How do you ask your community to buy?
New here to IH, but over the past couple days I've been incredibly thankful to be a part of the community.
I'm currently working on a project called Peel with a friend. We are actively conducting customer interviews to validate our target market and building a community of individuals who could be eventual customers.
I'm struggling with the "Sell". We aren't necessarily ready for anyone to buy anything right now, but we do want to gauge interest and actual value.
What are some commitments you've asked for from your community to validate a product and customer segment?
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Well I am not an expert, I am just starting to build a community, but I think that's exactly the point why people do build communities in the first place:
After you have offered enough value and built trust, you can make up-sells of things that don't even exist yet and measure an interest in that way.
So in order to detect if your community wants to buy... you need to sell.
I think you can do it in kind of informal way, kind of like:
"Hey guys, we are thinking of making an online course on X, for 199$. Here is a mailing list for those who would be interested, we will send you more info via mail".
That's what I plan to do anyways.
thank you for your thoughts. totally agree on offering value and building trust. my next step for me is to ensure that the community I build and invite are the ideal customer segment to see the most value so the trust we build has equity that can convert to revenue.
excited to see what comes of your CTA :)
Hi Danny,
I always consult my clients to start manually - don't know the details of your business but I'm sure you can do it!
What I mean is this - you probably have a vision of an amazing SaaS product that will automate all your millions of clients problems away. right? Great!
Now find 10 (or 1 for that matter) clients who will pay for your service and do it manually. That's right, manually! Find out how much they'll pay, if they're happy, do they have suggestions and what can you actually automate.
That way you can sell (really!) and validate your product without a single line of code.
Hope this helps,
Jonathan
this idea and suggestion gives me a ton of peace both as a community builder and as a non-technical entrepreneur. the project we are working on definitely has the ability to function and deliver value manually, so we can definitely go thru this exercise.
any examples that you would be able to share on your clients' behalf?
appreciate you logging your journey with your consulting interactions here on IH. excited to follow.
Hi Danny,
Why don't we jump on a call and try to discuss your business?
I'm doing free 30-min consults: https://calendly.com/jonathanoron
Would love to hear more about you :)
Hey Danny, we're in a similar boat! We just finished developing a robust MVP and have been interviewing prospective users for the past several months. While we're also trying to figure out the transition to "sales," we have been making some progress by taking the perspective of asking them their problems and "solving" them.
Basically, when we're doing our interviews we ask them about the most difficult part of doing X - in our case, conducting employee performance reviews - and then from there we tell them that we're building something that solves that problem and does it even better. We try to get a commitment from them to sign on with us as a test case in the future. This has worked in a handful of our meetings.
The through process here, we learned from going through Y Combinator's Startup School (recommend fully!!!!), is that you get people to just start using your product and you ask them what success looks like - what would they need to get out of the service to be willing to actually start paying for it? Then....you work your butt off on the back end to make sure you hit that level of success for them. Once that happens, you can go back to them and say, objectively,...hey, we've hit the goals you've laid out, let's turn you into a paying customer! It makes that whole conversation much easier.
Hope this helps a little! Things may be different for you depending on what you have and where you are in the process. Also....we're in the middle of doing this as well so please let us know if you come across anything that may benefit you!
thank you for taking the time to share and write! it's awesome to hear already where you are and the investments you've made into your customers... which in turn, has shaped and pushed your product and company forward.
i love your example "what is the most difficult part of doing X". this will be added to my next customer interview that I do.
when asking "what would they need to get out of the service to be willing to actually start paying for it?"... have you been getting answers that you can measure yourself against? do they know what they need to see to become a paying customer?
thanks again.. and excited to follow you here.
Sure thing! Yeah I find that if I can identify their #1 problem then it's that much easier for me to build or frame ourselves as the solution.
Regarding "What would you need...?" the answers have mostly centered around features that they'd like to have that make their job easier. I agree with you that they may not know what it would take to become a paying customer but I think that if you press them a little to define success - giving them free rein to push the envelope - they should come up with something. I find it helpful to tell them that their answer will be your "guiding light" that defines how you'll make decisions and by giving you something it will help you do a better job for them.
I built up my previous company on the foundation of community first. Meaning, I built the community first then along the way figured out how to make it sustainable financially.
Bearing in mind I started it 13 years ago, people didn't have the approaches of today, but I realise I wasn't far off how many people do things today, albeit less formal.
When you build a community you get to know the people really well. For me it was around a specific career path that I also had experience in. So my experience combined with communicating with people every day put me (I believe) in a really good position to just make some decisions on their behalf.
Most of our revenue growth was from events. I never really asked people if that was what they wanted, the few people I did talk to it about kind of stuck their noses up at the concept. But I felt I had enough understanding of the market to take a bit of a risk to do a small event (around 70 people for our first one).
The way I sold it to them? The same way I communicated everything we did. We just told them our plans. 'Hey, we're doing a thing. It'll be a great and educational day out. We think the community needs it. Hope to see you there.' I can't remember the exact steps, but I probably sent a few emails to remind people it was happening and mostly kept my fingers crossed that people would come.
I also did my best to keep my expectations low.
The thing is, you can ask people all they like whether they plan to buy, or if they will commit, but you'll never know the truth until they actually pay. Which you probably won't find out until you launch something. So rather than asking for commitment, the best thing you can do is try to figure out if you are truly providing value or solving some real pain.
The IH podcast with Rob Fitpatrick is a good one that dives into some of these topics and explains it much better than I can. :)