So yesterday I wrote about my first day doing Justin Jackson’s growing an email list to 1,000 class and the struggle of first time bootstrappers to build an audience.
The class continues
Today, we have to evaluate who are target audience should be. I think it’s pretty common for most bloggers to start writing about anything. I started talking about health and business topics because that’s what I was working on at the time. The content was also mostly educational. It didn’t help the reader in any way unless you just wanted to learn about health behaviour! By the end of the first iteration of Helthe, it was obvious I didn’t feel like writing about it. You should be passionate about what you write about!
A lot of the advice given is similar to what I had discussed when I started the PHP App Challenge. You should focus on your competitive advantage and the groups you are already part of that have money to spend (important!). I am very involved with WordPress, but I see myself as a PHP programmer more than just a WordPress programmer. So I want to write to programmers, but specifically those that work with PHP.
Another fortuitous discussion
For our homework, we had to come up with a statement to describe our audience and why were choosing them. I was struggling with the why, but then me and Justin started a discussion in the JFDI chatroom where we discussed PHP as a whole. This led to some great insight.
It started with me asking whether I could target programmers and still talk about products. He commented how there isn’t anyone talking about products using PHP or building products with PHP. I actually learned that Mailchimp is built entirely with PHP. This moved on, as it always does, to discuss how PHP is the second-rate citizen of the web. This has been mentioned many times on this blog already and it’s even the key reason I started Helthe.
To make PHP devs proud to be PHP devs
That line came from Justin, but it’s a great cause that any PHP dev can relate too. And just like that, I had my why. It’s a great why too. I can’t think of a week where I didn’t see this come up in conversation either in person or on the web.
I think it is partially why the community strives to do so much. There are so many cool projects going on and great developers working on them. I would say in the past 3 years, there has never been a day where I am not proud to be a PHP dev.
So following this new yet not so new insight, I finalized my homework statement for day 2.
“My name is Carl Alexander. The audience I am choosing is programmers who are using PHP, because PHP is awesome and we should be proud of using it.”
So things are shaping up
There’s a bit more of a mission statement around what this mailing list is going to be about. If you’ve liked what I have been writing, you can subscribe to my mailing list here! You can also keep checking the blog every day if that’s your thing!