Struggling for early testers
So, I'm working on a bit of a pivot. My market is a slow moving one. Legal practice management (and client work project management in general) is a hard one to get people to move their data -- whole customer and case databases -- over to a totally unproven product.
What I'm doing now is focusing on integrations with existing leaders in the market. What Dendri does is pretty unique. It gives everyone on your team including you the ability to organize work in their own way by cloning tasks across all of those points and teams. So, with my focus on integrations, if you do client work and two of your clients uses trello, one uses jira and one uses clickup, you can clone all of their boards into dendri and all the work you're assigned to do will end up on your dashboard to be organized however it makes sense. What I'm hoping is by building in all of these integrations, if you're a trello user, you'll try dendri to organize your work across your boards.
Really trying to get those first users though. My non-startup business uses Dendri as it's management platform, and so I have 20 testers on my team driving features outside what I could come up with, but I really want to get more eyes outside my organization. I feel like I'm really struggling to explain how incredibly useful this app is without sitting someone down and showing them - then I get that "a-ha!" moment, but that's tough to do without already getting someone's undivided time. How did you get those first eyes on your product?
Hi Rich,
From my understanding, your product consolidates some of the popular CRMs like Trello, Jira into a single interface. If my understanding is correct, why are you specific about legal practice niche alone, You can easily extend this to other fast moving industries like Software development companies, Digital Marketing agencies. All of these use platforms you mentioned to work with different clients.
Very true. The pivot to include these integrations is new, I started with clio a popular practice management software for firms and then realized this potential. Without the integrations it has its own project management system with native boards and crm. I’m hopeful by letting people integrate and collect the tools they already use I’ll be able to do exactly that and expand. Even if you just use jira, being able to easily bring together all of your work in a single place and reorganize it holds value for teams. Thanks for the feedback.
it may be possible to test who your users would be by writing about your product and putting videos in the posts. Before doing this go setup 'Google Search Console' and wait for the data to come in. This is how I discovered insights about customer behavior like terms they are looking for or what they are doing with searches.
Search console takes only minutes to setup. its one line in the <head> tags before you start entering your sites URLs in the box at the top of the screen for indexing. Make sure to press the button for indexing.
Say someone is searching two things they want to integrate , they find your site. This might be a Dev in the company who later recommends the product to management . Yes, its slow but people searching for and landing on your content are 'active' they need to solve their problems and are actively searching to do so. They are sometimes willing to pay.
Pro tip: Go ahead and start adding advertising pixels to your website.
This will start collecting data on users. Say you want to retarget readers on social, linkedin , etc they will get a gentle reminders or sales alerts if you want to convert.
Once you have actual customer data then this is the gold mine. Retarget people using these datapoints will pull customers out from everywhere if it the right platform.
Good luck, hope there are some ideas here.
Very good advice, thank you! I do this extensively with my firm and for some reason just have a blocker on this for dendri totally right! Thank you.
I have some luck with IH and Reddit. But that's for consumer products. I doubt people don't look for enterprise systems like yours on those channels. The people I know who have done enterprise spend a bit of time cold emailing firms.
Have you tried creating articles or videos about how the product makes your firm more efficient? Try and take into account the questions people ask you in live demos and incorporate them in the content.
I’ve definitely posted a bunch and done cold outreach. I’ve been lagging on videos but I think that may be my weekend project. Thank you!
I started out by finding users on twitter who tweet about things related to my product and contacting them. Strangers are surprisingly open if you are sufficiently targeted.
Yeah, this is where I’ve fallen flat. People are very engrained in their systems and unwilling to even test something new given the data sensitivity. That’s why I’m focused on this integration pivot which will hopefully make the ask easier. I really believe once people see how much easier it is for their teams to manage their work and clients it will be easier to get that momentum but struggling to get people to even give feedback so I can start tweaking is still frustrating. Thank you!