This is a monthly update where I share what I’ve been working on recently. For the previous installment, check out my December 2023 Update.

January was a big marketing month! I published a bunch of blog posts, created “alternative to” pages, cleaned up documentation, updated screenshots, and just generally focused on the marketing site.

Playing the SEO game

I mentioned previously that I started working with an SEO agency, but I hadn’t myself done any keyword research or tracked rankings or anything, so I signed up for Ahrefs this month.

It’s been super fun poking around competitors’ sites, seeing what they rank for, and building a list of keywords I want to go after. It’s also really gratifying to see domain authority, rankings, and traffic trending up, and I’m realizing this is a game I could be into playing.

The lag time between input and output isn’t great, but it’s still one of the few marketing activities where you can quantify the results.

More alternatives

As I continue investing in SEO, some of the lowest-hanging fruit is “alternative to” pages explaining how Teaminal stacks up against competitors. Last month I created my first few of these (which are already ranking in Google), and this month I added 11 more:

• EasyRetro Alternative
• GoRetro Alternative
• Metro Retro Alternative
• Parabol Alternative
• PlanITPoker Alternative
• Planning Poker Online
• Pointing Poker Alternative
• Range Alternative
• Retrium Alternative
• Scatterspoke Alternative
• TeamRhythm Alternative

I also made a new comparisons page and redesigned the footer to link to all of these, since they’re pages I want Google to think are important.

More blog posts

In that same vein, I also published more blog posts:

• How We Conduct a Backlog Refinement Meeting Effectively
• We Explored the Difference Between Backlog Refinement and Sprint Planning
• Here Are Our 3 Favorite Daily Standup Tools
• Here’s Our Expert Guide to Slack Planning Poker
• How We Optimize Agile Reporting to Improve Efficiency
• Here’s Our List of the 5 Best Agile Reporting Tools
• We Tested the 10 Best Agile Retrospective Tools on the Market
• We Tried the 10 Best Free Retrospective Tools
• Here’s Our Definitive Sprint Planning Checklist for Better Project Management
• Here’s How We Optimize the 5 Scrum Ceremonies for Maximum Efficiency

That puts me at 10 out of my goal to publish 52 blog posts this year! I’m tempted to bump the goal up to 100 posts, but for now I’ll keep tracking the goal I’ve got.

Documentation

I made the docs page a long time ago, and created pages for docs I wanted to write, but then never actually wrote them. This month I finally got around to writing a getting started guide, plus instructions for setting up the currently supported SAML SSO integrations:

• Azure AD Setup
• Duo Setup
• Okta Setup

I also deleted all the old empty pages I had created and never filled out, so the docs page is looking a lot cleaner now.

Fixes & Improvements

I also shipped some small fixes and improvements to the app:

• Suppressed notification and reminder emails if you haven’t logged in for 2 weeks or more
• Fixed a layout issue on the home page when a non-admin had no “to do” issues
• Fixed an issue with my internal analytics

Next month

I really like the idea of having a theme for each month - this month was all about the marketing site, and I feel like that clarity really helped keep me focused. Next month I want to do the same thing, but with a focus on integrations.

I’m going to try and build 5 new integrations in February. I should probably do more research before I commit (don’t want a repeat of my failed attempt to build a Microsoft Teams integration), but as of now I’m planning on building integrations for PagerDuty, Trello, ClickUp, Linear, and Shortcut.

That includes not just the work to build the integrations, but to update the integrations page, make new pages on the marketing site for each integration, and submit to each integration’s respective app store. I’m also going to loop back on trying to get into app stores for existing integrations, some of which were rejected for various reasons.

And, of course, I’ll be publishing 4 or more blog posts to stay on track for my 2024 goal to put out 52 blog posts this year.

Update: The February 2024 Update is the next post in this series.