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14 Comments

CRM That Automatically Sells Your Side Projects — Do you need this?

Pain point

80% of the time I design or make stuff, 20% of my time I do marketing and sales. And it should be the opposite.

Solution

I need something that facilitates/automates the process of selling my side projects, keeping the personal touch that I would use when I reach out to people.

landing page screenshot

I was thinking about something like this:

  1. The system automatically finds new Twitter profiles of potential customers for my side projects and add them in a private dashboard;
  2. It writes custom sales messages for every lead, based on their activities on Twitter and my sales style;

generated sales messages

What does it technically do?
Basically, I would build a sales automation tool that takes in input:

  • 3x Twitter profiles of my current best customers for a specific project
  • 3x of my best sales messages I used to sell that specific project

And with these data it will:

  • Scrape and analyse recent Tweets and descriptions of the 3x chosen best customers and generate new Twitter prospects similar to the chosen ones;
  • Write personal sales messages for each one of them based on their recent Tweets and my 3x best sales messages style.

PS I'll use OpenAI GPT-3, I did some tests and the result it's quite impressive!!

Are you interested in this CRM/Sales automation tool?
Here a simple landing page just to show the concept Hustlejet

✅ IF YES: what feature would you love to see?
❌ IF NO: why aren't you selling your side project?

Notion like UI

  1. 9

    Honestly you are trying to do too much here. And most of it isn't necessary. I don't need 90% of what you are offering, the most challenging part is:

    The system automatically finds new Twitter profiles of potential customers for my side projects and add them in a private dashboard;

    The success of your platform will be the ability to find valuable leads, and at that don't need to limit your potential buyers to the niche of those that want to sell. If you can tell me about potential customers for my actual SaaS product, I would use your app.

    Homever you haven't sold me about your ability to find potential customers from twitter profiles, and I'm skeptical about your ability to find the right customers. The rest of the features are like "whatever", sure use GPT-3 to generate text, but what's the point, that isn't the main value.

    Aside: I'm happy to alpha test your product :) Let me know when it's ready.

    1. 3

      Thanks so much for the feedback.

      "Honestly you are trying to do too much here"
      I'm with you here, focusing on generating leads might be the way / first small MVP

  2. 3

    This is a neat idea, but speaking as someone in the CRM space, I think you're going to have trouble if you position it as a CRM. This feels more like an add-on or a single feature of a CRM.

    When you say "CRM" people are going to expect you to be the primary system of record for the whole business, not just a way to manage one specific channel. Obviously you should test this because maybe I'm wrong, but I bet people would be more interested if you either stopped talking about CRMs entirely and just say it's a way to automate sales via social media (or whatever pitch you think is appropriate like that) or pitch it as a way to supercharge your existing CRM.

    I also think getting away from the "CRM" term will help you charge more. CRM is a mature space with real price competition. Given how few typical CRM features you'd have here, I think you'd be anchoring your pricing with the very cheapest (or even free) CRMs. But if you position it as a tool to help you grow sales or whatever, I think people might be willing to pay a lot more.

    1. 1

      Nice and clear point of view from an expert, thanks Tyler!

  3. 2

    I think this is a really cool idea. A slight twist (that I think would be more valuable to me and easier to build)...

    • I'd love to just have an area where I could manage DMs on Twitter almost like a CRM (like you've shown here).
    • Then if I could test the same message on 10 people, and a different one on 10 others, then see the difference, that would be really useful.
    • I don't know if it's worth scraping tweets and analyzing them. I think finding people on Twitter can be as simple as looking at a prospects "following" list and going from there.

    Would definitely test is out when you're ready!

    1. 2

      Really interesting the small MVP you defined here...
      A Twitter direct messages board, send the same message to 10 people, A/B testing... cool man thanks

      M

    2. 1

      hey, something like this? :) [ONLY DESKTOP] https://twitter-dms.bubbleapps.io/

      1. 2

        Whoa this is cool! Love the addition of A/B testing here that makes it really powerful 👏

  4. 1

    would love to test. i sell learninpublic.org and would love automated help.

  5. 1

    It's a cool idea, and I see the value in it. For me personally, though, I'm skeptical of how well it would work. I don't trust AI to write messages. I would prefer to set the criteria for identifying prospects and write my own templates. I would also prefer if the communication was done via email. I haven't found Twitter to be a good platform for two-way communications.

  6. 1

    I will be interested if it works for LinkedIn. Basically, if it can do the following:

    1. Build a list of profiles similar to my ideal profile
    2. Find people who interact with posts with keywords/hashtags I define
    1. 1

      Thanks @VishalSrivastava! Can you give me an example of keywords/hashtags you would like to be able to enter?

      1. 1

        For example, I want to write about ConvertKit. If I can find people who have interacted with posts about it, I can reach out to them about their experience.

  7. 1

    Building up a list of leads takes time and it can be a bit overwhelming with:

    • Different platforms to manage them from (Twitter, Reddit, Gumroad, CovertKit). Sure, one should try to get emails (as they're still the best) but I have a gut feel that most users like to stay in their respective platforms, at least initially 🙂
    • Finding relevant Twitter profiles is like finding a needle in the haystack. I'd be curious to know how well your algo performs.

    I'd be willing to give it a spin!

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