Ryan Battles – How to Gain Traction in a Crowded Market – MicroConf 2017

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  • Someone earlier was telling me
    • They’re looking to build a product
    • Interests: programming, selling, kung-fu
    • Programming: Python, and Go
      • Go sounds obscure. You should start a product around that!
        • Then I Googled it. 15 million results
    • Every market is crowded
    • So rarely will you find a product that’s brand new, never done before
      • If it doesn’t exist, there’s usually a reason
  • Harpoon
    • Would show your finances, expenses, forecasted revenue…
    • Shows graphs and charts showing you more information about your business
    • Had a landing page. Lead magnet. Purchased ads
      • 3k signups before launch
      • Had a great launch
      • But
      • They signed up… and then churned. Quickly
      • This wasn’t the tool for them
      • What’s going on?
        • “I don’t want to enter my payment information twice – once into my accounting tool, and then again into your tool”
        • We had to create a product people wanted
    • Googled startups. Rob Walling’s book came up (Start Small Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide To Launching a Startup)
      • Quote from Rob’s book!
        • “Building a general purpose, small-business, online accounting application is a really bad idea for a self funded startup”
      • Similar quote in Justin Jackson’s content
      • We ignored it!
        • We’re going to take on Freshbooks; Harvest; FreeAgent
          • And LOTS more
      • Decided to go ahead anyway
  • Why did we do it?
    • We wanted this tool ourselves
    • None of the existing tools had the goal-tracking features that we wanted
  • We thought we had a “niche”
    • Just focus on solo freelancers
  • Decided to stay simple – just US dollars
    • But our traffic was coming from all over the world
    • Had to add
      • Currencies
      • Number formatting
      • Dates
      • Custom tax names
      • Multiple taxes
      • Multi-lingual invoices
      • In over our heads!
    • Fixed these gradually
  • Started to see growth towards the end of 2015
    • New features were bringing people in
    • Looked like a hockey-stick in 2016!
    • …But wasn’t
  • Lesson #1: build what people need

  • We didn’t on our first revision. But we got there

  • Lesson #2: Find a way to let them know about it

    • You probably aren’t the first one to do this - No matter what it is
      • Jazz
        • Fixed melody at the start and end, but improvisation in the middle
        • Any instruments, any size of band
        • Building a SaaS is similar
          • Any team size
      • Find AND EMBRACE your unique
        1. Be better at solving a problem
          • E.g. email marketing
          • There were a lot of options
            • But Drip was better. Simple. Easy to get started.
        1. Be unique in your solution
          • SendGrid – adding some tools that the others don’t have. Unique
        1. Leverage your advantage
          • ConvertKit – Nathan was an authority in content marketing, so he incorporated his knowledge into ConvertKit to make it better at solving professional bloggers’ problems
  • “The only assets you have against bigger, wealthier competitors are raw talent and time. Corporate America isn’t as nimble as you” – Gary Vaynerchuk, #AskGaryVee
  • Measure everything
    • Decide scientifically what’s working and what’s not
    • Know what to double down on
    • When we want to test out something new:
      • What is the main idea?
      • What are we hoping to accomplish?
      • How are we hoping to accomplish this?
      • What are we measuring?
      • What is the timeframe?
      • How do we know if it’s a success?
      • What would failure look like?
      • What was the result?
      • What are some key takeaways?
    • We use Basecamp. You can use Notepad. Evernote. Anything
    • Can also use a Gantt chart
  • Recycle as much as possible
    • Say you write a Quora answer
      • Repurpose it as blog post
        • → LinkedIn and Facebook
        • Medium
          • To instagram
            • To twitter
          • To Twitter
          • Quuu
        • Guest post
  • Even though SaaS is crowded, “I still see people executing and just making it happen” - Rob Walling
  • I think you have what it takes to make it happen
    • Just try things
    • Get creative
    • Put yourself out there
  • Q&A
    • “Were you able to get anything from your competitors?”
      • Two schools of thought. Some (like Gary Vee) say I don’t even know what competitors are doing.
      • We keep tabs on a few of our competitors, but we don’t try to match them feature for feature
      • We listen to our customers. If there are patterns in our customers needing things that other tools have
    • “Examples of things you tried that didn’t work well?”
      • Twitter, and Twitter automation
        • Grew our follower base, but didn’t increase signups
        • But it’s worked for others
      • Just have to try stuff
    • “How did you land your first 10 clients and convince them your product was better?”
      • Content marketing and paid ads before we launched
      • Even though many churned, they were still on our email list. So as we improved we could keep them up to date, and won some of them back
      • Our network of friends and colleagues
    • “The recycling idea was amazing. What % of your income/leads/etc comes from that experimental third-party social media / recycled content?”
      • Not a great % yet.
      • We still find the best return for us at this stage is launching a feature and emailing our list about it. As we plug the feature holes, people are waiting for those features, they join. That drives the most sales at this point.
      • But the content marketing / recycling is bringing people into the LIST in the first place. So it’s all kind of circular.

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