Published on 04 February 2017
After the Game of Thrones episode, we sat in a mild stupor for a few minutes. Another character we liked was dead. It was 9:00 at night; we had been watching Game of Thrones over dinner, and then moved to the couch to finish the episode. Now the evening lay before us.
“Should we watch another one?”
I hovered over the next file, and realized that I wasn’t happy with that prospect. It would lessen the emotional force of our beloved character dying, for one. And, for two, I wasn’t doing anything. I was passively watching a TV show I had seen before, a story I knew so well I founded a community around it. I can do better than this.
“No, I want to make something.”
“Ok.”
That’s all it took. We got up, I put the kettle on to make some tea, and I sat down to work. I had had an idea in the back of my mind for months, but I hadn’t been actually doing it. The idea was to write gambling websites and casinos, and pitch The User Is Drunk at them. I’d never done it, but I’d kept it as a bit of a last resort, just sort of mulling over the concept in my mind. “Well, when I’m screwed, I can do this at least.”
Why not now?
It might be hard, and I saw myself getting stuck for hours on something stupid. I’d spent the last month trying to get one project out of the door, and wasted three weeks on thinking of a name for it. I didn’t want that. So, for this project, I gave myself a three hour deadline. Within three hours, I would build a consultancy website, I would do market research, and I would email 30 different companies asking if I could help them out.
Seems reasonable.
So, that’s what I did. I did some market research on other UX consultancies aimed at Casinos. Most of their sites were atrocious. I decided mine had to be only 50% better. It didn’t have to be great. I wanted a different site than The User Is Drunk, because I didn’t want it to be too tied to that brand - I wanted to pass myself off as a legitimate agency, even if it was only me.
Naming was easier. I had bought firstimpressions.io years ago, but hadn’t used it due to paralysis analysis. I decided sacrificing it to this effort wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Good - domain and name done. Next?
I found a theme for Hugo, which looked OK, downloaded it, found a header image on Unsplash , edited the content, threw in some logos for past clients of mine, set up Google Analytics and an email address alias for the domain, pushed the entire site to Netlify, added SSL, tested my build, added some custom CSS to make the title pop out a bit on the site because I didn’t want to spend too much time making it look pretty, and wrote a pitch email.
Any time I thought to myself, “I should make this better”, I remembered the deadline. No thinking. No asking for advice. Don’t get stuck on research. Just do. Over and over again, do.
I did all this in three hours. I spent an hour after looking at gambling websites, and realized that most of them hide away their ‘About Us’ pages, and don’t have a public email except for customer support. I started writing emails to customer support, and, after a few live chats with their website’s supports, realized that I needed to pitch to CS to get me through to Marketing, and that this was the normal flow. I made a template, but then edited each email to make it clear that I had looked at their site and at their specific issues, as opposed to spam. I got one bounce.
I set up a Google Sheet and wrote down each company I contacted, and how I did it, and what their contact information was. By 12:30am, I had written 12 different companies, and I was a bit tired. So, I went to bed.
In the morning, I was a bit shocked. I had gone from zero to market in less than four hours. Sure, the site - firstimpressions.io - won’t win any awards. The content needs a major overhaul and rethink. I need to find a way to get through customer support emails to the actual marketing and promotions team. I need to choose if I want to talk to marketers or to their development departments.
I’ve got one response, and that was from a Twitter user after I asked them for their contact email. So far, no one has responded to me emails. I don’t care.
First Impressions didn’t exist when I finished Game of Thrones. I have learned things about the industry -in particular, about how hard it is to reach marketing departments - that I didn’t know at all. I’m better situated now to know what that market is like, and I’ve actually done something in it. No money yet, but results aren’t everything.
All in all, this was the best Friday night I have spent in a while.
Tonight, what will you do with yours? Watch another episode, or make something?