[Week 2] Building in Public - Validation
[Week 2] Building in Public - Validation
📝 Snapshot
🤯 Top Insight
I spent last week talking only to SaaS companies. Companies with over a $1mm ARR and a marketing team already have a process in place to (a) have & maintain a customers page (b) generate case studies (c) request new reviews on G2 and other review sites.
Conversion through these activities is not a measurable number for most. But the better teams carefully track conversions on their different landing pages.
Simply put, a Wall of Love by itself is a nice to have.
We will have to go deeper to explore how we can impact conversions.
✌️ Top Win
Got one consumer funded startup showed some active adoption with 3 videos: https://plusone.to/swimply. (Funny, this is not a SaaS company - so we will have to learn how they ultimately end up using PlusOne)
Chrome Plugin built! What does it do? Look at the Product - New Release section below.
🐝 Top Customer Channels
First degree connections only (still figuring out what we are solving and for who)
🙏🏻 Top ASK
If you are a founder or growth team member working on increasing your onsite conversions - I would love to do a zoom call with you! We can brainstorm some good tests for you to run, and I will get more research done on this problem. Let me know by DM :)
🕵️♂️ Breakdown
🧩 The problem we are going after
Increasing On-site conversions through social proof.
📜 Outreach Effort
I setup a test outreach campaign on Lemlist and sent the following campaign:
I sent it to 46 people and here is the result:
As you can see, the open rate was good but the reply rate was sh*t. Two problems with my email -
I am writing to a broad list (as I learn more)
My message has a weak ask, not specific enough.
You will see my campaigns get dialed in as I hone in on what we solve. This is my one super power so I won't lose here, unless I am not solving squat for anyone.
I stopped sending the above, and will be doing a lot more interviews and product tweaks before sending the next one.
🙇🏽♂️ Customer Profile Learnings
Within SaaS companies, there may be several different cuts, but we will need to narrow the problem much much further:
Companies with a growth engine vs without a growth engine (no mature process and team). Both of these have different problems related to conversion.
Self-serve product sign-up vs Sales Demo page signup (the first one entirely depends on their online and on-page footprint vs a sales process which may have demand-gen marketing working for it before a prospect ends up on the page to request a demo. Also, the latter will have many different ads landing pages + directory listings.
🚜 Problem Breakdown
The conversion problem is at multiple points in the lifecycle:
First visit to site - signup for trial or demo.
Requested demo but then fell off (sales team is chasing through email nurture).
Attended demo and then fell-off.
For self-serve,
Signed up for trial but didn't finish onboarding
Finished onboarding but didn't become active.
All of these are conversion problems.
🎤 Product - New Release
Chrome extension to collate and pull reviews from Instagram, Twitter and G2:
https://www.loom.com/share/38b6a52977c045c0b2f05ce5f285809a
This will work on any of your social posts on Instagram, Twitter and any review site. It's a super cool way of collating your social proof in one place! Works really smooth - check it out.
⏳ Upcoming
More customer interviews coming up this week...
Transparently Yours,
Raj