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Update 78: Crossed $1,000 in MRR đź’¸!

First significant milestone for Encharge: we crossed $1,000 in MRR last week!

Last week we managed to close one new customer, upgraded an old customer to a $350/mo plan, and got paid by a third one that we’ve been onboarding for the last few weeks.

All in all, it was a successful week for us.

Other highlights from the week:

✅ We launched 2 customer discovery campaigns — one via cold email, and another one on LinkedIn

âś… We launched an inbound campaign and got 4 leads, scheduled a call with one already.

âś… Made fixes to our Salesforce integration

âś… Optimized costs for AWS.

We learned that thought leadership and providing value on calls is a competitive advantage we have over big competitors, who hire sales/support people to do the demo calls for their tools. Most often can’t provide the business insights that we have.

________

Goals for this week:

My goal is to flesh out our customer persona and prepare content/SEO clusters based on that persona by the end of the week.

  1. 2

    Congratulations! 🙌

    I'm one of Encharge's customers and am happy to be a part of the early days.

    Keep going Kalo and Slav. You've got a great product. đź‘Ťđź‘Ť

  2. 1

    Nice going! How's the cold email outreach campaigns going so far?

    I'm jumping over hurdles like ip blacklisting & such.

    Seems spam filters are getting smarter & smarter.

    Any creative counter-measures you're trying?

    1. 2

      All of our current customers were warm inbound leads. Which is unpredictable and at our stage not enough. But hey, at least it works, unlike cold outreach at the moment, which we haven't been able to get going - only a couple of leads out of at least 2k emails sent.

    2. 1

      Cold email — not good at all :/ I think the email message is of little importance, but the target audience AND the timing are the key. Two things that we still haven't managed to nail down.

      We had very few issues with deliverability and getting reported. How do you track your deliverability? I don't know how to track deliverability but I see that our open rates are usually decent. Still, we don't get any responses.

      My only measure is to do small scale outreach — 100 emails per day per warmed up email address, or 50/day if the email address is brand new. More than that and we start to see issues.

      1. 2

        I track deliverability with a tool like MixMax etc, it has open tracking. Here's the email warm-up strategy I used to get my email inbox rate to 83%+ (GlockApps Test) & a 10/10 Score (Mail-Tester).

        🏆Email Setup & Warm-Up Process
        âś…Email address is at least 3+ days old.
        âś…Site Domain is at least 30+ days old.
        âś…Email 10+ friends & have them reply + unspam your emails from their inbox.
        âś…Sign up for 15+ email newsletters & start getting blasted by them.
        (GaryVee, Buzzfeed, Supreme, Pat Flynn, etc)
        âś…Setup DKIM, DMARC, & SPF records.
        (I have problems getting DMARC to play nicely but no biggie, it's the least important).

        🏆Email Deliverability Tweaking & Testing
        âś…Disable link & open tracking. Remove ALL links from email + signature.
        âś…Do not send images until the 3rd email in the sequence.
        âś…Include a physical address mailbox in your signature to help with spam filters seeing you're a real person & not a spam bot.
        âś…Send a few test emails to Mail-Tester (min. score must be = 8.5+)
        âś…Make sure inbox rate is higher than 80%+ from GlockApps
        âś…Check MX-Toolbox to ensure Domain is NOT blacklisted.

        Revise your email script also so it doesn't contain links (if possible, I know some signatures contain your website url & this gets auto-hyperlinked on sending but not a big deal).

        Then just keep testing to get your score up. I warmed up my email really slowly, over a period of a few weeks actually.

        Hope this helps @slavivanov & @kaloyankulov

        đź‘Ź

        1. 2

          That's awesome, thank you!

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