Nov/Dec 2024 Status Report

See if Spartacus.app can help you change something you care about

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year!

This update summarizes our progress from November to December and outlines our plans for this month.

The sections are as follows:

• TL;DR

• Primary Updates

• Accomplishments and Wins

• Failures and Learnings

• Upcoming Priorities and Planning

• Asks

• Gratitude

• We’re currently developing a variety of high-quality short-form video content as part of our new social media strategy (see samples below).

• We’re working with several partners on new pilot programs in Q1 of 2025.

• We’re refreshing the UI and art design of the website and web app to improve their polish and aesthetic consistency.

• Our next sprint will include optional anonymity, personalized success thresholds, and other frequently requested features.

• We’re aggressively pursuing campus outreach and competitor poaching initiatives in Q1.

• To encourage more experimentation, we plan to take a more “full service,” high-touch approach to managing specific campaigns.

As outlined in our previous update, I dedicated considerable time to one-on-one outreach during the summer and fall, but the results were disappointing. We’ve shifted our approach to a more traditional B2C content marketing strategy.

I found some excellent collaborators who are assisting with this. Before launching these campaigns, we’re developing a month-long backlog of content to be released at scheduled intervals.

• We’re researching and analyzing high-performing content and hashtags related to collective action in political and social activism.

• We’re identifying and remixing high-performing content relevant to Spartacus from other content creators.

• We’ll leverage our better-performing content to form influencer relationships for content amplification and cross-posting.

Here are some samples of videos we’ll be posting soon!

Much more to come!

We’re also building a considerable library of blog posts, Q&As, tweets, and other medium format content for LinkedIn and Reddit.

There are several pilot programs in development that we hope to launch and resolve in the first quarter of 2025. Among them:

• Classroom exercises in group decision-making and organizing at a university

• Expanding membership and coordination in an online community

• Helping recruit workers for an experimental education program

• Whistleblowing at an AI tech company

Website updates in progress:

• New Homepage

• New branding and art direction

• New user support tools

Feature updates in progress:

• Modifications to the user onboarding flow

• Optional anonymity

• Open-ended success conditions

• Optional deadlines

• Custom identity reveal threshold; pre-sets and manual override.

• We’re on track to aggressively launch our new marketing strategy. After thorough research, confidence is high that this will be a needle-mover with far more impact than other growth tactics we’ve tried. Yes, we should have done this from the beginning. Lessons learned are painstakingly detailed in the previous update.

• We’re accumulating an impressive roster of helpers and advisors. This was a silver lining of over-emphasizing 1:1 meetings and conference attendance. We’re building a professional network that should pay dividends as we progress.

• Going too long without achieving significant wins has been a painful reminder of the sometimes harsh reality of early-stage startups. It can be a slog, struggling to gain traction, not knowing precisely how to fix things. On the one hand, it humbles the ego; on the other, it saps enthusiasm.

• I’d be lying if I denied it’s been a challenge to remain consistently motivated or that lingering bad moods don’t impact productivity. I’ve needed to be more vigilant about negative self-talk and consciously refocus on what I can control.

• Despite the struggles and setbacks, my confidence that we’re building something with immense potential and that we possess the ability to execute that vision has not diminished at all.

Our priority remains user acquisition. We’ll continue to execute and iterate:

• Organic short-form content marketing

• Influencer Marketing

• Paid ads

• Campus Ambassador Initiative

• Poaching from Competitors

• Dogfooding

• UX Audit

• User Support and community building

• Interviewing BDRs for outreach

We’re happy to welcome Caitlin Borke, who will help with content creation and social media management and is responsible for the videos posted above!

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-borke-39a67b107

• Anyone can still donate through Manifund HERE.

• If you want to support Spartacus through some alternate means, contact me directly at jordan@spartacus.app.

• We appreciate warm introductions to anyone who would be interested in Spartacus.

• We’re incentivizing referrals that lead to successful campaigns with $100 gift cards.

• We want to hear from anyone with thoughts on coordination problems that matter to them. These can range from simple group decision-making challenges to ambitious, large-scale issues. We also want to engage with skeptics, who may see problems we’re insensitive to.

• We cannot currently deploy or support Spartacus outside the US. We are, however, open to collaborating with a partner who can take the initiative to ensure compliance with local laws and regulations.

If we don’t have a specific need for your skills now, we may soon! Please inquire at jordan@spartacus.app

• Thank you, Tetra Jones, Caitlin Borke, William Bookman III, Jordan Loewen-Colon, Sasha Cooper, Jeffrey Kursonis, and Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya!

That’s it for now! Expect the next update in early February.

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