Hey there,

It’s Edgar from Engyne here, a tool that makes it easy to write content and build pages for SEO using AI. I’m coming back from a hiatus on writing these weekly updates due to a mix of heads-down work and personal travel since Sukh and I wrapped up our onboarding month of the On Deck Fellowship in San Francisco last month.

That being said, we’ve been making steady progress, and we’re excited to share the latest updates with you. Here’s the archive if you want to review our past issues.

In this edition, we’ll consolidate the past few weeks into a condensed version so we can resume next week and get back to going “full steam ahead”🚂.

Let’s dive in.

Wins & Updates

• Built early marketing engine and grew to $1000+ MRR

  • We were excited to share that we doubled revenue during the last week of May, breaking $1000+ MRR for the first time 🎉

  • We’re currently driving new leads from 3 channels: Twitter (where we’re posting often by building in public), podcasts, and newsletters like the features we shared in our last issue.

  • Our goal is to hit 10-20K MRR by end of year, which would prove that we have product market fit and show we can acquire new customers in a predictable and scalable way.

  • That said, not all revenue is good revenue, and we decided to off-board a customer last week after working with them to integrate our tool into a custom site and realizing that it wasn’t the best fit.

  • As we’ve shared in previous issues, we’ll always optimize for the long term. Hitting goals is great, but staying true to our values and using every situation as a learning opportunity will allow us to build a company that lasts.

• Shipped major product updates

  • Since building a prototype for our new AI feature for the May hackathon, Sukh has been hard at work on shipping some major product updates.

  • The first was refactoring our code to overcome a bug that was crashing the database. Now that we’re onboarding more customers, we’ve had to shift to building systems that can handle larger loads, vs writing code that only catered to a small number of users.

  • This will be an ongoing theme, as balancing speed and scalability to fight “scope creep” is a never-ending challenge that product teams face.

  • The second was building a Product Release Document (PRD) to outline how to incorporate our new feature into the existing product.

  • We’ve identified that startups that want to win with content marketing have to perform 4 steps:

    • Research what to write

    • Write the content

    • Analyze results

    • Improve and repeat the process

  • As a result, we’ve broken down each step into specific features and built a roadmap to address each one.

  • We’ve prioritized getting the content writing feature out in our upcoming release, and we’re excited to roll out the others soon.

• Kicked off initial fundraising efforts

  • Given our early momentum, we decided to flesh out our overall vision and fundraising strategy by building an initial pitch deck and getting feedback from the On Deck team and other supporters.

  • We also submitted an updated YCombinator application (Sukh and I originally applied separately as we hadn’t met before the deadline) and got 10+ recommendations from YC alum.

  • Despite our traction and recommendations, we weren’t selected for an interview, but got valuable feedback on areas of our business that weren’t clear.

  • We’re still not actively raising capital, but now have a better idea of the areas we’d need to address if we choose to pursue that route.

Learnings & Lessons

• Build community early

  • There’s been a lot of hype around “product-led growth in the past few years, but the new theme has been “community-led growth.

  • In the early days, building a community of customers and supporters can help you move forward faster as you bring people along for the ride. Many of our customers and features have come from the communities we’ve joined (On Deck, Build In Public Fellowship, Indie Worldwide, etc)

  • The first step to building community is to focus on how you can help others and provide real value. This allows you to become known as an expert for solving a specific problem.

  • For example, we’ve helped a lot of On Deck fellows with growth strategy, SEO, and content marketing so when they’re looking for a tool to streamline their marketing efforts, they tend to choose us.

  • The same applies for most things in business or life. As Gary Vee says often: “Give, give, give, then ask”.

• Measure what matters

  • There’s a quote from Peter Drucker, a well known management guru, that goes: “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”.

  • When building a startup, it’s easy to get excited about top line numbers like revenue but the more important question to answer is the fundamental one: have you built something that solves a problem?”

  • Monitoring the right KPIs makes sure you’re focused on the right indicators that the health of your business. For us, that means helping our customers generate organic traffic, clicks, and ultimately sales but it’s also important to measure product usage over time, and check back in with customers at a regular cadence to make sure they’re still getting value from the product.

  • Ultimately, aligning your success with your customer’s success creates the best outcomes for everyone.

Gratitudes & Asks

Gratitudes

• Thank you to Erika, Gonz, and Alexandra from the On Deck team for your feedback on our fundraising strategy and narrative.

• Thank you to @wuweiweiwu for helping us through our technical architecture challenges.

• Thank you @pagebakers and @aaronkazah for helping with front end design.

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