This is the last of 3 articles relating to our pre-launch checklist. Check out Day 31 and Day 33 to see the rest of the prep work we are doing to get Knowlo ready for launch.

When I started writing Day 34, the plan was to finalize the pre-launch checklist and then explain in detail how we’re going about setting the initial price for Knowlo. But the article was getting too long and a little over the place. So, I decided to break it into two pieces and make the pricing article stand-alone, given how vital pricing is for startups.

There is not a lot remaining on the pre-launch checklist, so today, we’ll finish all the items that are remaining, we’ll provide an update on our problems with WordPress, we’ll give an update on our beta customers, and we’ll reactivate our Google Ads campaign to bring some more leads to our website.

Let’s do this.

Legal and Compliance

The 8th item on the pre-launch checklist are the legal and compliance aspects of Knowlo. We’ll need some Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy for the product. Since we’re a startup, we’re not going to overthink GDPR. Especially since we are using publicly available data for training the tooltips and no personal identifiable information (PII) goes into Knowlo. 

We’ll certainly tighten up our privacy policy and terms and conditions later if Knowlo starts taking off, and we’ll also look at being more compliant with GDPR. But at this stage, we need a simple Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to get started.

Luckily, we already went through this once with Vacation Tracker and have a solid Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. So we will use those as a template and simplify them to suit our needs at Knowlo.

But when we were getting started, we got our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy from a website called Privacypolicies.com, where they sell various templates for different types of legal agreements, including the two that we need.

This website works by asking you a bunch of questions about your product and then generating the policy for you. It’s fantastic for getting started, and they even have a free option for those limited on budget. We actually took the paid versions of both for Vacation Tracker because we needed some of the more advanced legal options.

Anyway, for Knowlo, I took the Privacy Policy we had and pasted it into CofounderGPT. Then I asked CofounderGPT, with its context about Knowlo, to suggest improvements and changes. I did the same thing for the Terms of Service. In both documents, I removed unnecessary parts and changed others to adapt them for Knowlo.

This is good enough to start and it didn’t cost us anything this time.

Feedback and Beta User Communication

Initially, Slobodan and I plan on being very hands-on with all the users we onboard. We need to understand their pain points and how Knowlo can help them. So, we’ll gather feedback regularly and try to make fast product improvements.

One mechanism will be the Crisp chat system we set up on Day 31. Customers will be able to chat with us to ask questions and we’ll take that opportunity to gather feedback.

We’ll also have a form inside the product, and we’ll send emails to our customers asking them to help a startup by providing some feedback.

Most importantly, for the first six months, Slobodan and I will schedule follow-up calls regularly with all the customers we onboard. In our experience, the best way to gather feedback is to talk to customers directly on Zoom, by phone or in person.

WordPress problems

Believe it or not, we still haven’t figured out what exactly broke the Knowlo website about two weeks ago. We figured out why the theme was breaking; that had to do with Elementor updating itself. And we fixed that. But something else happened that converted apostrophes, hyphens and quotes into question marks in most of the articles that we published. 

Many people have looked at this problem, from the most junior WordPress developer (me) to the most senior WordPress developer (someone from Vacation Tracker), with a few people in between. I didn’t want to bother Slobodan with this because he’s busy finalizing the Knowlo MVP.

When we figure this out, I’ll write a short update. In the meantime, we’ve manually cleaned up the most recent articles and one of the superstar developers on Vacation Tracker’s team is looking into cleaning up the rest. We’re very fortunate to have knowledgeable people around us who can help!

Update on Beta Customers

Our waitlist has been growing slowly over the last 8 weeks because we haven’t published many articles over the summer. Usually, we get a small bump in signups every time we write an update. But since there have been few updates recently, we’ve only added 4 people to the list in the last three weeks. This is why we’ve decided to reactivate our Google Ads campaign, which I’ll talk more about in the next section.

Besides our mailing list, we’ve gotten two more beta customers through our network. The first is Master Your Rush, a point-of-sale restaurant system run by a friend I reconnected with recently. And the second is Lufa Farms, an awesome Montreal-based agriculture startup founded by a good friend.

When we finally launch, which I sincerely hope will be in the next 2-3 weeks, we’ll have at least 5 confirmed beta customers and 4 scheduled demos from our network. And then, hopefully we’ll be able to convert at least another 5-10 of the emails on our waitlist into beta customers.

Google Ads campaign

We had some decent results with the Google Ads campaign we set up on Day 20 and it didn’t cost us very much on a per-click basis:

So we’ve decided to invest another $150 into a small ad campaign over the next 3 weeks to bring more attention to the product—$ 50 per week, $10 per day, only on weekdays.

We already have some ad copy that CofounderGPT wrote on Day 18, which performed well during the last campaign. We also have some data on which keywords and which ads did well. So, I just reactivated our campaign with the best-performing keywords and ads and set it to start on Monday.

Let’s see if we can get some more people interested in Knowlo.

What’s Next?

Today’s article is not super detailed because it was supposed to include a part about how we will price Knowlo. But the way we’re calculating how to set the price will make your head spin and is the subject of the following article.

Scoreboard

Time spent today: 6h

Total time spent: 230h

Investment today: $0

Total investment: $1,306.60USD

Beta list subscribers: 96

Paying customers: 0

Revenue: $0