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Competitive Industry! How “Prospect Listening” Saved My Ass (Part One)

There’s no water more treacherous than one that’s saturated with blood-thirsty entrepreneurs, but in some cases, those same waters can be quite lucrative as you keep refining your execution. Take it from Peep Laja (CEO of Wynter and one of the greatest minds in growth marketing):

Indie Hackers - Peep Laja's LinkedIn Post

I reflected on an extremely popular guide, posted last year from none other than the founder of Indie Hacker, on "How To Brainstorm Great Business Ideas". Personally, I don’t think his guide was made for competitive industries, because most, if not all of the customers’ core problems are usually solved already. So I’d love to add an “extension” to Courtland Allen’s amazing guide, all backed by my own experience, lessons, and results.

This is the first of a three part series:

Part One: What Inspired “Becoming An Outlier” And Its Impact On My Startup
Part Two: Money Wasted - Avoid This Crucial Mistake I Made And Step 1 Of “Becoming An Outlier”
Part Three: Do Or Die -> Step 2 And 3 Of “Becoming An Outlier”

Hope you’ll find this guide incredibly helpful with differentiating your startup from your competitors so you can smile bright knowing you dreamt it, built it, and as a result, your users love it and pay for it. I call my 3-steps process “Becoming An Outlier'' because so far, I haven’t seen a single growth marketing startup with my new solution. Try to break my process, I dare yah! Let’s jump in!

I Let My Ultimate Vision Lead The Way:

After about 4 years working in the tech startup world with nothing but built up passion and impatience, I finally launched my growth marketing startup in late February, 2021. Digital marketing is one of the most saturated industries. Seriously, I’m sure you’ve seen atleast one YouTube ad on some “guru” gloating how Facebook Ads make him 10k a month from tricking clients?

Before I built “Becoming An Outlier” I ain’t gonna lie, I was in a dark place mostly because I felt stuck. I got clients for my growth marketing services, but I wanted my company to be an “anti-agency” where it doesn’t scale the way other marketing companies do or even put their employees under such massive stress of managing large quantities of clients. And to focus on quality over quantity, without taking a huge revenue hit. Only a few marketing startups out there scaled in a different way and I made it my vision to become one of them.

How This Process Saved My Ass:

After 2 weeks of brainstorming, an idea popped in my head while I was watching the local news (talk about heaven sent, haha). It’s a solution I call “Hybrid Consulting”. For the prospect listening process, I focused on prospects that have spoken to multiple marketing companies to find out what they didn’t like about each of them vs. what they were looking for. It was like I turned most of my “sales calls” into “prospect research sessions”.

After implementing “Becoming An Outlier” I could now market for 4 pain-points that previously I couldn’t hit (think of it as gaining new features), secondly, I’ve only seen 2 competitors with something kind of similar, but at 10-15x the cost due to them using the old process.

However, I found out the hard way that though affordability was also a new strength of mine, Hybrid Consulting has a weakness. A weakness that I didn’t notice at first and as a result, I took a revenue hit. Take note of my weakness in part two of this series because it’s crucial it doesn’t happen to you too or your company could take a bigger revenue hit than I did.

PART 2 PREVIEW ---> Here’s What’s To Come:

  • How to avoid hidden mistakes while executing “Becoming An Outlier”.
  • Money burnt. The hidden mistake I never knew I fell for.
  • I’ll also dive into step 1 of "Becoming An Outlier" which is the preparation phase.

Can’t wait to share it with you and follow me here on Indie Hackers so you’re notified when I release part 2. Also, let other Indie Hackers benefit from this series too by upvoting this post.

  1. 1

    Looking forward to part 2:-)

    1. 1

      It's about to drop my friend!

  2. 1

    Interesting concept, and well explained. Looking forward to Part 2!

    1. 1

      Thanks! I'm glad you liked it. Part 1 is just a teaser compared to what part 2 and 3 has in store. I can't wait to share it with you guys!

  3. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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