Find your audience first they say...
I'm the type that gravitates towards creating my ideas before going out and having hundreds of conversations with my target market to validate them. Which results in lots of lectures from my best bud that runs a growth team for a well funded startup. If I had a dollar for every time I heard I have a "solution looking for a problem", I could probably retire by now.
For some reason, I always have trouble stopping myself from opening the IDE when I'm inspired by an idea, as opposed to going out and talking about it with people. Well after many failed attempts and an embarrassing amount of years trying to prove my friend wrong, I only proved him right, over and over again.
I wanted to follow my friend's advice, but the problem was I didn't and I don't have a huge Twitter/IG/Linkedin/FB following and it's sort of hard for me to try to promote products I want to build through my social accounts because my boss would wonder where I'm finding all this time to build these things.
My lack of audience and the apprehension to go all-in on social media drove me to what all the inbound marketers assured me would fail....cold emails.
At the start of Covid in the US (March timeframe) I once again fell back on old habits, I took three months and built a product that allows Real Estate Agents and Real Estate Investors to send postcards to all homes in whatever US geo they choose, prior to consulting any Real Estate Agents about whether or not the solution would solve any of their problems.
But with an MVP in hand and out of complete desperation I did what any tech leaning product developer would do, I turned to a large online ratings and reviews site that rhymes with "Welp" and I scraped all of the real estate company listings to get website and company info. But I still lacked actual contacts since Welp has no emails on it. So I created a second scraper that iterated over all of the website links from the listings I scraped and luckily for me, realtors like to publish their emails on their sites, so I did the dirty deed and scraped their emails.
I then sent a semi-salesy cold email to ~2,500 realtors in Central Florida as a test saying "Hey, I'm looking to talk to a handful of top realtors in Orange County Florida about a new site I'm launching that lets you send direct postcards to any homeowner in Orange or Seminole County. Any chance you'd be willing to connect and give me some feedback? In exchange I'll order you a coffee at your favorite Starbucks through the app and you can go pick it up at the counter as soon as we end the call. Here's a link to my calendar if you can spare 30 minutes: <insert link to my free Hubspot calendar>"
The result, I had 10 direct conversations with realtors over the past two weeks (only 3 took me up on the coffee offer) and I got my first paying customer!
Not saying cold emails is the holy grail, but if you lack a huge following, it's not the worst idea ever.
There's an important distinction to be made between personal audience vs product audience. This is where people get confused. A personal audience is useless if you aren't building a product specifically for them.
The correct launch sequence should be:
Well said. I know I’m missing some fundamentals around idea validation before I’m knee deep in code. But, I find it hard to feel like I’ve validated anything if all I have is someone telling me they like the wireframe I put in front of them. I’d rather have a shell of a product built with a working purchase flow. If I can’t hold someone’s hand through the purchase flow to a successful transaction, I don’t know that I’d ever truly feel like I gave an experiment or an idea a full effort.
That's awesome, I'm still stuck with finding validation for my idea.
Some years ago I built a full product with some friends that failed, and now I just built a landing and I want to test the idea (I learnt from my mistake). The problem I have, is get people to just see my idea, haha I'm working out that part with little experience. Hope to reach at least some subscribers.
Glad you managed to overcome that part, and wish you luck in your journey!
Great story, and it's awesome that you found your first customer.
On the other hand, do people really discourage cold emails? That's crazy to me - IMO cold emailing potential customers is the very best type of marketing for that stage of your product (if,you know, you don't have 1000's of Twitter followers who are your exact audience 🙄)
Thanks for the read and comment yousufj. I’m only speaking anecdotally about the discouragement I received. I think most people involved in any form of business development considers cold email at one time or another. But I think the approach is out of majority of people’s comfort zone, and I know some people think they’ll be ousted as a spammer. Even if they feel like it my offer some return on effort/investment for them, they’ll still shy away from it. But I agree with you, if done correctly, it can be a great option to get you in front of a target market inexpensively.
At the very least I love your initiative. There's definitely room for improvement. There are still some crazy pain points. The market is big, and it still takes crazy amount of time(>30 days?). I haven't bought a house, but everyone I've talked to who bought a house hates the process.
Great work!
I think I agree with you more than I agree with your friend :D
I think what's missed in these "growth advice" convo's is the emphasis that you shouldn't spend months or a year building something without talking to real people.
Otherwise, prototyping quickly is one of the best ways to get real feedback on an idea. Conversation would only go so far.
Good luck man! I'll be following to learn about more of your ideas!
Thanks for the follow! To my friend’s credit, his advice came after he’s seen me spend more than a handful of months building without validating with an audience (on several side project attempts). His encouragement was definitely helpful in getting me out of my comfort zone. I just needed a villain to make the post a bit more dramatic.
Haha it's all about good storytelling :D
Great job Steve!
Thanks!
great read, funny too.
Thanks for reading. Glad dry humor translates to text!