Thread by @dickiebush

4 months. 621 members. 18,630 Atomic Essays.

The last 120 days of Ship 30 for 30 have been epic.

We've built a community on accountability and consistency to empower the internet's next generation of writers.

Here's the tech stack that's driving it 👇🏼🔌

The TL;DR:

• Landing page: @carrd, @shoutoutso_
• Course: @podia
• Community: @slack, @circleapp
• Video: @Zoom, @LumaHQ
• Emails: @ConvertKit
• Analytics: @dr, @hypefury
• Surveys: @typeform
• Atomic Essays: @figmadesign, @andreynocap
• Money: @stripe. @BankMercury

Ship 30 for 30 is a 30-day community-based writing challenge.

Every day for 30 days, members ship an Atomic Essay (more on them later)

Ship 30 for 30 helps beginner writers overcome the most-common struggles in building a writing habit.

Learn more: ship30for30.com

1/ Landing Page, Domain, Checkout

Ship 30 went from idea to MPV in a few days.

I built the landing page in @carrd, bought the domain on @Namecheap, and embedded it with a @typeform connected to @stripe.

Five days later, we had a bustling @slack group and the shipping began.

After the first cohort, we wanted to leverage the social proof of our members.

So we worked with @5harath from @shoutoutso_ to embed a Wall of Love right on our landing page.

Every time someone tweets about Ship 30 for 30, we add it to the wall.

wall.shoutout.so/dickiebush

2/ Email

In the first cohort I used my personal Gmail. This worked fine, but we needed a better solution to scale.

@ConvertKit does it all for us - segmenting, tagging, automation, and seamless integration with everything.

It's a delightful product and one I highly recommend.

Now @convertkit handles three things for us:

• Free email course
• Community email course
• One-off communications

Their segmenting and automation save us hours every week.

It's a set it and forget it system that is worth investing in from the beginning.

3/ Course hosting

The initial "course" was a @NotionHQ doc that gave each shipper everything they needed to know.

This worked fine until we launched the referral program.

We needed an all-in-one solution that handled products, courses, membership, and referrals.

We found @podia and it does everything we need.

• Courses
• Products
• Referrals
• Memberships

And seamless integration with @stripe and @convertkit

The only negative: its landing page builder and email are 4/10.

But I know the team is working on it

4/ Community management

We started with @Slack, but it got noisy.

But that was because we didn't set proper guidelines or expectations.

At ~250 people, things get lost easily if there aren't crystal clear instructions for what goes in which channel.

So we tried @CircleApp

My thoughts: @circleapp is a solid product and on a great trajectory, but has a ways to go to cross the chasm.

Feedback from members was it felt "out of the way" and hard to navigate.

My biggest cons:

• Clunky mobile
• No group chat
• Brutal notifications

So, back to "Boomer Discord" we go (aka @slack)

But we feel good about the changes we are making to quiet things down a bit and have more evergreen conversations.

https://twitter.com/ianmiell/status/1366102348398006276?s=20

But the most important part of the Ship 30 for 30 community is Twitter.

By "being a community in public" we drive engagement and awareness for the program and its members.

Check out the 🚢 emojis, #ship30for30, and community feedback sessions.

AND, @TwitterSpaces coming soon

5/ Live Sessions + Workflows

We host weekly Office Hours sessions on Saturday morning and a community-led session on Sundays.

• We use @Zoom / @lumahq
• We share workflows with @loom
• We record every session to @youtube and take detailed recap notes in @notionhq

6/ Analytics

Ship 30 for 30 is a data-driven program.

We encourage writers to share ideas on Twitter and get immediate feedback from the market.

Share ideas -> interpret the data -> iterate

Twitter is the ultimate idea place for idea refinery.

Most Atomic Essays start as tweets.

When the market validates an idea, we tell our writers to double down.

To keep track of analytics. we use ilo.so from @dr and @hypefury from @Yannick_Veys.

Shippers get special discounts on both products (we love them!)

7/ Surveys

We use @typeform because of how well it integrates with everything else.

It's a little on the pricier side at $35/mo, and Google Forms is a fine alternative.

We use surveys almost every day to get quick feedback and continue to iterate.

8/ Atomic Essays

The foundation of Ship 30 for 30: The Atomic Essay.

It started as a crappy screenshot in a text editor.

Then, we built a @figma template and gave it to every member to use.

From there @andreynocap built an incredible web app.

Here's the evolution:

9/ Money

The money stack is simple.

• We accept payments via @stripe
• We incorporated via @stripe Atlas
• We do banking with @bankmercury

We're looking for an accounting service, leaning towards @Xero, @Bench, or @QuickBooks

Imagine the internet without @stripe 🤯

10/ That's the whole stack!

We want to keep things lean.

Total expenses:

• @Zoom: $25
• @Loom: $10
• @Typeform: $35
• @Podia: $79
• @Hypefury $19
• @NotionHQ: $5
• @ConvertKit: $60

It blows my mind how inexpensive it is to run an internet community.

11/ If you found this thread valuable:

• Follow me @dickiebush for more threads on writing and building.

• Ask a question in the replies - I've made every mistake under the sun.

• Share the original tweet so other builders can find it:

https://twitter.com/dickiebush/status/1372671344530325520?s=20

I can contribute 100% of this community to one thing:

Writing every day.

There are three days left to join the next Ship 30 for 30 cohort.

Get involved:

Ship30for30.com

This is the kind of data-driven writing @Nicolascole77 and I preach in Ship 30 for 30.

I tweeted out the tech stack in a single tweet.

It received a ton of engagement and follow-up questions.

Idea -> market validation -> execution.

https://twitter.com/dickiebush/status/1369086817450987523?s=20

And now 115k impressions later, there is more market validation.

Seems people are interested in learning about launching and managing challenge-based communities.

Noted 👀👀👀