010: Everything is downstream from lead gen

Hey friends,

This week I was deep into learning more about marketing as I explore all the ways I can get more people to know about metalabs. One aspect that caught my attention this week was specifically lead generation. I recently stumbled upon a quote from Daniel Priestley that perfectly captures the essence of it.

This is such an ah-ha moment for me. Daniel also gave a great example of how Elon Musk effectively marketed the Tesla truck. How he started with lead generation and the rest flowed into place.

So if you haven't heard yet Tesla's Cyber truck. Opinions on the design aside it's a futuristic truck designed by Tesla. More interesting, is how they managed to capture people's interest by allowing them to sign up with a small $100 deposit. That small signal of interest led them to get over 1.6 million people to reserve a preorder. This massive signal of interest allowed them to secure a massive loan for manufacturing, factories etc. It might take years to eventually release a production model, but now they were confident they had a product people craved.

In the context of what I've been building. I've spent so much time on branding, design, building functionality, and setting up products with pricing and terms etc. I honestly feel I've put together a great brand with a great product. But I know I could have just as easily put up a quick landing page or even just sent out a form or email to a bunch of people to validate the idea first.

And tbh, that approach would probably be the better. But I didn’t do that and I’m honestly glad I didn’t. With metalabs, it is more than just a business venture—it’s a personal project for me. It represents all the skills, teaching, and training I can offer in one convenient package. That’s why getting things right from the start matters so much. This isn’t a throwaway business idea; this is something that I hope can grow alongside me and my working life.

But one thing for sure I've learned that. Lead generation is essential—it sets the stage for everything else in our journey. So in future, I'll look to seek signals of interest before diving too deep into a new project.

But for now here's some interesting discoveries from this week:

1.  Testing Todoist as a personal task tracker

I've been testing out Todoist as my new personal task management tool. Edworking has been great for both clients and my team. But I'm looking for something more streamlined for my workflow. It's only been a week but I'm enjoying Todoist. It's simple intuitive and does all the basics well. I've tried so many different task managers over the years and I find simplicity is my most important factor. I love how it integrates across my phone, watch and laptop so I'm never too far away from knowing what I need to be working on next.

2.  Automation with IFTTT

I recently had an embarrassing moment where I missed a client's call because I didn't see the email notification. That incident made me realize the need for a more foolproof system. So, I set up automation using IFTTT. Now I'll get a push notification whenever a client books a call on Google Calendar. This means I'll never miss another important appointment again. I really wanted to make this super easy to set up and not get lost in the world of automation - IFTTT made it super simple and I had it set up in 10min.

3.  SEO 101: Subdomains vs Subdirectories

This could probably be a full blog post in itself but in short. I set up the metalabs blog on a subdomain (blog.metalabs.global). However, after reading a tweet from an SEO specialist who was making the case for why subdirectories (www.metalabs.global/blog) are better for SEO. In the end, I decided I didn't want to risk losing out on that sweet SEO juice so I made the switch. It required some technical work with Cloudflare workers and firewalls, but now we have a proper subdirectory blog that will help boost our domain authority.

That's everything for this week. I'll catch up with you next week. :)

Mattxx