Last week the day time changed here in Denmark and with that the official announcement for spring has begun. Easter is around the corner and days are getting longer. Around this time, approximately three years ago, I started writing the first newsletter with approximately 80+ audience. In a world, where people are advised to build a pre-start subscriber list in hundreds, before even writing the first code of line, I was a little naive indeed.
3 yr. ago while I was still learning WebAR, an idea hit me hard.
🧠 What if I start sharing my learning with everyone? Especially helping Marvin XR's early customers to understand how to leverage Marvin XR platform for their business and profits?
That thought gave birth to 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬 – a weekly newsletter solely focused for 3D & AR enthusiasts.
🙇 But the journey was not easy. Within first few months, I received feedback such as
– Another imposter who claims to be WebAR guru
– Too technical, not of any use to real world
– Doesn't know even basics of 3D modeling
During my long career in IT, while working as Solution and Enterprise architect for MNCs, I have seldom failed while working with various tech stacks in many challenging projects. I had the privilege to work from high security govt. customers to private multi-billion dollar revenue companies and I always came across with my work goals achieved in time.
😟 Such feedback was sort of new to me and certainly hurtful. I never built things before in public. Marvin XR was the first software I started building in public. So despite the backlash, I chose to continue.
😎 With time, more new audience subscribed the newsletter and wrote things like this
– This is exactly what I was looking for to start a digital business
– Very well written newsletter – keep it up
– Important topics you write that nobody talks around
– I get to learn a lot about WebAR from the newsletter… and more.
It's not like that I never received a negative comment afterwards. As a matter of fact, I still do.
But now I have learnt to ignore them and only focus on the positive feedback. This inspires me to write everyday in LinkedIn, write this newsletter every weekend.
With more requests from the audience, I realized that a one page newsletter might not be enough for people to understand WebAR utility, especially for the enterpreuners and business leaders. So I ended up writing two books on them.
📕 𝐖𝐞𝐛 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 – 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞
📒 𝐖𝐞𝐛 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐄𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
🙏 People who read them, shared their positive feedback.
💪 It helped me to shape Marvin XR for better growth. In 2024, Marvin XR bagged the contracts to serve 3 major Fortune 500 customers across the globe.
– West Elm
– Pottery Barn
– Reliance Retail
This was a major milestone in the journey of Marvin and us too. Being a bootstrapped startup, driven by a vision but led by a small team, it was quite important to bring the best out of the platform to server customers. Many major features were added in the platform to help business easily adopt WebAR in ecommerce.
This paid off to some extent. Customers appreciated the journey and shared their positive feedback too.
Next What?
Now that TSS has reached the milestone of 150th week, the new set of challenge to me is to deliver unique and valuable propositions every week which I have not written before.
3D and AR industry is shifting faster. AI has been a major disruption to every industry since the last year. Maybe a combination could bring out the best. In Marvin, we have already incorporated AI to some extent and I could see more opportunity.
Please feel free to share any thoughts which you'd like to learn or want to read in TSS. I can convert it into a newsletter perhaps. Hit reply to this mail or write to sr@marvinxr.com anytime.
Finally a BIG THANK YOU for sharing my jorney for so long.
I hope to continue delivering effective newsletters in the future too.