This week, I got stuck and unstuck again

How the new menu in 2Quiet2Market made me crazy, how I got unstuck, and what the next 5 weeks will bring to you.

Published: December 13, 2022

Hey all,

Matthias here again with the weekly update about the progress of 2Quiet2Market.

Last week was odd. You will have noticed that it's already Tuesday. Last week, I wrote on Monday. The week before, I wrote on Sunday (the day I really *planned* to do it).

So, I'm drifting, getting stuck, right?

Yes.

Working on re-usable marketing items

On the picture above, you see a new kind of menu on the left side of the screen. That's what I built last week.

The purpose of this menu is: You can re-use items of your marketing model that you defined on another board in the same project.

Why would you want to do that?

Well, marketing models become complicated when you're forced to cram everything onto the same board. Now you can use multiple boards to tell more stories about the same product.

Of course, you already defined your product, its features, qualities, and benefits. Let's say, you just want to write another story that talks about the same benefits, but for a different channel. Say, Reddit instead of Twitter.

Content for Reddit will look different from tweets for Twitter. It's longer and it is one instead of many.

So what you will be able to do is this:

• Open a second board
• Look at your previously created items in the menu on the left
• Drag and drop them onto the new board
• Drag and drop a new story from the right
• Link the re-used items to the new story
• Write copy for the new story and copy/paste it to Reddit.

So far so good. But...

This drag-and-drop thing made me crazy

In the old editor, it was impossible, that's why I created the new one (see my newsletter from a week ago). And I thought: That was it!

Nope.

The menu on the left has to show many items. Of course, it becomes scrollable. And that's where drag and drop becomes difficult to code because you have to track where that damn' thing actually is that your dearest user is currently dragging.

Fortunately, I asked Kilian Valkhof (Indie hacker who makes Polypane) for help. He looked at it for 10 minutes and gave me good advice that got me unstuck. Yay, thanks and praise to Kilian! 😄

Next day, I had to throw away part of my code. Again and again, until it finally worked.

And it is still not done (Example: I need to catch the case where the dear user hits the mouse button, does not drag, but releases the mouse while still within the menu. In that case, no item must be generated).

Phew, what a road block! But rest assured: I know I'm doing this *for you*, so I got enough motivation and energy to push this through.

What the next weeks will look like

This week, I will work in my day job (giving a training in software architecture for 10 people).

Then, 5 weeks with no day job to do. Wow! 😄

I'd really love to release the new menu from above, and more. My plan is to allow you to do these things in your marketing:

• Have pre-configured "channels", like Twitter, Reddit, ConvertKit, Ghost, WordPress, etc.
• Publish a Story that you composed in 2Quiet2Market, to one or more of those channels.
• Automatically generate marketing "tasks", complete with links to the story and the channel, so that you can execute them easily, one by one.
• Keep those tasks in the Todoist task management system, prioritize and track them there. (They have a generous free plan, more than enough for the typical solopreneur.)
• Focus on the most important task at hand, using Llamalife, for example. Easily switch between building and marketing, without getting confused ever again!

Sounds like a lot for only 5 weeks. But I'll try to make it happen!

What you can do to support me

You can do two things here:

1. Give me feedback about 2Quiet2Market itself, or about this newsletter here.
2. And: Buy a subscription. Currently, it's only $5 per month, for as long as your sub will live. Lock in your early adopter price now, at 2Quiet2Market.com.

Wish you a good time, have fun building and marketing. See you again next week!

Cheers,

Matthias