Week 3: One Reel, Four Users, and My First Paid Subscriber

One Instagram Reel → 4 new users and my first paid subscriber.

After months of testing Search Ads, SEO, and newsletters (combined: 0 conversions, 0 users), I think I finally found my channel.

I'm not going to pretend four users is traction. It isn't. But the number that matters this week isn't four, it's the jump from zero. Zero and four are different categories. Zero means nothing is connecting. Four means something connected, and now the job is to figure out what and do more of it.

The Reel that worked

In week 3 of Shipping Every Week, I posted a Reel about something every powerlifter has but nobody talks about: a camera roll full of 1,000+ gym videos that all look identical. You record every set. Then eight weeks later you want to compare your bench today to your bench then, and you spend 20 minutes thumbnail-scrubbing through a wall of near-identical clips trying to find it.

That's the problem Powr solves: months of gym videos, searchable in seconds, linked to the exact set they belong to.

Here's what I got right almost by accident. The Reel that worked wasn't about my app. It was about the problem — the camera-roll mess — described so specifically that the right person watches it and thinks "that's me, that's my phone." The app is the resolution, not the subject. The earlier stuff that converted nobody was, in hindsight, me talking about features. Features are interesting to the person who built them. The problem is interesting to the person who has it.

The Bullseye framework

In his book Traction, Gabriel Weinberg lays out the Bullseye framework for finding the one marketing channel that actually works for you, rather than spreading thin across all of them:

• Outer ring: brainstorm every conceivable channel, including the ones that feel unlikely.
• Middle ring: run cheap tests on the handful that seem promising. For me that was Search Ads, SEO, newsletter, and Reels.
• Inner ring: find the one that's working and pour everything into it.

The premise is that for most products, one channel drives the majority of growth, and the mistake is dabbling in five instead of dominating one. The middle ring exists to find that one channel as cheaply as possible.

The scoreboard so far:

• Search Ads + Email → 0 users, 0 conversions
• In-person direct asks → 3 users
• One Reel → 4 users, 1 paid

I spent real money and real weeks on Search Ads and SEO. They taught me nothing except that they weren't it. One Reel, made in an afternoon, outperformed all of it. That's the whole argument for the middle ring: you don't reason your way to your channel, you test your way there, and you keep the tests cheap because most of them are going to fail.

Bullseye.

What's next

Two Reels a week for the next 30 days. The hypothesis is set; now I find out whether one Reel was a signal or a fluke. I'll report back.

What did you ship this week?