Dejon is the 20-year-old Founder of Trend Watchers. After reaching over 50 million online people himself, Dejon helps other influencers go viral using trends.
What were the top 3 mistakes you made starting out with your business, and if you could start over what would you do differently?
I didn’t have a startup story
When I first started my software company I thought it was going to be easy. Turn on some ads, drive some quick traffic then boom, $10,000 a month cash in my pocket.
But boy was I wrong. When it came to finding my first customers, I found it very difficult getting people to read my ads. Taking action on my ads wasn’t an issue, it was just capturing people’s attention and holding it all the way through.
Or in other words, I just wasn’t interesting enough. And to make matters worse, I was using my capital for marketing. This forced me to try out different approaches so I could get the most leads out of my budget.
Why was I so hesitant to share my startup story initially?
I’m not a fan of putting my personal business out there. I felt like it puts me in a vulnerable position plus I like keeping things to myself naturally.
Once I decided to get a bit more personal in my startup story I noticed that I got more customers, reduced churn, and opened up new networking opportunities with talented people.
I failed to expand my beta testing group
When I first opened up the original Trend Watchers group chat I was able to get some paying customers in. This was all good until they realized no one else was in this group chat. Because of this they would quickly ask for a refund, and leave the group.
This is how I first learned about social proof and why it’s important. To combat this I went to read it and got a group of around 100 beta testers. The purpose of these beta testers was to provide feedback, testimonials, and social proof while I bring paying customers on board.
This small community was a huge success for about 3 months and then things started dying down. When I look back at this Golden era I realize I wasn’t adding any new members to this group. The group wasn’t growing.
There’s a saying out there if you’re not growing you’re dying and I ultimately believe that was the cause of my small community’s death. I love the small community because they were able to provide me immediate feedback on new updates I would add to my platform.
Without this immediate feedback, I often waited days or a few weeks to see if users like or dislike a newly released update.
I had a poor short term monetization plan
Originally, Trend Watchers was supposed to be based in a group chat but I quickly realized that I needed to create my own custom platform.
Just threw off my original monetization plan. I could have made things work better to improve development speed but I failed to adjust my short-term monetization plan to stay alive.
This lack of finances added an extra one to two months of development time. I also had a limited marketing budget because of it.
If I could start over, I would start building in public sooner and build a multi-level funnel to fuel a growth engine.
Improvement 1: Start building in public sooner.
As I mentioned earlier in this interview, building in public sooner would have made marketing a lot easier and cheaper for me at the beginning.
Especially when pulling those first few customers and beta testers.
People love being a part of a movement or a great cause. It gives them a small sense of purpose which brings fulfillment and joy.
Improvement 2: Build a multilevel funnel to fuel a growth engine.
As mentioned earlier in this interview, I did have a monetization model in place but it lacked a backend offer/upsell that would turn my sheets green and cover my upfront marketing expenses.
This back end would have completed & funded a growth engine for a paid marketing channel I was working on.
Running this growth engine earlier would have helped me pull up revenue and user signups faster within my first 6 months.
Now that I look back at it I’m happy that I didn’t scale as fast. I didn’t realize how weak my platform’s infrastructure was and that would have been a massive customer support nightmare.
Dejon Brooks Founder Trend Watchers
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