The Origin Story
Retackmon is a new creator-focused experiment by CrafterFaster! The corporate entity behind CrafterFaster was founded at the end of 2020.
CrafterFaster has gone through a number of phases since incorporation. After interviewing almost 200 creators and synthesizing learnings, we identified our best starting problem. We took a little under 2 weeks to thoughtfully design a demo solution with a tight scope, and 3 months to code it up. The demo was an incredibly lo-fi clone of Google Docs, but specifically tailored for newsletter writers to collect and apply feedback to their posts. After coding the demo, we ran a 2-month long pilot with a super small cohort of Substack writers who had small audiences. The purpose of this experiment was to de-risk retention and validate that newsletter writers who released posts weekly would also strive to get feedback at the same cadence — given a good enough user experience. After 8 weeks, retention for the pilot cohort flattened to 50% at week 5 without any further churn. Not bad.
Even though we were able to confidently validate our retention hypothesis on a small scale, it took a meaningful chunk of time just to nail that one important dimension. There was no bandwidth to simultaneously find scalable acquisition channels and a monetization model with profitable unit economics. We decided that our de-risking approach needed to change, so we ended up adopting MVP methodology to "speed things up." Our most recent MVP iteration was a cobbled solution comprised of email, Figma, Airtable, Typeform, Stripe, and a lot of manual work outside of the MVP itself.
We saw the advantages of having overwhelmingly fast turnaround time and being able to test many dimensions of Product-Market Fit holistically at once with an MVP. However, we came to the realization that consumer expectations have risen exponentially since the term MVP was coined in 2008. MVPs don’t cut it anymore. It makes complete sense that seed rounds have become larger because it just takes more time for new entrants to displace the bar to Product-Market Fit in any market. A real business with a delightful product, not just something people regularly use. It's now clear to us that speedy, but less-than-thoughtful, product design would not satisfy the creator population. It’s also clear to us that sustainable and scalable acquisition needs to be developed alongside product efforts.
At this juncture, we're now faced with the challenge of quickly, thoughtfully, and systematically:
de-risking various dimensions of PMF in a holistic, non-isolated fashion,
shipping a focused product that has overwhelming competitive advantage in at least one important aspect that our “now” and “future” creator sub-personas value, and
acquiring new users profitably on a unit-economic basis.
This newsletter Retackmon is one of the our few validation experiments. Retackmon is a portmanteau of “Retention,” “Acquisition,” and “Monetization.” It will initially start as a newsletter that analyzes the growth strategies of today’s coolest startups. There are many reasons why we’re starting with this particular newsletter and topic set, but here are 3 big ones. We want to:
pinpoint the successful and failed aspects of products we admire,
build our own owned channel to leverage with other efforts, and
deeply empathize with creators, as a fellow creator.
We’re going to continue using this post format and Figma image templates to churn out posts covering more cool startups at a quicker cadence with every release. If you’d like to see a certain startup covered in a future post, email us at retackmon@substack.com.
