Donna Digital Receptionists
A micro call center exclusively for financial advisors
Based off that email blast that I did to my network back in December, I had one person reach out and ask to be my first customer. The great thing was that he was a client of mine from back in the agency days who I have stayed in touch with. We aren't particularly close, but I felt good about the work I did for him. Just goes to show that putting good things out there to help others will eventually come around to help you.
The funny part is that I don't actually have the backend systems set up to actually service a client right now. But I'm using that as a feature rather than a bug. I've sent my first client the onboarding sequence and asked him for feedback. Basically, I'm building what I need right as I need it and am bringing my first client along on the journey with me.
Simultaneous to all this, I decided to launch a blind recruitment process for my first employees. Offering good job opportunities to anyone who is qualified - not just those who had some kind of privilege growing up - is something that is important to me in building Donna. And frankly, it's just the right thing to do.
So I set out to learn how to build a blind recruitment process, which is actually a lot easier than I imagined. It did require changing how I thought about hiring though. Rather than asking the usual screening and background questions, I had to start thinking about what kind of traits I wanted to hire for and what behaviors would be exemplified by those traits. Then I designed some scenario-based questions that would help to identify people who fit those traits.
I won't say that it wasn't a bit of work. But it wasn't that much more than any other hiring process. If anyone else wants help designing a blind recruitment process for their projects, let me know!
After finishing the front end of TryDonna.com, I decided to take a page out of the startup playbook and 'launch' the concept to my network to gauge interest and see if I could drum up a little interest before laying out the time and money to build out the back end of everything.
And to be honest, it scared the pants off me! Up until this point, only a few people knew I was working on Donna, and should it fail, I would be able to do it in secret and my ego would be intact. But no longer! Now, if I fail, everyone will know.
And I'll be even more honest when reviewing the emails on my list my heart would skip a beat every time I saw a name that I would be embarrassed to tell that I failed at some point in the future. I seriously considered hitting 'delete' every time I saw one of those names to avoid even telling them in the first place. But I also knew that exactly BECAUSE this is hard, is why I needed to do it. So I held my hand, swallowed the frog, and hit send.
And what do you know? In nearly 2,000 emails that went out, only one reply was critical. Most people didn't bother to reply at all. And a few were incredibly excited and wanted to know how they could help. So, it seems, I've finally learned the lesson that most people are too caught up in their own lives to even care what I'm doing over here.
And that's incredibly liberating.
It's a bit nervewracking as it means that now I have to try and drum up some interest. But it's a low commitment way to get started and if no customers bite, then I'll only be out a little time and cash rather than had I set up all the infrastructure first. Next up? Launching some cheap FB ads and cold email campaigns to see if I can drum up any interest!
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