04 Dec 2017
Hey all!
If you’re new to this series, I laid down some ground rules
in day zero, and explain the idea for my first project
on day one. I document, a little every day, what I’m working on.
I continued our big push of cold emailing as expected. We’re still looking to get around 30 total calls scheduled.
Tomorrow we start on our first market research calls, which I took some time to prepare for today. I don’t have a script or anything that strict laid out, but I do have a list of questions lined up to keep the conversation going around uncovering challenges and try to talk about what a perfect solution would look like.
Here’s a list of some resources I’ve used to lend a guiding hand with preparing a list of interview questions:
Tomorrow
- More emailing, of course!
- Fumble through our first few market research interviews, this should be quite a learning experience!
03 Dec 2017
Hiya!
If you’re new to this series, I laid down some ground rules
in day zero, and explain the idea for my first project
on day one. I document, a little every day, what I’m working on.
More of the same today! I mentioned yesterday that we’d have a few short updates over the next bit. Today was a big push on going farther down the SaaS1000 list to get as many calls lined up as we can.
I’m looking forward to seeing what we learn this week with our market research!
Tomorrow’s todo list
- A big list of follow ups go out, and an equally large list of new cold outreach. Let’s validate or pivot to validation!
I hope you all had an amazing weekend!
02 Dec 2017
Hello!
If you’re new to this series, I laid down some ground rules
in day zero, and explain the idea for my first project
on day one. I document, a little every day, what I’m working on.
We’re half way through 30 days already!
The next few days will be bite sized updates, just to check in and hold myself accountable. The day-to-day won’t change much until get somewhere around the 30 mark of calls scheduled with people in my target market. Then I’ll be able to relax the cold emailing and focus elsewhere.
Today I combed over the next 200 companies on the SaaS 1000 list and pulled out the likely prospects and have drafts ready to send on Monday.
I also dove back into consuming some resources on NgRx (an Angular flavor of Redux) to help satisfy the developer itch.
For anyone looking to get started, some great resources:
Tomorrow’s todo list
- You know the drill! Plow ahead on more prospecting until we’ve got enough call lined up or exhausted our resources.
See you all tomorrow!
01 Dec 2017
Hy there!
If you’re new to this series, I laid down some ground rules
in day zero, and explain the idea for my first project
on day one. I document, a little every day, what I’m working on.
As warned a few days ago, we’re really hammering out some cold outreach to get people in my market on calls to explore pains/challenges. The hope here is to explore if my solution is compelling enough, if we should look at solving similar pains, or if we just need to do some repackaging on what we have.
I’ll share further stats, in aggregate, regarding cold validation at the end of this challenge. After putting quite a bit of thought into this, I don’t want to share anything too specific, now that I’m chatting with other folks (It’s really nice of people to hop on the phone to help my by sharing their challenges and I want to be super respectful of that!)
Our LinkedIn ad experiment to test headlines has helped some. It turns out the headline I’m really happy with doesn’t perform as well against some other headlines I tested. So the one I initially liked, my headlines related to:
Stop losing money from your error messages
Doesn’t perform as well to UX professionals as headlines similar to:
Maximize your users complete rates
And similarly, towards customer support leaders, headlines like this performed better:
Reduce your support team’s workload
This seems obvious in hindsight, and we did hint at having this problem around day 9, but generalizing a single landing page when at the moment I’m targeting two different sets of professionals, means we’re not getting our message across as effectively as I’d like.
That’s given me a direction to go with the landing pages in the future. But that effort is on hold until I get done talking to a bunch of people about their challenges, to make sure we’re tackling a pain that provides high enough value for our target customers. And I also want to determine if we need to double down on just support teams instead of trying to sell to & provide value to UX teams in parallel.
Tomorrow’s todo list
- More prospecting, again! (It doesn’t stop until we have some answers!)
- Since I’ll just be scheduling emails to go out on Monday, we’ll have a lull in actual emailing to do. I’m hoping to have some time to lay down some code for the fun of it.
Thanks for reading! And as always email me with any questions!
30 Nov 2017
Hi all!
If you’re new to this series, I laid down some ground rules
in day zero, and explain the idea for my first project
on day one. I document, a little every day, what I’m working on.
Our cold email strategy from yesterday’s post is yielding some positive results already, in that we’re moving into some calls scheduled for next week.
Today has been more of the same for yesterday. My ultimate goal is you get about 30 calls scheduled, and getting this done in a short amount of time means I’m spending ton of time in my email.
The first wave of follow ups are written and scheduled to go out tomorrow morning. They’re meant to target a different time of day than the original email, just in case the time of day was simply bad for them on the first email.
And on that note, I’m afraid I need to leave you all with this tiny update. 🙈
Tomorrow’s list
- More prospecting and emailing! 🏃🏃🏃
- A bit of app development since it has been a few days, I need to scratch that developer itch.
- Ski lifts run for the first day of the season at my local mountain, so I might treat myself to a few runs in the morning
Thanks for reading! And please email me with any questions or feedback! Since I’ll be hitting the prospecting hard for a few days yet, I’m curious if you all have a particular topic you’d like to see a post on? Tomorrow’s post might take a closer look at our follow up strategy. My email is on the sidebar. See you tomorrow!