Youmami v1 - CoStarting Recap

The goal when joining the CoStarting cohort 01 was to create and launch Youmami within a month. I am happy to report that it happened. To the best of my knowledge, Youmami is the first Instagram bot tasked to find personalized food recipes.

Youmami launched on 01/31/21 and here are some interesting metrics as of 02/04/21:

• 14 recommendations on Instagram

• 7 sign-ups for the free accounts

• 1 sign-up for a lifetime subscription - this user donated $10

• 6 subscription hashtags: #porkchops, #pasta, #lobster, #bakmie, #pizza, #bbq

• 23 Instagram followers

• 98 likes to Youmami's instagram posts from the launch campaign

• 22 new users to the Youmami landing page

• 51 tweets

• 4 blog posts with 48 reads

While this is exciting for me, it may not be as exciting to potential customers. I will dedicate the rest of this post to do a recap of this experience.

CoStarting Cohort 01

This was the fun part. I really enjoyed the company and encouragement of @iamsvenh, @IamEmiW, @jchristie07, and @sv2c_. Great crowd. The weekly check-ins and discussions over slack and twitter made this experience easier.

Tweeting was brand new for me. However, I picked up the habit after a few days. There were days where I couldn't work on Youmami, but I kept the tweets going. This helped me focus on what I needed to accomplish the day after. Unfortunately, I did not spend any effort in growing my Twitter network; my audience was the cohort members. I will keep the twitter Youmami account, and update when something interesting happens. Youmami tweeted a total of 51 times as of now.

Blogging was painful to do. However, I see a key benefit: clarity of thought. It helped document the experience and I am surprised to see that I had a total of 48 reads. I wonder who these visitors were and whether they found anything interesting. I will keep the blog and will try to update it monthly.

I look forward to joining another cohort in the future. However, I need to gather more data and decide what to do with Youmami first. If it dies, I'll try to join with another project.

Costarting and working full time is a challenge. There were two weeks where the workload from my full time job was heavy and I did not have the energy to work on Youmami. This created some delays with my launch campaign and showed in the quality of my landing page. Fortunately, the cohort members stepped in and recommended Carrd. I had a cool looking landing page in under 2 hours.

Instagram Launch Campaign

The current campaign is still going and started 4 days ago. However, it is clear that my plan of leveraging my @carnicerdos follower base to promote Youmami sign-ups did not go the way I anticipated. The engagement is very low. The reach per post with 1400 followers is probably a few hundreds. On average, each post gets 50 likes and 5 comments. With Youmami, however, the engagement dropped to a third of likes and comments. The clicks to the landing page was a handful per post. I am learning that Instagram users don't click on profile links (too cumbersome), shy away when they see a hint of a new app or service, just like to see their feed, are not interested in bots, or simply find Youmami a useless idea.

I am thankful to those who clicked and signed-up. Most of them are people who know me and wanted to show their support. I appreciate it! In particular, a friend of mine who was following the cohort updates knew that my success criteria was $5 in donations. He chipped in with $10 and negotiated a lifetime membership with more frequent updates. Youmami will deliver!

It is clear to me that campagining early would have been the best thing to do. I delayed the campaign until the beginning of the fourth week and it was rushed. Starting early would have allowed me to prepare the audience, build the hype, and get early feedback.

I will continue campaigning, but I will give priority to one on one interactions with recipe creators, influencers, and other food-related Instagram accounts.

The Future of Youmami

I have a lifetime subscription that I have to support. I have several feature requests, and new ideas on where Youmami could go.

The current implementation needs hardening. This will take the highest priority in the near future to support the current subscribers and delivery the weekly updates for 1 year.

Before implementing any new features, I need more feedback from the current subscribers. Are they happy with the recommendations? Is Youmami accurately classifying recipes? What's the best day of the week to send the recommendations?