Coldlytics

I woke up this morning to the most amazing notification from Stripe - our first subscriber!

It feels so incredible to make our first "scalable" dollar (i.e. to move away from renting our time). I rode the high all day long and even wrote a short post.

@Kshilov & I have never met in person but we're gonna get together on Zoom (with our wives) and toast! 🍾

There's a fantastic outreach tool with an amazing community that we totally love called lemlist, by @guillaume_lemlist.

Some of our users have been asking for a lemlist integration so we decided to do it! It wasn't a hard decision to make - we love the community around lemlist and we think they could really benefit from using Coldlytics, so hopefully we can get some visibility by eventually becoming one of their approved partners.

In terms of tech, we switched it up this time. Usually @Kshilov handles back-end but @rich0886 decided to implement this one as a serverless application on AWS. The way we have set it up (using "infrastructure as code") means that we can easily throw up new integrations going forward, in parallel to frontend and backend tasks. Next up: Hubspot & Pipedrive! 🚀

Over the past couple of weeks, users have been contacting us asking to top up their credits, however, they have gone cold when we sent them the payment link. Perhaps it's the delay in responding sometimes, or perhaps they don't trust Payoneer so much. In any case, we decided to prioritise integrating Stripe - as this definitely reduces a lot of friction.

It took a little longer than we expected, mainly due to testing the many possible edge cases (3D secure, decline reasons, subscription payment failures, etc).

We got there in the end though, and now our customers can 🎉upgrade/downgrade and buy credits whenever they want

So far we have just over 20 beta users, which is great! Each one of them fills out an invite form via our landing page, which contains questions like "Which CRM do you use?", and "Which data providers have you used in the past?". This has provided us with a lot of insight and is already informing our decisions.

What's more, we've done a demo call with every user so far. This has given us even more insight and it turns out one of the main pain points/areas of confusion right now is our targeting UI.

Targeting people for lead research is very different to PPC. There's a real person behind the scenes (@Kshilov has built strong relationships with many great researchers over the years). Often, if a task is ill-defined (i.e. a newbie using Upwork), there will be a lot of back-and-forth between the researcher and client. This is something that we want to minimise on Coldlytics.

Although we don't have vast amounts of structured data like LinkedIn or Facebook, we still wanted to provide a familiar targeting UI, where users can see a running estimate of audience size as they apply filters.

We've combined all sorts of data from many sources (from working population sizes to industry, salary, and seniority stats) to build a pretty accurate audience estimation gauge. We think it'll really help our customers!

After 4 intense, very productive weeks, we just launched our MVP. @Kshilov handled the back-end (Python) and @rich0886 built the front-end (React).

We currently have no payments integration, but we will use Payoneer for users who want to subscribe. The next task will be integrating Stripe.

We just began an initial cold outreach campaign, using our own platform to procure the prospect data. So I guess you could say we're our first customer! It's awesome to see everything working - the task specification, lead research, and the integration with our CRM.

Onwards and upwards!

In February 2021 @Kshilov posted that he was looking for a co-founder for his B2B data mining project. I got in touch, we jumped on a call, and just a few days later we started building!

We immediately clicked - although we have very different backgrounds, there are many similarities in our goals - both personally and professionally. We felt it was a great sign!