I forgot how much tedious work there is to get a new venture like Knowlo off the ground!

While Slobodan and CofounderGPT work on Knowlo’s signup flow and other technical MVP stuff in Day 21, we’ll provide an update in today’s post on all of the various activities we have started over the last couple of weeks. we’re also going to be setting up Knowlo’s social media, setting up re-targeting pixels, and starting a Facebook ad campaign.

There’s lots to go over today so Let’s get right into it.

Google Ads

We submitted our ads for approval last time but while waiting, I found out that our conversion tracking was not set up correctly. When I was initially doing the signup, I went with something Google suggested which turned out to be wrong. So when I tested the conversions after the ads were approved, I saw that it wasn’t tracking properly so I paused the campaign to fix this issue before resuming it.

I made a few changes to our campaign including the days of the week (Monday to Friday), reducing the budget to $10 per day and making it only for desktop users. I know it narrows down the reach of the ad campaign, but I have a feeling that it’s more likely someone on a computer will sign up. I may be wrong, we’ll see how quickly Google goes through the budget and we’ll make adjustments accordingly.

Update: Over the 2 days that I’ve been writing this article, we’ve spent about $16 on Google ads, we’ve had 279 impressions of our ads, 37 clicks and we’ve captured 4 email addresses. This is a very promising start to our Google ads campaign!

Google Tag Manager and Google Ads Remarketing

While I’m still in the Google Ads account, I want to install the Google Remarketing Tag. Although It’s a little early to be thinking about remarketing, we want to start gathering data on our audience so that we can do more effective retargeting later. And the sooner we start gathering data, the more data we’ll have when we’re ready to start.

Here is a quick explanation from CofounderGPT on what the Remarketing Tag is and how it ties in with Google Tag Manager:

Google Remarketing is a form of online advertising that enables sites to show targeted ads to users who have already visited their site. This is a powerful way to stay engaged with your target audience, as it presents them with highly relevant ads and offers across the Web, which in turn keeps your brand at the top of their mind.

The technology behind Google Remarketing is a “Remarketing Pixel” or “Tag”. This is a short snippet of code that you place on your website. The tag places a cookie in the user’s browser when they visit your site. This cookie then lets you show remarketing ads to those users as they browse other sites within the Google Display Network or as they search for terms related to your products on Google.

Keep in mind that Google has moved towards using the Google Ads tag and Google Tag Manager for implementing remarketing tags, instead of the traditional remarketing pixel.

The Google Ads tag is a piece of code that works with Google Tag Manager to enable remarketing and conversion tracking among other features.

CofounderGPT

Allow me to use a simple example to explain. A year or two ago, I was checking out some Adidas shoes online and I may have even put a shoe in the cart. But then I left the website without buying anything. For the next few weeks, I was being followed around the internet with Adidas ads with the shoes I was looking at on their website. Something similar has most likely happened to you with another brand at some point online. You may be wondering how they do that? It’s through the Google Remarketing Tag and similar tags from Facebook, LinkedIn and other companies.

So I signed up for a Google Tag Manager account and then followed the instructions in this Youtube video to set up Google Ads Remarketing.

Microconf and Product Hunt

If you read our Day 20 update, You’ll know that we asked for some advice from the Microconf and Product Hunt communities on how to get some beta users. As of today, there have been no replies on the Product Hunt thread except from my buddy who wrote a comment of support. And the Microconf thread got a few questions but no suggestions. One person noted that what we’re doing is very interesting.

However, we did get about 30 visitors to our website from these two posts and at least 1 person that came from Microconf signed up to our waitlist. I say “at least” because our conversion tracking was not working properly for a few days and there may have been one or two more signups that we can’t attribute. So this wasn’t a total waste of time but it definitely did not yield the results that we were hoping for. And if we didn’t get many answers by now, It’s highly unlikely anyone will answer these threads in the future.

I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get anything from Microconf. I know there are some great people in this community but it seems that the Microconf Slack is not as active as it used to be a few years ago. For Product Hunt, we’ll do a proper launch once the beta is actually ready and that may actually bring some users. We had some success when we launched Vacation Tracker on Product Hunt so hopefully we can recreate some of that with Knowlo.

Social Media Accounts

Next, we’ll create all the social media accounts for Knowlo. we’re not sure which social media accounts we’ll use in the future to promote the product so we’ll create accounts and pages with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok. we’re going to try to lock in the Knowlo name on each of these platforms:

1. LinkedIn: creating the LinkedIn page for Knowlo was very simple, you just have to fill in one form if you already have a LinkedIn account. I asked CofounderGPT to write the tagline for the page and the description. I quickly generated a tree of life as our icon for the page and a ship out at sea as our cover image. we’ll make improvements to everything later. Here is the link to our page, please follow it: https://www.linkedin.com/company/knowloai/.
2. Facebook: I really passionately dislike Facebook. I haven’t logged into Facebook for years so I was worried about setting up the Facebook page. In fact, it turned out to be super simple. The first form I had to fill out was 3 input fields and I was able to use the tagline we created for LinkedIn for our Facebook page as well. Although the image dimensions for Facebook the facebook profile and cover images are slightly different than the ones for LinkedIn, I was able to reuse the LinkedIn ones without having to create new ones. Here is a link to our page, please follow it: https://www.facebook.com/TryKnowlo/
3. Twitter: I used the same text and images as for Facebook and LinkedIn, and created a Twitter profile for Knowlo, here is the link that you should follow: https://twitter.com/knowloai
4. Instagram: Again, same text and images as in the previous 3 social networks in order to maintain consistency, here is the link that you should follow: https://www.instagram.com/knowloai/
5. TikTok: The famous TikTok which I never used up until today, but was told by someone I trust to create a TikTok profile for Knowlo while creating the other social media profiles. I really don’t see us using this but it didn’t take long to set up, so I did it along with the others: https://www.tiktok.com/@vacationtrackerapp

Intro post for LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook

Now that we have all of our social media accounts created, Let’s do an introductory post so that there is something on each of these pages. For that, we’ll ask for CofounderGPTs help:

Context:
You are a social media expert who specializes in creating high-converting content. Your job is to create content for Knowlo on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

We just created our social media profiles for Knowlo and we need to do an introductory post for each of them.

The introductory posts should mention that you (CofounderGPT), Slobodan and I are working on Knowlo. The posts should say a little bit about what Knowlo is and what the team has done so far. The posts should also encourage people to sign up for our upcoming beta because they’ll get 6 months of Knowlo for free if they sign up early. The posts should also mention that we are building Knowlo publicly and that people can follow us to learn more about how we’re working with an AI cofounder, CofounderGPT, to build Knowlo.

Instructions:
1) Please write 3 different variations of introductory LinkedIn posts which follow all the best practice recommendations for creating engaging content for LinkedIn. Make sure to start the post with an engaging hook of 250 characters. No hashtags or emoticons.

2) Please write 3 different variations of introductory Twitter threads which follow all the best practice recommendations for creating engaging content for Twitter. Make sure that you are within Twitters character limits. Only use 1 hashtag in the thread and no emoticons.

3) Please write 3 different variations of introductory Facebook posts which follow all the best practice recommendations for creating engaging content for Facebook.

With this prompt, the first answer produced by CofounderGPT was actually pretty decent. But I asked for improvements with some suggestions each time. And then I picked out the ones I thought were best out of the 5 variations provided by CofounderGPT.

Before posting on social media, I think we need a cover image for the post. CofounderGPT provided some suggestions, one of which was a picture of the three Cofounders watching a rocket taking off. We then made a Midjourney prompt and tried to recreate this idea visually. But Midjourney still struggles when you introduce numbers like “2 humans and a friendly robot” and for some reason, these types of prompts confuse it. But we were able to get the two humans and a rocket in one of the variations from Midjourney, and now that Adobe has released the new Photoshop with Generative Fill, we added the robot using Photoshop. Here is the final image we posted on social media:

The new Photoshop is pretty powerful and we’re lucky that Vacation Tracker has a paid license to share so that we can make the adjustments to this image. One other tool that I’ve been playing around with which is free and pretty cool is Clipdrop from Stability.ai, the people behind Stable Diffusion. In this case, I used it to upscale the image to make it a little cleaner looking and ready for social media.

With this image and the text written by CofounderGPT, I posted everything on the Knowlo LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook profiles. I don’t see much value in posting to Instagram and TikTok yet, so we’ll just hold those accounts for later.

Facebook Ads

With our social media profiles created, we can finally get to trying out some Facebook ads. We want to spend about $100 USD on Facebook ads so Let’s try to create a small campaign. I’m kind of familiar with how Facebook Ads work but It’s been years since I’ve seen the dashboard and its probably changed quite a bit since.

We already have a Facebook Ads account for Vacation Tracker that we don’t use much anymore. So I just added another ad account under that one and luckily it was pretty easy to get started.

I turned to CofounderGPT for help to write some ad copy. But first, I want to make sure it knows what It’s talking about when it comes to Facebook ads. Here is our short conversation on this topic: https://sharegpt.com/c/2FBnsNE

Sounds about right. Now with this information, Let’s start a new Facebook campaign.

The Facebook ad manager is a little more clunky and complicated than the Google Ads one. I asked CofounderGPT which campaign objective we should go with and we agreed that Traffic is the best one given that we want people to come to our website and sign up.

Making Facebook Ad Groups

After creating the campaign, Facebook ad manager took me into the individual ad groups where I could create the ads. Here are some of the settings that we chose for our ad groups before starting the actual ad copy:

• Performance goal: Maximize number of landing page views
• Budget: $5 per day
• Campaign duration: June 12th to June 23rd
• Audience:

According to Facebooks estimates, this campaign could have a decent reach for $5 per day:

I don’t expect incredible results. Facebook has usually performed quite poorly for us and I think It’s because we’ve been trying to push B2B software on a platform that’s much more oriented towards B2C. we’ve completely given up on running Facebook ads in Vacation Tracker but the clicks on Facebook are so cheap that I think It’s worth spending under $100 over 10 days to see if we might get some people interested in the Knowlo beta launch.

Writing copy for the Facebook Ads

Next, we need to create the actual ads. I’m going to ask CofounderGPT to write up all the necessary copy:

Context:
You are an award-winning expert marketer with 10+ years of experience creating Facebook ads that convert. We are going to write ads that are going to go into our target audience’s feed with the goal of getting them to visit our website and to sign up for the beta of our product. Our goal is to attract some beta users for Knowlo and we are offering 6 months for free to those who signup early.

Here are the two templates we are going to follow:

Template 1: The Problem-Solver
Post Copy: Struggling with [common problem]? Discover the simple way to [achieve the desired result]. Find out how our tool can transform your business today.
Headline: Meet [Your Product], Your New [Business Area] Solution

Template 2: The Invitation
Post Copy: Ready for a [business area] revolution? We’re inviting a select few to test drive [Your Product] in our exclusive beta program. Claim your spot now!
Headline: Exclusive Beta Invitation: Experience [Your Product] First

Instructions:
– Please provide several variations of each template with copywriting relating to Knowlo and designed to convert.
– Provide the text for above the image.
– Please provide the primary text, headline and description for the Facebook ad
– Provide some catchy copy and a CTA for an image that will accompany the ad

With this long prompt, I got something pretty decent out of CofounderGPT. I asked for 1 additional variation and that was enough to create the set of ads for Facebook that we can A/B test. But we need something visual to attach to this ad, and the website picture Facebook pulls up by default is horrible.

Ad Visuals

We use Canva for this type of stuff at Vacation Tracker so I asked our marketing manager for some help and guidance. The reason we like Canva is that it has templates for most things You’ll need as a small business, including Facebook ad images.

We created two basic visual templates to test out:

We’ll use one of these visuals with variation A and the other with Variation B.

Publishing the Ads

I was getting ready to click publish and I realized that Facebook was going to release these ads all over its network including Instagram and Messenger. So I went back and set it only to Facebook. I think even Facebook is not a fantastic channel for this type of product but Instagram in my mind is the last place we would advertise for Knowlo.

After setting up the “A” group, I set up the “B” group using the copy that CofounderGPT wrote and the alternate image. Now we just have to wait a bit for Facebook to approve our ads and they’re scheduled to start showing for 2 weeks starting June 12th.

Facebook Pixel

As I was preparing this campaign, Facebook pointed out that the Facebook pixel was not installed. So that’s another thing that was done while finalizing the Facebook ads campaign: install the Facebook WordPress plugin and then connect it to the Facebook ads account.

Now we are able to track conversions, and if we ever want to do remarketing later, we’re collecting data on Facebook around the people who interacted with our website.

Why Facebook Ads and Not LinkedIn Ads?

You may be asking yourself why we went with Facebook and not LinkedIn? After all, we said earlier that Facebook is more oriented towards B2C. And since Knowlo is more of a B2B product LinkedIn would be a logical choice to do marketing on since It’s a network for professionals and it has all kinds of company information allowing us to segment our ads in various ways.

There are two reasons we are going with Facebook. First, we used it with Vacation Tracker and for a small amount of money, we did manage to capture a few email addresses. And then we were never able to make it work after we actually launched the product. Second, LinkedIn ads are really expensive and you burn through your budget very quickly. Seeing as we’re a scrappy startup, we can get a lot more people onto the Knowlo website using Facebook because the clicks there are much cheaper. we’ll see how this strategy turns out.

Scoreboard

Although we set-up Facebook ads, no money was spent yet today on those ads.

Time spent today: 8h

Total time spent: 153h

Investment today: $0 USD

Total investment: $1,141.54 USD

Beta list subscribers: 57

Paying customers: 0

Revenue: $0

What’s Next

We’re hoping to finalize the MVP before Slobodan goes on vacation at the end of June. So he and CofounderGPT are hustling to tie all the remaining loose threads while I hope to finally get to the sales article done next.