The current version of Marketing Frameworks is far from the original iteration. This project has gone through a countless series of revamps and restarts over the years.
The original idea was to make a marketing course. I had spent decades in marketing and it seemed fitting to get it all out into the world as a series of detailed lessons.
After spending a ridiculous amount of time demoing and testing different course delivery apps and iterating through design after design… I threw a landing page up and got to work on the slides which would end up being the basis for the course.
This is a small snapshot of the dozens of slide decks created for this application.
None of the course systems seemed “good enough” as in they all lacked at least one thing I was looking for.
The biggest drawback to the course in general was the lack of ongoing payments.
Enter pivot #1 – build a SaaS instead.
I had found a cheap customizable script and spent over 3 months trying to customize it and tailor it to my brand. This was the first iteration of the software…
However… it wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible by any means and it technically worked, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to build. I put together over 20 long PDFs of course work (~300 pages of content), built the script out to fix a ton of bugs, made 43 marketing chatbots and tested thousands of prompts to build this out.
…and no one signed up.
The reason as – it was a bloated mess. It didn’t solve any particular problem. It’s like selling an entire Home Depot inventory to someone who needs a hammer.
The worse part was… I didn’t like it. It was sort of cool, and it was fun to build out the branding; it looked nice and had tons of features. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to sell something you don’t think is actually great.
Once that realization hit me, I took the whole thing down and started over.
Enter the final pivot #2 – start from scratch / learn how to code.
I always sort of knew how to code but never started something from scratch. I could build a WordPress site in no time or hack through a Magento theme but this time I was going to build what I really wanted. An AI enabled marketing framework generator. Not outputting blocks of text, but actually outputting the formatted framework.
Take this LEAN Marketing Framework for example.
That’s no PowerPoint slide, but actually direct output from the app.
It took another 3 months to get an MVP together and many more to get everything working but eventually the current iteration of https://marketingframe.works was done.
The real outcome of this project wasn’t just the app and the code, etc… it was learning tons of new platforms and technologies I never knew before.
I learned Laravel and the Jetstream boilerplate, how to integrate with the OpenAI API and generate styled, structured output instead of big blocks of text. I learned TailwindCSS, Adobe Premier, dabbled in After Effects, learned how to make SVGs in Illustrator and figured out how to launch with Fly.io.
As a part of the unexecuted marketing strategy, I started a YouTube channel, build a Twitch profile, customized OBS for streaming, and executed my 2nd ProductHunt Launch. Almost none of the of the marketing plan and strategy was actually executed though and still remains to be completed.
Additional notes:
- At one point, I thought of taking all of the content and making a book which would turn into an audiobook. Taking hundreds pages of text and having it turned into an audiobook through Amazon’s acx system is rather inexpensive. This audiobook would become the narration for all of the courses and videos, YouTube promos, etc… that ended at page 50 and abandoned.
- There are 30 YouTube video scripts sitting in a folder ready to be read by someone who doesn’t completely freeze up when anything is recording.
- I built out something called “Content Boost” to promote the Marketing Frameworks app: https://cb.marketingframe.works but only promoted it very lightly.
- There’s an entirely different homepage/landing page for http://marketingframe.works that’s never been finished.\
- I tried LinkedIn ads (with some free credit) and that was 90% spam clicks – all international, all bounces. At least it was free.
That’s the current story of Marketing Frameworks. I’m sure there will be more to add as things progress and we’ll see if it ever gets more than 2 users.