Watching. Listening. Cultivating. Then choosing to Re-tool.

I spent the summer undergoing some major surgery. This kept me from going full throttle on anything. But it didn't keep me from researching, watching and listening to the SaaS founder community.

It seems obvious at first, that, with my startup marketing background, I might have started with this audience, instead of needing it suggested to me.

But I guess like so many of us, I saw something that needed to be fixed and set about trying to fix it.

I just didn't realize until I was a few hundred hours into it. That the contractor/home service provider audience did not need fixing. They were quite happy with the biz that was landing in their laps, the freedom to turn down work, and for some, they just didn't have time to stop and look around at a longer term solution.

One of my marketing leaders back at a startup, had often said,

"you should be a marketing professor...you're always up at the whiteboard mapping it out, showing us how we can make it better/increase CR% etc..."

So - here I was, back with my roots. I had come full circle.

And, I shouldn't have been, but, I was shocked to find that this audience was always looking for marketing ideas, strategies, the latest, assistance, another eye on, a roast of their landing page....it was an ever-changing world of eye-balls moving from one platform to another - one medium or social space to another...and the product creators just wanted to get their thing out there. Some wanted to scale and sell. Others wanted a side gig, or a stream of revenue enough to justify continuing.

I put together a curriculum. I looked at what would make an impact. And how long of a sprint made sense.

And it turned into a cohort. A group that meets every week, for 8 weeks. I mapped it out 🗺 to cover a diverse enough range of experiments and tactics that people would see movement.

I'd also need them to understand where users were in their journey with the product - so, I'd fit components neatly into the lifecycles of marketing. This would give the members a way to always come back to a single sheet, and see what areas they may be neglecting that could make a difference in customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

But I needed a way to make sure that they got more than they had counted on, more than they could by googling around. It needed to be so good, that founders couldn't turn it down. So I agreed to create and edit everyone in the cohort, a commercial.

I'm not pro-level yet - but I have learned a thing or two about vids that get traction, building energy, making a vid worth watching. And I suspected (not confirmed yet) that many product creators simply had not the time to go down the video editing rabbit hole on their own -- and probably had not hired a firm to do it for them. It put me in a position of having to invest an extra 40-80 or so hours to make this work, but I felt that it was worth it. I knew what joy they'd experience when they put a video out there online and woke up to thousands of views and more awareness. I couldn't resist giving this to them. Had I a partner at this stage of the journey, I'm sure they would have tried to talk me out of it. 😋

The timing could be good, I reasoned - with the changes to the economy and a recession looming, the prominent accelerators were reducing their footprint. Bringing in fewer founders, investing in fewer. And there are just so, dang many people out there creating products now and wanting to see them soar. I could get on board with that. I could work with this audience. I already had a soft spot for them, I already emphasized with their plight.

So I set up a new landing page (again spent way too much time on it...should hire a designer next time I come up with something new) - I put the parameters in place for what we would work on, how we would move forward. And created a decent video (if I do say so myself 🙄) 🎬 📹.

I've probably painted myself into a corner, timewise.

Sometimes the realizations and the ability to turn-on-a-dime and get it out there, don't correspond well with the calendar.

But I am off to the races again - and thrilled to see what kind of growth the founders and I achieve in our 8 week marketing cohort.