Tech Tafari

Building Engimeets: 30 Days of Marketing, and Still Figuring It Out If you're bootstrapping a software company, one uncomfortable reality is that you can put considerable effort into marketing without knowing whether any of it will work. That's where I am with @engimeets (engimeets.com/atlas). I can explain the effort. The wins are still undetermined. So, here's what I've been doing. 1. Cold Emailing I decided to start with direct outreach. My assumption was simple: if I could identify freight forwarding companies that might benefit from Atlas, I could reach out, start conversations, and eventually find customers. I've been doing this for about 30 days. It hasn't been straightforward. The first challenge was figuring out how to send unsolicited emails without running into the restrictions imposed by email providers. I ended up learning quite a bit about deliverability, sender reputation, verification, and marketing automation. I'm now starting to see some email opens. That's a small positive signal, although it doesn't necessarily mean anyone is interested in buying. At least the process is working. 2. Social Media This is another area where I have a lot to learn. I enjoy posting, but I also know I don't have the energy to create and publish content every day. Some days, I have enough time and motivation to create content for an entire week. Other days, I want to focus entirely on building Atlas. So I decided to separate content creation from publishing. Create when I have the energy. Schedule the content. Let the system handle distribution. I experimented with two self-hosted tools. Postiz and Bright Bean Studio. Postiz has some interesting AI-assisted social media capabilities, where you technically hand over your social to Claude Cowork or Codex, or so they claimed. But I ran into bugs connecting LinkedIn. After spending time troubleshooting, I decided to use Bright Bean Studio while I figure out the issue. So far, I've been able to schedule content for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. X is not available (the API is paid), and LinkedIn API approval is taking its sweet time. My branding consultant raised questions about whether I need TikTok when I'm selling enterprise software. Fair concern. My thinking is that experimenting with the channel costs me very little at the moment. I also don't want to dismiss a potentially useful audience before testing it. Of course, being visible on TikTok and finding enterprise customers are two different things. We'll see. 3. SEO This is the one I believe could become especially valuable over time. But right now, my website traffic is terrible. In the gutters for sure. Fortunately, @shadrac_matata is an SEO specialist and has shared several strategies, including improvements I need to make to the Engimeets website. The challenge now is implementing those changes consistently and understanding what actually improves organic discovery. So, What's the Plan? I don't have an impressive marketing success story to share yet. No extraordinary conversion rates. No dramatic growth figures. Just experiments, mistakes, small signs of progress, and quite a bit of learning. I also won't repeat the popular rhetoric that marketing is more important than building the product. I think both are equally important. You need something worth buying, and you need people who understand why they should buy it. For now, my approach is to do the ordinary things repeatedly. My targets are: - Finding a brand voice for Engimeets that works - 4 posts per day on each social platform. - 60 targeted cold emails per day. - Continuous improvements to Atlas. - SEO improvements as I learn what works. Of course, the numbers alone won't mean much if I'm reaching the wrong people or publishing content nobody finds useful. So I'll keep watching the results and adjusting. The idea is to make these activities repeatable enough that marketing doesn't depend entirely on how motivated I feel on a particular day. Create content in batches. Schedule it. Reach out to relevant prospects. Improve the product. Rinse and repeat. I can't control when someone decides to become a customer. But I can control how consistently I do the work, how carefully I measure it, and what I learn from the results. For now, that's the experiment.

To get a DUNs number we pay a whopping Ksh 75,000. An engineer by recommendation requests for Ksh 35,000 as the backend had been done and examplary well. So good, I'd never seen a backend so smooth. The UI splendid. He jumps to works. Problems hits, he's a junior with a bad laptop.