“One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist.
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.”
Source: Paul Graham
I’d like to tell about one particular experience. I’ve been working on one enterprise software, which didn’t sell well enough. Team had a bunch of hypothesises and massive backlog, which was quite technical.
My first question was “What is the most specific pain, which we’d like to cure?”, and there was no answer. My second question was “How do we used to look for solutions for our customers?”.
And the answer was: “Well, we thought that some features might be cool, so we’ve been developing them and then we launched it.”
No surprise, that sales were poor. So, I suggested different approach. Why don’t we make some “Test-brands”, develop interface designs and go into direct sales to test our ideas?
The answer was “You are out of your mind, mister” 🙂
A couple of negotiations after they finally decided to try something new. But how should we start? You can’t just grab your phone and start to call every company like a maniac and pitch them your product.
We’ve made one simple decision. We found quite specific pain, made some research, found some companies, that might be interested, and then – we made a little trick.
The trick was to develop tailored letters for each individual company. Moreover, we searched for interviews, articles and posts by executives of these companies and wrote directly to them. And only after that we would send warm letters to our potential customers. Something like this:
“Dear Mark,
I saw your article on Forbes, and I was absolutely thrilled. It was so good, I just couldn't help but forward this to my colleagues. The ideas you’ve been talking about have been a center of my interest for a quite a long time.
However I see, that you didn’t look into the area of our interest, which is quite interesting. We’ve made a little research about that, the copy is in attachments. I think that would be interesting for you, and I would be grateful to hear your point of view.
I think we have a lot of common ideas, which would be pleasure to discuss. I believe, that people with strong ideas can build something special.
bla bla bla”
What’s the point?
First of all, conversion rate was 50%. That is insane for e-mail marketing. Secondly, we’ve made some good CusDev sessions with our target audience.
And finally, you can test your product before building it. After all this operations you can “kill” your fake-brand, in case you’ll figure out, that idea was worthless.
It’s cheap, it’s fast, it gives you real money. And you can test whenever and whatever you want. By this approach you’ll find out the real problems your customers face on day-to-day basis, which will help you to automated really important processes. And most importantly, it is a quite legit way to find your first customers.