We’ve decided to jump on board the ‘build in the open’ train and regularly write about what we’re trying to do, why we’re doing it and how it’s going.

We pushed Hakune live April 21 and since then have been trying to ‘find our feet’ which to us means exploring what we want todo with this thing and how we’re going to do it.

Nothing we do is set in stone but here’s a few solids we’ve landed on.

1. We’re creating content to help business owners and entrepreneurs build and grow their companies
2. We’re trying to create best in class content to provides more value than any other content in the same categories
3. We want to become the largest mixed-media business help content creator in the world
4. We want to create the world’s best community for business owners and builders

Those are lofty goals and sound silly at the moment but that’s what we want to do.

They sound even more ridiculous when you see how slow our progress has been to date.

Stealing from the growth machine blog we’re roughly tracking our progress towards these goals via KPI’s like;

1. Article Published
2. Backlinks
3. Keyword Rankings
4. Traffic
5. Conversions

In September we

1. Blogs Published | 0
2. Total Backlinks | 0
3. Ranking Keywords | 1
4. Domain Authority | 1
5. Traffic | 148
6. Conversions | 4

NZ Entrepreneur is who we see as the leader for entrepreneurial content in New Zealand at the moment. They’re doing ~10,000 visits per month, have a DA of 32 and are a long way ahead for content frequency, backlinks and so on.

In future updates I’ll start breaking down our spend such as domain hosting, ad spend and hopefully contractor wages in the near future. I don’t see any revenue in the near future, which we expected.

On the bright side ‘NerdWallet’ is a blog about personal finance, which is about to float with a public valuation of $5 Billion only made $75 dollars in its first year.

Across September we experimented with different cpc lead generation campaigns at a $5 per day spend. This worked okay 2% conversion, when the lead magnet matched the blog post and worked terribly when it didn’t.

We set up Facebook and Instagram pages and ran acquisition tests for traffic here too. Achieving ~$1 per click for content and ~$1 per follower. These tests have stopped for now until something more sustainable is set up.

October like most months ahead will be more experimentation in line with the Bullseye method and trying to grow our audience. We see building our email list as the most important metric to optimise for atm.

Until next month.