Weekly update #8 - Weekly progress update

Hi all, very late this time coming in on Monday evening! It was a bit of a hectic weekend with a work offsite on Thursday and Friday and then an interstate trip for a wedding Friday night to Sunday night. But glad to say I got my goals done earlier in the week (despite setting them 3 weeks ago, but hey, rolling with the punches here 👊).

Feeling a bit flat on the bike shop newsletter idea now. I managed to jump on a call with a bike shop manager (thanks again Dad!) who worked with my Dad previously. I felt like I got a bit of similar feedback as the previous shop owner, with this manager speaking about it being important to make the emails local, i.e. talking about what the local bike club is doing. Which I really don't think can be done in a scalable way while keeping it affordable for these businesses. It seems from these two chats that what shops really want is to have someone be able to tailor content for them. Which makes total sense, but they probably can't afford that generally. And for me, that is not the kind of business I want to be starting, the agency type model of back and forth for approval.

I think this is going to be a really hard slog to sell this in to shops. Not that I expect entrepreneurship to be easy, but I do want it to be exciting and fun, and I'm not sure I'll enjoy trying to convince people this is something their business needs, in a way that is sustainable for both me and them.

So I've got a bit to reflect on with it this week. That said, I've got a cold email I can send out so I'm going to have a crack at sending it to as many bike shops as I can find the emails for and see if anyone nibbles. I tried two this week and didn't hear back, but I did add email tracking and saw both opened it, so that is a positive. I'm going for the strategy of asking for feedback on the idea, as that worked for setting up a call with the industry expert initially.

Here's the cold email I've written:

Hi bike shop owner name,

I'm a software engineer based in Melbourne. I have a marketing background and I love biking. I'm working on an idea to help local bike shops with marketing and I'm reaching out to hopefully get some feedback from you as a shop owner. I've spoken with Phil Latz and he thought it was a great idea, so now I'm trying to see what bike shop owners and managers themselves think.

The idea is I'll create a fun, engaging, educational series of biking email newsletters to be sent monthly on behalf of bike shops to their email lists, making email marketing effortless for shops. The emails will include things like "top new mountain biking destinations around Australia", "what you need to know before getting into gravel riding", "latest trends in e-cargo bikes", etc. The sections included would be dynamic based on the disciplines the shop caters to. I'll customise them to add discount codes and links to the shop's sales in the specific categories each content section focuses on. The idea came from my Dad's realisation while doing email marketing for a shop up in the NSW South Coast that emails, while very effective for sales, are too time consuming and expensive for individual shops to do, so perhaps syndicating content for a number of shops would be better.

The goal is to get people looking forward to the next email, and give them reasons to get them back into the shop. The shop's branding and logo would be on the email as if the content is entirely written by them, and would be sent from their email address, in your case being from say "name from bike shop email@bikeshop.com".

While less direct sales focussed than traditional email marketing from your ecommerce store, these emails will create long term brand affiliation for the shop and make sure it is the place the reader goes back to when they need to upgrade their bike.

I know bike shop owners are very busy (hence the idea!) and this is a cold email so I'm not expecting anything, but I'd really appreciate 15 minutes of your time to jump on a call and get your feedback on the idea, see if you think it has legs or is just terrible. Please let me know if you are interested.

Thanks so much for reading!

This week's goals

Goal		Comments
Get landing page for business live	✅	Done! Got the landing page live here - https://bike-shop-landing.vercel.app/. I've just got it on a temporary domain as I've had way too many domain ideas and couldn't pick one haha. My initial thought for the business name was "Crank Up" I.e. bike crank / "crank up your bike shop" type of angle, so I've got that as the logo for now.
Reach out to one or two businesses to get initial feedback before trying to sell	✅	So I've reached out to a couple more bike shops, both local here in Melbourne. No responses from them yet, but need to send to a lot more I think, and it is pretty easy to do.

Life habits

You can probably see where I went on a work offsite and wedding in consecutive days 😆

	M	T	W	T	F	S	S
2🥛💧 in 🌅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
💪 20⏱	❌	🏃‍♂️	🏋️‍♂️	❌	❌	❌	❌
0🍻	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅
🛌 by 🕚	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅
❌ 🍔 🕘-🕐	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅

Next week's goals

Goal		Comments
Send email out to many more bike shops	-	-
Think more about whether this is the right business and makes sense	-	-