Hey there,

This is Edgar from Engyne. Thanks so much for your support on this newsletter launch! We’re at 20 subscribers so far with zero promotion (we haven’t shared it anywhere yet outside of personal 1:1 conversations).

20 people may not feel like a lot, as the world tells us to focus on big numbers. But in the grand scheme of things, having a small group of people truly believe in us and find value in the learnings we share is more than enough motivation to keep going.

We’re grateful for your time and attention, and excited to have you follow along with our journey. Later on, we’ll do a broader marketing push, but right now we’re heads down on product so we’ve decided to wait a bit (more on prioritization below).

With that said, let’s dive into this week’s update:

What is Engyne again?

Engyne is a tool that lets you build programmatic SEO landing pages—without writing a line of code. We help you build, customize, and publish hundreds of landing pages in seconds to boost organic traffic, leads, and sales so you can grow your business with ease.

Wins & Updates

• Established a product cycle + our roadmap for the next 2 weeks

  • Using a framework from YCombinator, we established a weekly product cycle where we plan the features, bug fixes, and updates we’ll make to the product.

  • We have a few powerful features on the way leveraging AI to speed up content marketing, and we’re excited to roll them out over the next few weeks.

  • This video from Micheal Seibel breaks down the process we’re running and is a simple way to make sure you’re building something that users want. Feel free to check it out and let us know what you think!

• Fixed an issue that was crashing the database by migrating over to AWS

  • We ran into a bug last week that kept crashing the database.

  • Migrating to Amazon Web Services fixed the issue, and will give us a stronger foundation to bring on more customers as we scale.

• Onboarded initial customers and switched over to a waitlist

  • We spent a good chunk of time onboarding our initial customers last week and switched over to a waitlist to ensure we’re controlling our bandwidth.

  • As part of our onboarding, we hop on 1:1 calls with every customer, and do a fair amount of manual work to ensure they’re set up for success.

  • While this isn’t scalable, it’s critical to do in the early days as their feedback helps guide our product direction, and we can make sure each person has an amazing experience.

  • As Paul Graham from YC says: “Do things that don’t scale”.

Learnings & Lessons

• Focus is critical in the early days

  • YCombinator has a mantra of “build product and talk to users” in the early days of building a startup. Everything else is a distraction.

  • We really felt this last week, as we had a chance to attend Stripe Sessions, a one-day conference hosted by Stripe including a fireside chat with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

  • While the talk was informative and we had a great time at the conference, we didn’t really move the business forward that day outside of making a few new connections.

  • As a result, we cleared our schedule for this week, and have been more intentional about managing our time.

• Accomplish one “Top Goal” every day

  • Building on the idea of focus, one helpful framework we’ve been using is to set a primary goal for each day (coined as “Top Goal”) and schedule a two hour block to focus only on that thing.

  • Ideally, you should schedule this block at the beginning of your day (mine is from 9am - 11am), so you can focus on getting it out of the way before moving to anything else.

  • That way, you’re flexible enough to adjust to issues or serendipity as things come up, while still making consistent forward progress every day.

Gratitudes & Asks

• Gratitudes

  • Thank you to all our early customers. We’re excited to work with you to scale your businesses. Your success is our success.

  • Thank you to Justine and Tas from Kindred for sharing their co-founder fundamentals doc. Sukh and I spent an hour and a half going through each point, discussing the hard things along the way. This is a great resource for anyone navigating co-founder relationships so feel free to check it out if you’re a founder looking to establish a strong foundation for your startup.

• Asks

  • None this week!

Thanks for reading to the end! If you have any questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to hit reply. We read every one :)

See you next week!

Thanks,

Edgar & Sukh

Co-founders of Engyne

P.S. Here’s a fun pic of us at Stripe Sessions!