No one laminates flyers

✨ North Star: Miniature farms across rooftops, lush balconies, street-long vegetable gardens and people feeling just a bit more light, easy, playful, and connected throughout New York City

I’ve given it some thought, and rather than writing something super edited, I figure I’d just be straight up and post edits raw and unfiltered

Here’s what happened in the past two weeks:

No one laminates flyers 😅

Post election, I put up flyers across the city like this to drive traffic to joinmulch.com:

Before day one I spent a couple hours laminating flyers by hand with a $30 Scotch’s lamintor. The next day I realized almost no one laminates flyers because it’s a pain in the butt and they get taken down quickly anyways (not entirely sure who does this takedown but they are QUICK) 🤝

The flyers performed good enough (176 site visits, probably a few thousand impressions) and got a few DTC customers, but thinking the juice was not worth the squeeze especially given the time and energy to go put up flyers. Cool experiment, will shelf for later.

Whatsapp is a little funky, moved to iMessage!

Before I was running the Tiny Garden Club out of a massive whatsapp chat — I realized a couple of things:

• Few people check Whatsapp regularly

• Whatsapp feels a little cluttered

• It’s more intimidating to message in huge groupchats

Whatsapp has some awesome features — e.g. that you can create groups and see who's read your message or not, polls, etc. — but my instinct is that a tiny iMessage cohort (5-6 people) is just a better experience. Will report back.

Dropped the paid requirement for individuals joining the club

The ambition with this whole thing is to create lighthearted community around gardening. It doesn’t phase me at all when someone says they’re not interested, but when someone wants to join but can’t because of money it kinda sucks.

I think paid/free-community is a tricky balancing act. When things are free folks sometimes take it for granted relative to when they pay for it (not to mention — saying the quiet part out loud — that free doesn’t pay the bills), but I think sometimes the best things are also free. It’s both.

The vision is to make gardening easier in the city, not to become a gate-keeper and make sure folks only buy from Mulch. The bar for joining this club is just to be excited by the idea of a more nature-filled New York, so it feels weird to turn someone away who meets that criteria but just can’t pay.

For now, am going to drop the paid requirement for joining the club — rather than paying $10 / month to get the handcrafted kit delivered, the free tier folks can get supplies themselves, be a part of a tiny cohort, and come to our in-person events. This feels more aligned with the North Star of this club — of bringing New Yorkers together to rewild our city — so we’re rolling with it 🤙

Up Next!

• 🔨 Continuing to iterate on the “Tiny Garden Club” product to make it engaging

• 🎉 Hosting an in-person event

• 🏢 Closing some more building deals

• 🧪 Running GTM experiments / leveling up socials

Till next time!
Mayank