paulsingh

I've been a subscriber of HackerNewsletter for a few years now and recently started wondering why something similar didn't already exist for the firearms industry. (TLDR: most firearms trainers are great at what they do... but rarely allow you to subscribe for email notifications of upcoming courses, etc. The majority of their "marketing" is done through their Instagram pages.)

In my own case, I wanted to be able to find courses that might be near whatever location I might be visiting for work on a particular week. So, a couple of weeks ago, I started scraping their signup pages in an effort to organize the courses as best as I could. Over the past few weeks, I've focused my time on pulling in more courses, adding structured data tags for SEO purposes and doing small PPC tests. Overall, I'm seeing a ~20% conversion of a visitor-to-email-subscriber.

There's still a lot of improvements that need to be made (ie, better filtering/searchability on the site, etc) but I wanted to share here to see what advice I might get.

It's taken me 10+ years of tinkering with Rails to get this far so go easy on a noob. :)

Direct link: https://pewpewtraining.com

We're growing and I've issued company credit cards to my senior team. We've got firm spending limits on each of the cards, a CFO that keeps a close eye on everything and I trust that our team will make smart decisions about their use of company money.

All that being said, I'm curious to see how others have handled this. Aside from the "trust your employees" stuff you normally hear, I'd like to learn how other founders have handled this at their own companies.

Best practices? Worst mistakes? What else?