From Fighting Global Warming to Making a Social Media Scheduler

1 - Saving the Planet: The Enaliz Project

The story starts back in 2019 when a friend of mine and I embarked on a project to help save the planet.

As a matter of fact, in Europe, when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, oil boilers are a big problem. These are the big boxy machines usually found in basements of houses that burn oil for heating up homes.

There's about 14 million of them still in use on the continent.

Typical oil boiler found in Europe

To give you an idea of the problem, a household using an oil boiler consumes 2,000L of oil on average per year. That means on the entire continent, these 14 millions boilers emit as much CO2 as 92 million cars every year.

Besides, for many practical reasons, it would take decades to replace them across the entire continent. That’s why we thought we could create something to help improve this situation right away.

Both of us coming from technical backgrounds, we dug deep into the tech specs to see if we could find something... and we did.

You see, the technology used for these boilers dates back to the 70s, at a time when environmental concerns and high oil prices were not hot topics. They weren’t designed with consumption optimisation in mind - and this is exactly where we could improve.

To make a long story short, we dusted off our engineering skills and came up with a device which we decided to call FuelBox: a brand new product made to optimise the consumption of any oil boiler installed in Europe after 1970.

Testing our prototypes on an actual boiler

We estimated that FuelBox could help households save around 300L of oil every year, which in turn would reduce the cost of monthly bills and prevent the release of 1T of CO2 in the atmosphere ever year, without compromising the comfort inside the homes.

Final FuelBox prototype controlled with its mobile app

Feeling very enthusiastic from our discovery, we packed all of it into a bigger project we called Enaliz. This is the name we gave to the company that would be selling our FuelBox. We had even bigger plans for Enaliz.

2- The Tough Reality of Marketing

A year after starting working on our project, we came up with a functioning FuelBox. Now it was time to think about our marketing strategy (1st mistake).

As engineers, we knew we had a good product. A product that is good for the environment and good for users’ wallets - we figured marketing the product had to be easy (2nd mistake).

We set up our website and our social media accounts. At this point, we were quite convinced that after inviting only a handful of friends and family, the social media would work it’s magic and make our product go viral in what we thought was our niche market (3rd mistake).

Take a good guess…that did not happen.

Pretty much how we handled our marketing strategy

To be frank, we weren’t that naive about marketing. We had a proper business plan, a proper 5P’s, a fairly clear idea of the profile of our target customer (persona). We even had oil boiler owners who were truly interested in our product (test clients); but that was it. We didn’t have any ground marketing experience nor any BtoC sales experience.

So much so that we were thinking mainly as guys with technical backgrounds and that marketing could wait. Confident enough to think that since our product is “good,” it would be an easy sell.

As a matter of fact, it was not. Referring back to the mistakes mentioned above, here are the lessons learnt:

Lesson 1: Think about your marketing strategy and act on it from day 1. Building a community takes time. Nobody is waiting for your product and even potential clients will have to come across your product several times before actually purchasing it.

Lesson 2: The best product doesn’t necessarily mean a successful product. Remember the Concorde? Selling means knowing your customers’ problems as well as their expectations. It’s a science that requires interaction, data and time. Start as early as possible and engage with your customers as much as possible.

Lesson 3: Social media is a great way to market your products. It’s free of charge and easy to setup. There’s a lot of people using it, including potential clients. Take another guess: you are not the first one to use social media to promote your services or product. Therefore, you need to bring value in order to attract new followers and to create a community. This takes time and discipline (more on that in Part 3).

All in all, we may have flopped on a product that was destined to be really beneficial for both the environment and its users. We lost at least one year by not taking care of our marketing strategy from day one. We learned that the hard way and are trying to fix it now. Let’s see how it will progress in the future…

3- Inception of SocialPika

Another point worth mentioning for the sake of this story is that our budget was limited and already partly consumed by R&D. This point is quite important when it comes to marketing. Therefore, social media was our clear go-to channel of communication rather than traditional advertising.

We knew we had to create content for our niche market, so we started writing blog posts which we would share on our social accounts as soon as they were ready.

This effort paid off. Our website traffic started to increase and it was evident most of it came from social media.

As we continued this activity, July came around. We both went on vacation, stopped writing new blog posts and left out posting anything on social media. The result was instantly visible in our traffic - it had plummeted.

This is where social media discipline is coming from: to keep an audience interested in your theme, you need to feed them with content on a very regular basis.

This is when I decided to develop a piece of code on our server to schedule the release of new articles to our social media accounts and recycle them on a regular basis.

Eventually, I realised that many companies are potentially facing the same problems and challenges we had with social media posting. This is why I decided to take out this idea and the code I wrote for the Enaliz project to eventually create what has become SocialPika.

At this point I know exactly what you are about to say : What about all the other service providers doing exactly the same thing like Hootsuite or Buffer ??

Me feeling inspired...

The truth is, I got carried away writing the coding and only realised how many of them were actually out there when I had already written most of the code. In the end, this didn’t matter much as these service providers were either too expensive for our budget or poorly designed.

Now that you have a better understanding of our journey, my goal is to make SocialPika simple, affordable and useful for startups and small companies to handle their social media strategy without spending too much time or resources.

PS: I'll also share tips we picked up ourselves and from others regarding our journey of growth via social media on our blog post.