Sujan Patel – From Idea to Launch to Your First 1000 Customers With Zero Marketing Budget – MicroConf 2017

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37 slides, I’ll try to keep it short
Very actionable
How to get your first 1,000 customers
- Or past that, to 10,000
From idea to 1,000 customers
Me
- @sujanpatel
- Founder of Web Profits
- Growth marketing agency & managing partner at Ramp Ventures
- SaaS tools for sales & marketers
RULES of growth
- Follow these rules so that you… don’t die
- Focus on your top 3 channels
  - You’re not going to get every channel working for you
  - Especially if you’re bootstrapped – you can’t afford to
  - Do one at a time
    - Master it
    - Have the next one loaded, but don’t move to it til you master the first
- Understand your funnel AND ITS WEAKNESSES
  - Awareness → consideration → conversion → loyalty → advocacy
  - Common weaknesses – awareness to consideration, and consideration to conversion
  - Identify what your weaknesses are
    - There are ALWAYS weaknesses
  - Bullseye Framework (book: Traction)
    - 3 most important channels in the bullseye
- Screw PR!
  - Might get a burst of traffic, but then what?
  - Make your customers fall in love with you instead
Agenda
- 1) Pre-launch marketing
- 2) How to nail your launch
- 3) Scalable marketing
Grew mailshake to 7500 customers
- Focused on
  - 1. content marketing
  - 1. influencer marketing
  - 1. community
At WhenIWork.com, 15,000 customers
- Focused on
  - 1. customer advocacy
  - 1. content marketing
  - 1. Social advertising
1) 9 Pre-launch tactics
- Create a landing page with an email optin
  - Build it
  - Promote it
- (Why am I wearing a suit? Perception matters.)
  - A beautiful landing page increases perception and word of mouth
- We use NPS to survey customers
  - “We had this bug but we LOVE the UX”
- Build an audience
  - Create an ebook (collect emails)
  - Start a blog (post 2-3 a month)
    - Get people loving your content before they even know what the hell you do
    - 2008,9,10, KISSmetrics had a LOT of people on their blog who didn’t even know what they do. That’s good marketing.
  - Guest post on industry publications
    - Places that already have traffic
    - So you don’t have to start from scratch
  - Build relationships with influencers
    - I like to interview influencers
      - It makes them look good
      - That’s actually the first time I met Rob
        
        Got the courage to reach out
  - Interview influencers on your blog
    - Don’t go after Richard Branson on your first interview… start small, work your way up
  - Curate educational content on social media
  - Befriend a journalist (use ebook)
    - Start helping them. “Hey, I shared your article onto my blog”
    - Build relationships by helping them
    - Pitches generally don’t work. Helping them in a small way does work.
- Smart cold emails
  - Identify your customer
    - Who do I want to contact?
  - Get their attention on social media (follow & share their content)
  - Use Hunter.io to find email address
  - Email asking for feedback on your ebook
    - Instead of “hey this is my product”…
    - …”Would love for you to check out my book. Big fan of your work”
    - Starts the conversation
  - Use retargetlinks.com to remarket
    - If they click the link in the email, retarget them on Facebook and elsewhere
  - Follow up with valuable content
- Most people don’t have enough traffic to justify A/B testing
  - But you can use Facebook ads to test headline copy
    - Compare the click-through / engagement rate
    - Weed out the ones that suck, find the winner. Use that
2) How to nail your launch
- 6 launch marketing tips
  - Launch on Product Hunt (find someone to hunt you)
  - Email your list
  - Pitch journalists (the ones you found in the prelaunch step earlier)
  - Email your friends and family for support
  - Send cold emails
    - “We just launched on Product Hunt. Here’s what we’re gonna do. etc”
  - Retarget on FB with ebook & demo ads
    - Retarget with more value
    - Even if they don’t care about my product, they at least recognize the brand, know what my content is
- Use storytelling. Send useful data. Build the relationships gradually
- Timing is everything
  - All the launch marketing in the same week
    - Don’t launch on Product Hunt and then email out some time later
      - It’s lost by then
- Your friends and family will support you if you ask
  - Your grandma’s upvote will help you!!
3) Scalable marketing
- First: Do the math on your “genius ideas”
  - Problem: so many freaking ideas, and so many ideas don’t move the needle
    - “I’m so excited! I’m gonna go execute!”
    - Wait.
    - Do the math.
      - You’ll lose people at each stage of the funnel
      - So check that everything is actually viable
- Sujan’s Growth Framework: Ideas
  - http://bit.ly/growthframework
  - Spreadsheet with columns
    - Whose idea
    - Experiment name
    - Place/platform
    - Completion
    - Category
    - Metric
    - Prediction
    - Impact
    - Probability
    - Results
    - Notes
- Growth Framework: KPIs
  - Measure them, record them
- Don’t mix logic and creativity
  - Left brain: Logic
  - Right brain: Creativity
- Spend 20% testing crazy ideas
  - If you do 0 or 5% it’s just unrealistic
  - 80% of effort on the things that do work
  - 20% on these crazy oddball longshots and moonshots
- Concierge Onboarding
  - Walk or drag (if needed) your customers to the finish line
    - There’s not a great process for this to start with
    - Just block everyone from using it until they talk to me
      - Understand who they are
    - If they’re too lazy to do it, I’ll do it for them
    - Helps onboarding. Drastically decreases churn
  - Even though it’s manual. Takes hours
    - Distill what’s worked, and automate those things
- Thank your customers
  - Don’t see enough of this
  - Give a crap about your customers
  - Receipts/invoices
    - Buffer does that. Love it. Receipt → “Thank you”, and an update on what the company’s working on
  - Thank you cards using Maillift.com
  - On social media
    - Find their info (Clearbit), thank them
  - By giving them swag
    - Especially in their first 90 days
  - By educating them
    - Recognize that they’re a person. Show them that you’re a person.
  - By invite them to a private community
  - Drift sends a fun tweet to every customer after signup
- Ask your customers
  - For feedback (too many people don’t do this)
  - To help spread the word
    - Trigger after 121 days / 4 months
  - For referrals
  - How they would describe your product
  - NPS survey
- Secondary SEO
  - Quora
    - You can get traffic just by answering questions and Google crawling it
  - Blogs
- Increase leads with live chat
  - Trigger the live chat 5-10 seconds after whatever your typical time-to-convert is
- Remember there are only 5 scalable growth channels
  - 1. SEO
  - 1. Paid acquisition
  - 1. Sales
  - 4.
  - 1. Other
      - Rare or situational marketing channels that sometimes work. Often not repeatable. These are as rare as a unicorn
      - Do not focus on this one
- Q&A
  - “Could you go deeper on answering questions in Quora that rank in Google?”
    - I’m trying to find where Quora is ranking for my top keywords
      - (Keyword research, get top keywords)
    - Rank tracker
    - Check rankings for Quora.com
    - Cross-reference with search volume
  - “What are your thoughts on testimonials?”
    - Very important
    - I use NPS for surveys. 9s/10s → testimonials
    - Done tests where testimonial is the headline on the landing page
      - Haven’t found it to beat best landing page (which is a customer describing the product)
    - Short punchy ones → remarketing ads (with picture of customer)
    - Like to get reviews/ratings on third-party review sites
    - https://www.asknicely.com/ – automatically creates a testimonial page
    - We trigger at 91 days, because most of our churn happens in the first 90

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