add a marketing section to each of these updates because building an audience is such a critical piece of this process. Yesterday, I posted my Day 1 post around the internet and got overwhelmingly positive feedback.

The “sign up for updates” form yielded around 40 subscriptions. My wife and I went to the movies yesterday and at one point I looked at my phone and saw this:

Yesterday I mentioned part of my motivation for launching this Build a Ruby Gem email course was to determine if there was enough interest in the topic to warrant an ebook. So far, so good…

Total visits to the site was 337. I’ll take a 10% conversion rate any day!