The idea for AmpKnob has been something I’ve thought about for the last couple of months. I’ve got an idea for ways to help small teams save time with a bunch of different marketing tasks.

But to get there, I have to get started.

The first step was setting up a landing page to connect with folks looking to keep up with marketing news and trends without having to think about marketing all the time. I started with a free landing page template from Justin Jackson but hit a snag when I tried to use Mailchimp to start my list. I had to setup DNS to forward an email to a domain I have email setup on Google Apps.

Then I got distracted and let it sit there for a couple of weeks.

Last week, I went to SumoCon and in addition to learning a ton of good things for my 9-5 job at Wildbit I was inspired to get off my ass and get started on this project. One of the little hacks I decided to use was to pay for at least one tool, and pay enough where it created a little pain. Which is why I decided to ditch Mailchimp for Convert Kit.

Like every pretty much everyone who works online, I’ve got a whole staple of domain names I’ll get around to using one day. None of them were a great fit for this project, so I decided to come up with a new name. I was inspired by a video from Aaron Draplin where he sat down to design with pen and paper. I wasn’t designing, but I thought it’d help to get my ideas as fast as possible. This page kinda shows how I arrived at the name AmpKnob, minus running my idea past a few friends to make sure I was on to something that worked.

With Convert Kit setup, a new domain in hand, I finished the copy for the simple landing page I’d been working on from Justin. Then I set it up to work on GitHub pages and tweeted it out.

And 6 people signed up! How cool was that?!?!?

As I thought about it more, I decided I need something more than a simple landing page and it would be good to have a site where I could quickly add new pages and maybe even blog a bit to fully take advantage of Convert Kit.

So then I decided to get started with Octopress. I’m not a developer, but I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know some basics of Git marketing Beanstalk so I put those skills to work. It was a lot of trial and error Friday night, but by the time midnight rolled around I had a functioning site.

Now you can look around and see I’m not a designer but I know enough to know this rough. So I’ll be slowly improving this site, working design things that bug me as I have time to break off some CSS or want to dig into the guts of Octopress to make it do more of what I want.

But for now we’re ready to send a weekly marketing newsletter. :-)