Encharge

Revenue: $0

Subscribers: 468 of 1000

Cust. dev. Interviews: 18

This week I didn't have a lot of time to do some heavy work marketing. I've been spread across Encharge and looking for personal client work (needed to pay the bills).

I've been posting regularly to LinkedIn which has a decent effect on networking and audience building.

I also created a Facebook group and invited our email list. The group is almost 50 members now.

Managing social media takes more of my time than anticipated. I wish I could've automated completely the social posting process.

Slav has almost finished developing a first MVP version for Encharge (super bare bones for now).

I started designing the UI. So far I'm quite happy with the results. Taking the best practices from all marketing automation tools and putting them to good use to create a great UX.

Next week:

• I'll continue generating leads for customer development. I'll try with LinkedIn
• Continue working on the design
• Should start writing the second article for the blog

Revenue: $0

Subscribers: 438 of 1000

Cust. dev. interviews: 13

I've been hard at work growing our email list and promoting our first blog post.

Overall, promotion for the post went well. Over 400 subscribers, and 2,825 unique visits.

The audience might not be as targeted as we want it to be, but I'm not super concerned about this, at the moment. A lot of people sign up out of curiosity, top of the funnel leads.

We've done 13 interviews so far. It's hard to see some definite problem patterns, yet. We suspect that our audience might be too broad. We have 6 SaaS products, 5 marketers/service, 1 marketplace, and 1 eCommerce.

Revenue: $0

Subscribers: 332 of 1000

A few good things happened in the last 2 weeks:

• We launched the coming soon page of Encharge 2.0 (a marketing automation tool)
• We launched the blog and published the 1st article - https://encharge.io/blog/idea-to-exit/ We've also posted the article here on IH
• The post received a lot of positive reactions from the startup and marketing communities. I got a lot of emails with praises and invitations to different endeavors. Ask to become a CEO of a company, to give advice and to get our product featured on the Entrepreneur.com website among some of them.
• The Encharge.io site received over 2,388 unique visitors.
• We collected 332 email subscribers. At about 14% visitor to subscriber CR

It's still not very clear where we're going with the product. The interviews are still vague but we have a couple of concrete use cases that we can focus on for the moment.

Revenue: $0 Subscribers: 0 of 1000

This last week started off rather emotional for me (Slav), as I had to tell the few people in our sales pipeline that we would not be further developing the Encharge integrations platform. It was hard because we have been wooing these folks into our product for so long, and now I felt we had let them down. Most were very understanding. Our very first customer, a lead generation company called "Find That Lead" prepaid in March, so I wanted to somehow make it up to them. I ended up building an initial version of their Zapier integration for free, as I've grown quite comfortable with Zapier's platform. We are still emailing back and forth with some other potential customers, tying loose ends.

With that out of the way, we could set our sights on Encharge v2. The plan is to build a community interested in marketing automation and develop a product around them. Kalo has been hard at work on a ginormous blog post (5623 words and counting). He would release and market it this upcoming week. We are hoping to get 200-300 subscribers off of it. Next week, Kalo wants to start designing a bunch of email templates and to give these away for free. I'm doubtful of the potential impact of this, but we shall see.

I've been working on a few aspects of the product unlikely to change very much regardless of our audience. This week it was the workflow canvas, where one can set up their customer journey by dragging and connecting triggers and actions. I spent too much time fiddling with tiny details (such as how connections display). I have to be more focused on the major stuff next week. Speaking of it, the upcoming week I'll be focused on the email sending and tracking functionality. My goal is to get this done by the end of the week so we can start using our MVP to automate our blog's email sequences.

Oops, I missed the update last week. A long post ensues.

Two words that describe the last half month at EnchargeHQ are Confusion and Frustration.

I'd say, the last weeks have been chaotic and uncertain. We definitely don't know where we're moving to.

Slav has been working his butt off onboarding 2-3 clients for Encharge. With some minors details, onboarding has been going well.

Unfortunately, the onboarding for Encharge customers went downhill since then. Communication with customers has drastically slowed down. Making it unbearable to move forward with the product. We're giving it 1 last week before we either onboard the customers (I.e. get them to pay us) or fire them.

I'm starting with a group of 50 startups — the YC Winter 2017 batch. I'll send a cold email asking them about potential problems they experience with their marketing stack.

Spent 3+ hours researching leads and $40 for a data-entry specialist on UpWork to complete this task. Unfortunately, we literary got 0 responses out of this.

After the CDP hypothesis, we sporadically decided to quickly look into 2 other ideas:

IDEA 1:

A tool that helps you increase your conversion rate on your lead forms by auto-filling the fields for your visitors in those cases where you already have their information.

Shared this idea with 4-5 email marketing communities (our target audience). Responses were negative — people already had decent solutions to this problem.

IDEA 2:

A tool that records and reproduces your whole customer lifecycle. Think of a site session recording tool (FullStory/Inspectlet) meets analytical tool that captures your whole customer journey (Woopra/Mixpanel/customer data platforms).

Again, sharing this (crazy) idea with a few communities including IH the response rate was far from satisfactory.

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ENCHARGE 2.0

After all these unsuccessful efforts in customer development and idea validation, we decided to radically change our approach:

1. Stick with a large, proven market.
2. Do NOT come up with innovative ideas.
3. Validate the product through marketing instead of cold email.

In other words, we decided it's better to work on a commodity tool, stick with it for the long haul and do customer development by building an audience for the product through pre-launch and marketing instead of fishing for customer development via cold email.

After a long discussion with Slav, we decided we want to work on a marketing automation tool (think Autopilot and AC) — a.k.a Encharge 2.0

Things we did for Encharge 2.0 in the last week:

1. Despite our decision to ignore cold emails for customer development, I was still tempted and did one last cold email campaign. I reached out to Autopilot customers asking for 10 minutes of their time to talk about marketing automation. The results sucked. After 100+ emails sent, we got 0 responses.
2. I started working on pre-launch content marketing — setting up a blog and coming up with content ideas.
3. Slav has been looking into the technology aspect of building infrastructure and UI for a marketing automation tool.
4. I jumped on a call with a good friend of mine who works for a SaaS named Metrilo. The guys are currently looking into setting up a marketing automation platform to glue their marketing tools in order to provide a cohesive and targeted buyers journey for their customers. We're now waiting for him to provide the technical specs to figure out if it's something we can build for them.

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NEXT WEEK:

1. See the Metrilo specs.
2. Figure out if we keep Encharge customers or let them go and close the startup.
3. Get in touch with low mid-market SaaS companies (like Metrilo) and figure out if segmentation/marketing automation is a problem for them.

Slav has been working his butt off onboarding 2-3 clients for Encharge. With some minors details, onboarding has been going well.

I've continued my customer development from last week in the direction of the 2-way sync idea. I reached out to more Facebook groups and Slack channels.

We got some interesting insights, but they've been quite vague and generic, yet, to be able to find a pattern.

We slightly transitioned to a similar idea — "customer data platform". We hypothesize that there's no good CDP platform for the lower market (i.e., less than thousand dollars per month price-point market). A few reasons for that could be:

• this market doesn't get great value from CDPs — native integrations and Zapier cater to that segment of the market well enough.
• CDPs onboarding/development/resources overhead is large and can't handle the lower market.

We still need to explore more ideas and validate the hypothesis in this direction.

NEXT WEEK: I'll start proactively reaching out to many more people to understand better their data syncing pipeline/marketing stack issues.

I'm starting with a group of 50 startups — the YC Winter 2017 batch. I'll send a cold email asking them about potential problems they experience with their marketing stack.

Last week we've compiled a list of potential directions for a pivot for Encharge.

One relevant job to be done (JTBD) that we decided to focus on is:

"Keep customer contacts/entities current across the company" or syncing of contact/customer data.

We reached out to ~25 Facebook groups and Slack channels asking the question:

How do you keep [customer/lead/user/ActiveCampaign/Pipedrive] contacts up-to-date across your business? So there are no data gaps between [sales/marketing/support/different departments in your organization]?

We gathered some interesting feedback points and already have some hypothesis but still very limited. We might need to narrow down our audience.

NEXT WEEK: We're going to continue reaching out more channels and asking more questions to flesh out our hypothesis. We might potentially start contacting service agencies.

This is the last iteration of Encharge and what our current website — encharge.io reflects.

In order to make the native integrations process even more hands-off, we changed the concept of Encharge from an API to an embeddable widget — https://encharge.io/how-it-works.html

Our target audience is startups with Zapier integration that want to build native integrations.

We launched a cold email campaign to 500 potential leads with excellent open and response rates. Response rates were varying between 20% and up to 40% depending on the targeting of the audience.

5 leads currently onboarding 10 interested (qualified leads with interest to demo the product) 29 pending (leads that have responded to one or more emails but haven't been on a call with us, yet)

At the moment, we're struggling with long sales cycles and very complex onboarding processes that require changes to the core infrastructure of our customers. We didn't meet our target of fully onboarding at least 2 customers by the end of July.

While Slav is currently handling the onboarding process with 1-2 potential customers, I'm investigating ideas for a potential pivot.

While we see that there's a big problem to be solved, the perplexed onboarding process we currently face with the customizable/semi-enterprise model is difficult and discouraging.

We plan to keep a weekly update of our progress here.