Building 12 Features In 3 Months

Partially inspired by Pieter Levels’ 12 Startups in 12 Months, I’ll be building 12 sizable features for Cloud Campaign in just 3 months.

I know what you’re saying, “Pieter aspired to to build a startup every month, why is 4 features a month significant?”

I’m the solo-founder of Cloud Campaign, and accordingly I handle marketing, sales, support, product development, customer success, etc…, so on average I only have 2 days a week dedicated to product development.

Two days to design, implement, and test an entirely new feature.

My weekly task list consist of writing at least 2 blog posts, sending 20 cold emails, designing and building 1 new feature, redesign 1 part of the web app to improve user experience, and drafting & sending the weekly newsletter.

My Weekly Task Tracker

Click here to view my actual weekly task list or copy it to make your own.

So why one new feature every week?

The core product is built and functioning well, but I strongly believe no product is ever done. By continuing to iterate on the product and add additional functionality, I hope to design a product that is both intuitive to use and extremely powerful.

Subscribe and check back each week to see what’s being built.

Week 1: Export Functionality

Cloud Campaign — Analytics Reports

The ability to export both analytics and upcoming social media posts as CSV files for either manipulation in other software or sharing with clients.

Press Release

Week 2: Auto-Importer

Cloud Campaign — Article Auto-Importer

Remembering to share new blog posts to social media can be a huge pain. It’s repetitive and relatively thoughtless work.

The new auto-importer will automatically grab new articles from any RSS feed and fill your content library, so you can either share the article to social media with a single click or schedule it to be published at a future date.

Press Release

Week 3: Post Failure Alerts

Cloud Campaign — Native Alerts

On rare occasions, posting to social media might fail (credentials changed, the API recipient is down, servers are overloaded). With the new alerts and retry logic, you’ll receive an alert anytime a post fails. Simply click the alert to retry posting the content to social media.

Press Release

Week 4 (1/2): One Time Scheduling

Cloud Campaign — Ad Hoc Scheduling

Coordinate social media posts with press releases or holidays with our new one-time schedule. Simply choose the day and time you want the content to be posted.

Unlike competitors, using Cloud Campaign, you can schedule out as far as you want. Want to publish something in 20 years? Fire away!

Press Release

Week 4 (2/2): Auto-Generated Captions

Cloud Campaign — Auto-generate Captions Using NLP

We’re one step closer to a fully automated social media campaign. When using the auto-importer or recommendation engine, Cloud Campaign will read imported articles to get an overall understanding for the topic and then choose relevant sentences that summarize the article while capturing the over-encompassing topic. Those sentences are added as captions to the content so you can simply share without having to even write a copy.

The summarization is powered by Aylien’s natural language processing technology.

Press Release

Week 5: Instagram Integration (1/2)

Cloud Campaign — Instagram Support

Finally, Instagram scheduling without reminders. Natively publish images directly to Instagram from Cloud Campaign. During week 5, I built the authorization flow and activity feed. I still need to complete publishing and analytics.

Once the final two steps are completed and we’re granted access into Instagram’s partner program, I’ll begin opening it up to a private beta. Email me to be one of the first to natively schedule posts to Instagram.

Week 6: Instagram Integration (2/2)

I completed the Instagram integration with the ability to publish posts and track analytics. We’re waiting on Facebook/Instagram to approve our application before we can open it up to the public.

Be one of the first to schedule posts to Instagram using Cloud Campaign by signing up for Beta access.

Week 7: WYSIWYG Analytics Reporting

‘What you see is what you get’ analytics reporting. Essentially the ability to export your analytics data with the current configuration from the historical analytics dashboard.

We also completely revamped the signup email campaign this week. Another step towards building a more enterprise focused product.

Week 8: Annotations and Report Sharing

Cloud Campaign Client Analytics Reports

As a marketer, your job becomes much easier when you can quickly convey the value you’re providing to your client.

With Cloud Campaign’s report sharing, you can now send a publicly accessible analytics link to your client. Choose the account you want to share and the applicable date range to accentuate certain key metrics.

In addition, you can now add annotations to clearly display what you did to cause the change. Some examples would be, “Started Fall fashion campaign” or maybe “Increased ad spend by 10%”.

Press Release

Week 9: Auto-Publisher

Hate having to log on to each social network every time you publish a new YouTube video, write a new blog post, add a new item to your Shopify store, etc…? Now you don’t have to!

Cloud Campaign’s auto-publisher will detect new content and automatically share it to all of your social media accounts for you.

Wrote a new blog post? Already published to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Added a new shirt to your Shopify store? Bam! Already receiving clicks on Facebook

Press Release

Week 10: White-Labeling

Cloud Campaign White-Label Login

Interested in giving your clients access to your Cloud Campaign account or sharing analytics branded with your logo and company URL?

Now you can with our custom white labeling. You can upload your logos for a custom branded workspace, client portal, branded client reports, and a custom URL.

Press Release

Week 11: Categories

Content Categories

Cloud Campaign stores your content forever in a library for easy recycling and collaboration. But, that also means it can be hard to sort and organize your content.

Content Categories allow you to tag content items so you can sort and schedule by tags.

Press Release

Week 12: Content Creators

Cloud Campaign — Content Creators

While the option to add content creators has existed for a bit now, the content creator dashboard saw a refresh.

You can add clients, freelancers, graphic designers, etc… to your Cloud Campaign account as content creators. This allows them to upload and manage creatives without having access to any of the scheduling or analytics.

Week 13: Website Analytics

Cloud Campaign — Website Analytics

In most cases, you’re marketing your business on social media to drive more traffic to your website, so it only makes sense to have your analytics fully integrated.

You can now link your Google Analytics account to Cloud Campaign to view your social media and website analytics side-by-side. We also built a proprietary scoring system to score the health of your traffic coming from social vs traffic coming from other sources.

Press Release