CrowdMagnet

I spent December building the CrowdMagnet MVP and redesigning the landing page. The new landing page shows off all the features of CrowdMagnet and how to use it. I just sent out a beta launch email to my prelaunch email list, so we'll see how many people sign up 🤞.

I emailed 38 of the 90 total emails I've collected from doing customer interviews. Some of these 38 never replied to my initial interview email so I didn't expect the conversation rate to be very high.

But I got 7 leads from this outreach! All of them were people that I did interview, so I guess I was right that the people who never replied initially just aren't interested. Was worth a shot though.

I think this is a good signal so I'm going to keep trying to collect leads and hopefully I can get 23 more leads from other sources.

https://www.getcrowdmagnet.com

I want to gauge interest in my cross-promotion marketplace before I commit to building it. I created a small landing page to collect email addresses. I want to see if I can get 30 people to give me their email. I'm planning to email some of the people I interviewed to get their feedback and I'm also going to post to IndieHackers to see if anyone's interest.

It's called CrowdMagnet and here's the landing page: https://www.getcrowdmagnet.com

I finally settled on an idea I want to test out. This felt so much better than if felt when I used to come up with product ideas in a vacuum. I collected all these insights from my customer interviews which is giving me a lot more confidence in my product ideas. Even if this idea doesn't work out, it's a much better starting place than how I used to do it.

So what's the idea?
A lot of newsletter creators I spoke with have tried to do cross-promotion in the past but found it difficult. I'm thinking if there was a cross-promotion marketplace it would make it easier for creators to find matches for cross promotion.

I officially reached my goal of completing 20 customer interviews. I've conducted 22 interviews and even have a few more scheduled.

It was easier than I thought, I was surprised at how many people were willing to speak to me. I tried to ask objective open ended questions and listen as much as I could instead of speaking. I learned a lot!

In total, I sent out 70 emails and conducted 22 interviews. I was expecting about a 10% conversation rate but got a 31% conversation rate!

I'm going to keep doing cold outreach for interviews, but less so. I've learned a lot so I'm going to spend time going through my notes and thinking about product ideas.

I made a goal to interview 20 newsletter creators. I wasn't sure how feasible that was.

So far, I've reached out to 22 newsletter creators using cold emails. I got 10 replies and scheduled 6 interviews. I had the first interview today. I'm not sure all of the other 5 will show up day of. But even if some don't, I'm still pretty surprised at how many people replied and are willing to speak to me.

I'm a software engineer. I used to always build products without thinking about marketing. I'd launch them and no one would sign up and I had no idea where to promote them. I'd give up each time. It sucked.

That changed this year. I read two books: The Mom Test and Lean Customer Development. Then I had that Aha! moment. Don't build products in a vacuum and then launch them. Instead, pick a target market and interview people in that target to learn about their business. Then develop a product.

I'm excited by the recent growth in independent newsletters and I subscribe to a bunch myself. So, instead of making my goal to imagine and code a product as fast as I can, it's to find and speak with as many newsletter creators as possible.

I'm making a goal to conduct 20 interviews with newsletter creators. I'm not sure how hard this will be but 🤞