SnapMetrics
Better business analytics for busy business owners
After months of talking to marketing agencies (the initial target audience), I have pivoted into targeting a different audience: SME business owners.
This is what I learned from targeting marketing agencies with an analytics app:
It’s difficult for an agency to simply switch or start using a new tool, specially one that’s related to their clients
- They need to teach their team to use a new tool
- They need to change their already working SOPs
- They need to get permission from their clients on connecting their data to a new tool
Marketing agencies, succesfull ones specially, which are the ones you want to be building tools for - already have systems, tools and people in place to do their core offer.
Offering them a new ad tech tool is difficult, first you need to get the initial objections here, but second of all... their team already does the work for them...
For example as an agency owner, I already have media buyers / data analysts whose full time job is looking at analytics, why would I need a new tool in this area?
Which brings me to the new target audience and why I believe they are better: SME business owners.
Unlike agencies, the SME business owner doesn't have the analytics team and knowledge that they really need.
Analytics apps are complicated for the average business owner, and there are too many of them, where their data is all over them...
The business owners know the value of data, but they don't have time to look into it and it's too expensive to hire someone to do that for them.
SnapMetrics will now try and basically become a data analyst for SMEs, where you connect your different services (ex: online store, Google Analytics, advertising, email marketing etc) and we will automatically keep you informed on your numbers + insights on what's working and not working.
Let's see how this goes.
Building a new analytics tool for eCommerce marketing agencies, to solve the challenge of manually checking on different accounts and channels.
Which means it's a time-saving value proposition...
But noticed that value proposition is not strong enough for the agency owners.
And thinking more about it, what happens when your agency has more time?
You can now handle more clients!
So now SnapMetrics is positioned as a way to help agencies handle more clients, let's see how this goes.
Image of new value proposition headline for reference and feedback: https://imgur.com/A7JHsSl
Learnings recently:
-
Marketers usually don't want "recommendations", they don't trust the platform recommendations (ex: Facebook, Google) and have their own procedures they like to follow
-
From an agency owner point of view, client reporting is a bigger pain point because clients want to see reports (ask for it) and it takes their team time to prepare
-
Marketers / agencies want a single tool where they can see all their accounts data in one place, better than having to keep changing accounts on different platforms to overview performance
Based on that I have an updated landing page and user interface, and reporting automations is coming soon.
Learnings recently:
-
Marketers usually don't want "recommendations", they don't trust the platform recommendations (ex: Facebook, Google) and have their own procedures they like to follow
-
From an agency owner point of view, client reporting is a bigger pain point because clients want to see reports (ask for it) and it takes their team time to prepare
-
Marketers / agencies want a single tool where they can see all their accounts data in one place, better than having to keep changing accounts on different platforms to overview performance
Based on that I have an updated landing page and user interface, and reporting automations is coming soon.
Had 2 meetings today with marketers.
Key learning is it’s normal for early users to not sign up immediately.
They already have their own workflow, and possibly a million other things they want to do.
Unless your product is solving an immediate need, people are going to need more reminders and incentives to sign up.
Ways to help early users sign up faster:
-
Have an easy to access demo of your app which they can try (without signing up) to see the value it can provide
-
Make sure sign up process is super simple, and share a quick video / instructions to show that
-
Sign them up yourself, after the demo, ask them to sign up and help them get started, it shouldn’t take long and they will at least on board
On a different note, no matter where you are in your journey in building a product, the number 1 advice is: talk to more people in your target audience or mentors.
They will help you see things you can’t see, in fact you need their input and help.
-
2
number 1 advice is: talk to more people in your target audience or mentors.
agree as a bare min. But it is not what will give the AHA's quickly. It is actually more precise than this.
- Be laser clear on the target audience. Often an app has more than 1 target audience. I see many apps failing to go beyond initial traction as they have been myopic or bias in their target audience.
- Rather than talk only, talk + experience. Any SME that gives you 2min is better playing/using something and talking at same time than 'talk' only. You will get context and context is king in getting any user.
For example you seem to be targetting "marketing agencies" as your sole audience. Correct ? why not SMEs. Many SMEs do without marketing as have experienced little value add. Or what type of marketing agency is your niche.
We are fighting change
- I dont agree with your post title and if a dev has this mindset, they will hit problems. I do get your feeling some-what frustrated.
- New solutions, are not "fighting" anything. Fighting is a strong word. Having being in business / human transformation for yonks, I can tell you it is not this.
It is simple. Even the most BS-resistant SME-er, who only have 2min max, will signup if within 32sec they see or better experience value. AND the signup gives them immediate use of this value.
- It is even better to experience value with NO signup. Trust the value of your product rather than using another marketing tactic.
- If your struggling to get even 3 citizens who would use your solution, there is a very real reason. Sort that out. This number 3 is not linear but rather Fibonacci ratio - so 3, 5, 8, 13 in a count concept to start a snowballing effect. Each activated person becomes a WOM-er naturally (human nature).
For me, the site is missing an immediate experience to validate value. Within 32sec ideally. GIF. Animate your claims (VP) on the website with less than 1 min GIF. Demo can be the longer version of UX. NOTE: this only works if in fact your VP is correct. So make sure you have validated that first with at least 3.
Do you have 3 active citizens who want to use your app, if your app was finished, would use now (no payment) or would use now (with payment) ?
-
1
thank you for your feedback, appreciate you taking the time to review this.
re targeting SMEs:
SMEs was the initial target audience, and I learned that they are not a good audience for a marketing analytics solution because:
-
most are too small (most online businesses barely have any monthly orders)
-
they get a ton of cold email trying to sell them the same value props (more sales, save time, reduce costs etc)
-
they are hard to reach, not exactly into trying new tech and the owners are not accessible usually
-
when they are a good size to need services, they either hire a marketer or work with an agency, and they don’t want to be looking at analytics, they just want to grow profitably and let someone take care of that
re fighting problems:
-
you hit the nail on the head by sensing that I am frustrated and I am very curious how? that’s amazing
-
the experiencing and learning I am getting is that the target audience usually has a way of doing what you are offering (specially for B2B)
and you are asking them to basically use a different solution, and change the way they work
so let’s say you are an agency owner, who has a team of people with SOPs already to review clients analytics and take actions
and you now get an offer to try a new tool that’s promising to help you save time and do it better
for you to start using that tool, is not as simple as sign up and start… you now need to educate your team on using it, change in SOPs might be required.. and that’s assuming the tool actually delivers on the promise and doesn’t have issues that cause more problems (ex: inaccurate data and reporting)
so there’s a massive investment from your side to use to a new analytics tool, when a big part of your job is looking at analytics
agree with you though if you can deliver immediate value (and there is no big changes required on user end), people will sign up quickly
what do you think based on this?
re landing page value prop:
- how do you validate a VP?
from what I am seeing now, agencies / marketers are liking the product in demos but they are not super excited to start using it immediately and I believe it’s due to a few factors, one being changing how they currently work, other being they need validation that the product actually works properly and accurately
- currently have exactly 2 citizens who want to use it, and 1 more is looking for “reporting” feature more than “recommendations / suggestions”
thank you
-
For the past 6 years I have been working with eCommerce businesses, helping them launch, fix and improve their online stores.
But all this time what I really wanted to do is launch a software product, I just didn't know what is it.
By 2019 we had a good operations system, and an excellent team I could trust.
Now I could focus on building software, and so since 2020 I experimented with different tools for online businesses. (that's a different story)
After a few pivots in October 2022 I realised that online businesses spend most of their time doing marketing.
No marketing = no customers = no business = marketing is super important.
Marketers spend a lot of time planning and launching campaigns, but they don't have a good tool to help them do that.
And so I started interviewing marketers.
What was clear is the challenge marketers face is not in launching new campaigns, sure there are challenges there... but the bigger challenge is in the regular maintenance and optimisation of campaigns.
So I started building the MVP based on marketers feedback, and after a few iterations on the product it was ready to get people to start using it.
The product at this point is basically an analytics tool that helps marketers know exactly what needs their attention so they can focus on fixing and improving instead of looking for issues.
The MVP is built using Laravel + Vue.js, it allows users to add their clients accounts (Shopify, WooCommerce, Facebook ads) and then the app will sync data and analyse it for issues.
Now comes the part to get early adopters, which is very difficult... and a key learning here is:
I should have STARTED with that, instead of going for interviews, I should have been going for early adopters who not only tell me their challenges but want to work with me to solve them...
Anyway I contacted around 500+ people using cold email and LinkedIn outreach, 13 people were interested, one signed up but never used the app.
This made me feel frustrated, something was wrong... why are marketers telling me this is a good solution, but few want to try it and even less sign up?
At this point I almost stopped the project, but before I did that I wanted to speak to people who might be able to help me.
I shared my story and challenge on a popular marketers group called Nothing Held Back (on Facebook) and got good feedback to read the book: Mom test. (must read book for anyone wanting to build anything)
Mom test showed me that I have been doing interviews and customer outreach wrong... I needed to ask better questions.
Then I spoke to few mentors on GrowthMentor (great platform) and they gave me good feedback, but one mentor in particular changed my view completely.
Giacomo (the mentor) taught me that early adopters are not just people who say they are interested.
They need to be actively seeking a solution to the problem you are solving, if they are not, then it's not really a problem and they won't sign up to anything (even free).
So I started looking for marketers who are actively searching for a new analytics solution...
How? by going on forums and communities for marketers and using the search, I would look for posts asking for help or tools.
And this time I started asking better questions thanks to Mom test, and the result was actually shocking to me...
It seems the problem I was solving is not really a problem for most marketers, they enjoy analysing their campaigns or are happy with their current solution of using available reporting tools.
Did I just build something no one wants?!
Again I was almost going to cancel this project and work on something else, but something felt right about it still, why?
Because I was still capturing attention, so maybe I was onto something but that something is not exactly what they want yet.
So I kept trying to contact agencies and luckily one had a positive response, scheduled a call with me and they are on board as an early adopter to help shape the product and make it work for agencies.
This is just the beginning obviously there is a long way to go, but this journey taught me key lessons:
1. You need to start by finding actual problems
Who do you want to work with? let's say marketers.
Okay where are the marketers hanging out? what are they complaining about? what do they wish was solved? what do they keep asking for help on?
Those are the problem you need to solve.
If no one is actively seeking a solution, then it's not a real problem worth solving.
2. You need to start by recruiting early adopters
Don't build anything until you have early adopters on board, follow step 1 and use it to find people you can help.
Then approach them and get them to put skin in the game, that shows they want to work with you on solving the problem.
That might be paying you in advance or spending their time helping you shape the product.
3. You need to get help from mentors
People want to help, you just need to ask.
There are a lot of ways to get mentors to help you, you need to first do the work and then approach them with what you are working on and what you need help with.
If it wasn't for people helping me here I would have been stuck or completely dropped the project by now.
Recommended resources here:
- Nothing Held Back (FB Group): https://www.facebook.com/groups/nothingheldback
- Mom test (book): https://www.momtestbook.com
- GrowthMentor (find mentors): https://www.growthmentor.com
2 Comments
Thank you for sharing this: pivoting is a hard decision to make, and seeing others do it and understanding the reasoning behind it is like an encouraging nod for others who are considering it but are frightened about the possible implications. 🙂
Nice insights