[Week 2] Building in Public - Validation

🤯 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

1. 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)
2. Chrome Plugin built! What does it do? Look at the Product - New Release section below.

🐝 Top Customer Channels

1. 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 -

1. I am writing to a broad list (as I learn more) and
2. 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:

1. Companies with a growth engine Vs without a growth engine (no mature process and team). Both of these have different problems related to conversion.
2. 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:

1. First visit to site - signup for trial or demo.
2. Requested demo but then fell off (sales team is chasing through email nurture)
3. Attended demo and then fell-off.

For self-serve,

1. Signed up for trial but didn't finish onboarding
2. 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:

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