u/Holiday-Sun1798

Dear Toastmasters,

I have been a Secretary and VPE for an in-person club.
As a secretary I spend anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour to religiously prepare the meeting minutes or MoM of our meeting every week straight up for 6 months. No doubt that, this helped my summarizing skills but I hardly did give any speech those 6 months.

Similarly, when as VPE, since we are a community club, I used Canva where we had templates. Yet, it took me 10-15 minutes to edit each field, change position and at times do the changes and re-publish in the last moment due to change in role players. The work felt overwhelming as the agenda preparation was also not very mobile friendly, etc.

To solve this, I came up with a tool that my club has been using for an year now to do these in minutes and not hours. Recently, the meeting minutes tool didn't work and the frustration expressed by the secretary validated the pain and I thought this must be the case for the broader fraternity as well. The secretary still have to summarize which is a muscle toastmaster helps to build but the redundant data is not needed. Similarly agenda can be quickly created by just editing the fields instead of doing aligning work etc. I think reducing the admin grunt work will help officers focus on actual toastmasters skills - communication, leadership and networking.

I would love to see if there are any VPEs / Secretaries / Ex-comm officers has a similar pain and if a free tool would help them.

Quick Background:
I am an engineer turned product manager.
I built a one time payment digital product in December and within a month got my first paying customers after my launch in Hacker news. But that's the first and last.
Post that, I am not able to bring sustained traffic and paid users to my product yet as I won't be able to launch repeatedly in HN.

I thought I will build more products with 'product as a flywheel' concept in mind.
I later realized, even that and PH launch is a distribution game.
I now understand why most people first build their audience before building a product.

For the last couple of months, I understand marketing needs equal focus as product building and only through founder led authority, trust gets established and sales conversion happens.
At the same time, I also see how marketing efforts ( content creation, adaptation ( based on channels ) and distribution ) is time consuming.

So, especially non-marketers, what worked for you to grow your traffic and product?