Season 5, Issue 2: Spread the Word 📢💖
Trying to get better at a thing that none of us are very good at.
1. Do Things, Tell People
The Good Enough team is made up of people who love building software. Collectively, we have about a century of work experience — probably 90% in designing and developing software and 10% in everything else. That’s great for building products but less so for building businesses.
Not one of us would call ourselves a natural marketer, or even say we enjoy that type of work. But we’re at a stage where a much larger percentage of our time needs to be spent marketing the very nice things we’ve built. Too often, though, we’re easily pulled away by the siren song of product work. It’s taking a lot of effort for us to step outside our collective comfort zone, but Matthew and I did recently show off Jelly at a Brooklyn Tech Expo:
In recent weeks, Cade volunteered to put down his IDE and step up to lead our marketing efforts. He’s currently speed-running his way through learning how to be a marketer, absorbing every bit of information he can get his hands on. If you have any great tips or tricks for product marketing — especially fun things to sponsor — send them his way!
(He might have written this update, but he’s out for spring break this week. I expect he’ll have more to share in future issues. 🤞)
—Patrick
2. Studio Update
It’s been a minute since we’ve last newsletter’d — that comforting siren song is strong! The rest of us continue to be heads down improving our products this winter (and don’t expect that to stop even though we’re all quite excited about spring starting next week 🌸).
On the Jelly side, besides continuous improvements like Bookmarking and Blocking Contacts, we’re neck-deep into two big projects:
We’re almost done changing Jelly’s text editor from Trix → Squire. This is a huge undertaking, as we have to rewrite how we handle attachments and @mentions and other niceties we’ve built into our current text editor. It’s worth it though since Squire can better handle how emails are coded, which unlocks a host of highly requested features like quoted replies, forwarding, and more. Stay tuned.
We announced a limited beta for connecting Jelly to Google, and begun the approval process Google requires to get this integration, well, approved! This integration will not only simplify the steps involved for teams that use Gmail to set up their shared email with Jelly, but it will also sync their sent mail back to Gmail too.
On the Pika side, we’ve really upped our game with images. We’re excited to finally offer both a click-to-zoom image lightbox for all images you upload to your blog, and the ability to set the alt text for your images. 💪 Accessibility ftw! We also shipped a number of other smaller improvements (e.g. Vimeo and MP3 embeds) in the past few months, and started blogging about the even smaller things you probably don’t notice. Follow along on Building Pika Out Loud.
Speaking of “been a minute”: While our focus over the last year has really honed in on improving Jelly and Pika, we do still run a number of other products that new folks are regularly finding and using. If you’re a new reader of our newsletter and came via Letterbird, Album Whale, our Guestbook, or somewhere else, welcome! 👋
—Matthew
3. Sharing is Caring
There’s no amount of busy that will keep us from sharing links!
Not only does MapQuest still exist, but they’re throwing punches!
Matthew wants you to know that some fonts work harder than others.
Barry’s looking to try a new recipe.
Share your [Bracket City] score with us!
Shawn doesn’t know what Pierre does, but thinks their website is 🔥🔥🔥
Patrick thinks Be My Eyes is a very cool way to help a stranger.
4. In Conclusion
We may not be experts, but even we know the most effective kind of marketing is word of mouth. A friend telling you about something cool is way more powerful than any ad we could ever run.
Remember those chain emails that warned something bad would happen if you didn’t forward them to a certain number of people? Well, what if this newsletter worked the same way — except instead of bad luck, forwarding it brought you good luck!? It would definitely help Good Enough keep building nice things.
OR MAYBE if you don’t forward this you’ll stub your toe and it will feel really crappy and you’ll think “I should have forwarded that newsletter to my friends ouch this really hurts!”
(Just kidding, your toe will be fine. Tell a friend!)
—Patrick