It’s been a week of shelter-in-place and social distancing in SF due to COVID-19, so even though this is an update on the things I’m working on, it also feels like a quarantine journal. Hopefully, it helps me stay sane.
Sales
Talking with your customers
At the beginning of the week, I listened to the latest Indie Hackers podcast episode with Rob Fitzpatrick who wrote The Mom Test, a book about how to talk to your customers, and it was super inspiring. I had heard of The Mom Test before, but I usually hear about it in the context of idea validation; it teaches you how to ask non-leading questions so that you can push past people being nice to you to find out whether your idea makes sense. Since we were past that phase with InterviewPlanner, it was pushed further down my never-ending list of books to read. But some of the pieces of advice Rob mentions in this podcast goes beyond idea validation and is about talking with your customers in general (and even potential customers). So this even applies when you’re trying to talk to people to sell your product and when you’re talking to existing customers to collect feedback about your product. Rob gives tons of tangible examples when he gives advice, so it’s easy to see how it could actually work for you (or not work for you, since every company is different).
After listening to it, I rewrote the email copy that I was struggling to make better, and this time, I approached from a way that asks whether scheduling is a major pain point for them right now, and if it is whether they just want to talk about their issues. This is a similar approach we took when we were doing market research and customer discovery last year, and we got a handful of replies, some good conversations, and a few relationships built. But I thought that our goals back then were different than they are now, but that’s not the case. It’s the same goal: we want to build relationships and understand our users’ concerns. But this time, we want to qualify the people we reach out to to make sure that, if they wanted to use us, they could. This just means we made sure that they use Greenhouse and G Suite, since we currently only integrate with them. After write an email I was happy with, I made sure I had a good list of people to reach out to, so I focused some time on figuring out the best way to prospect leads.
Prospecting
Originally, I was using LinkedIn to do very basic prospecting, and that was working out for the most part. It was tedious and time-consuming, but it worked and was free. And then LinkedIn noticed that I was doing this and then stopped showing me search results without upgrading. Good to know their detection feature works.
I still had one month free trial for LinkedIn Premium that I could use, but I wanted to investigate a few other tools as well. I checked out Clearbit, HubSpot Sales Hub, and Apollo, and Apollo seemed the most straightforward to get started with, so signed up for their free trial to test them out. They have a cool feature where you can filter by technology used, and surprisingly, Greenhouse was an option I could pick. While there were a few mistakes with the technology filter and with the email finder feature, Apollo was pretty good overall. One thing was certain thought: it was significantly faster than my previous process with LinkedIn. But before paying for any tool, I still want to try out the others and evaluate them across a few different criteria. So we’ll see which one I end up liking enough to pay for.
So after getting a good list, I sent out my emails like normal on Monday and Tuesday, but this time, with my copy that I was much happier with. But unfortunately, this batch was met with the same fate as the others: a decently high open rate with a 0% response rate.
Bad timing
It was at this time that Pallavi and I realized that with all that’s going on with Coronavirus in the world, nobody really has the bandwidth to think about potentially using a new tool. We actually had a few calls scheduled that also cancelled because this was a priority right now. And it makes sense. It’s effectively Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs kicking in. They are more concerned about their and their family’s well-being and safety, so thinking about whether they could be more efficient at scheduling interviews is very low on their list. But while it makes sense, it’s still unfortunate for us. The economy is not in a great place, and it’s unclear when things are going to pick up and start getting better.
But since we’ve realized this now, we can at least change tactics a bit so that we’re not wasting time and energy on efforts that won’t be fruitful right now. So instead of going full force on sales like we wanted to, we’re going to be shifting gears and focusing on marketing and engineering. Just because the economy isn’t moving forward, doesn’t mean we can’t.
Engineering
As mentioned last week, we recently started our first pilot, and that’s been going pretty well! Our main contact has been using the platform more and more, and through that, she’s been finding some edge cases and some features that are table stakes for her company. This was exactly what we wanted to see with our first few customers. It’s been helping us keep our roadmap focused and adding features that our customers are asking for directly.
We were supposed to go into their office to shadow her as she scheduled, but due to the quarantine, that’s been postponed until later. That would’ve been very interesting to see exactly what her workflow was when using InterviewPlanner. It’ll be nice when that does end up happening though.
As of now, we’ve got a handful of features that we need to build out for them, and we’re also going full steam ahead on trying to launch our public beta. We’ve got a (fairly short) list of things left to do before we’re ready to let people sign up directly and use the platform. While that by itself will be exciting, it’s actually what comes after that part that I’m interested in: we can start working on figuring out what’s the best distribution channel for us.
Marketing
Okay, so just like sales, neither of us know much about marketing. So we’re starting from square one here. But one of the biggest things that people talk about is finding a good distribution channel, which effectively means we need to figure out how customers are going to find us.
One of them that we think will be pretty good is Greenhouse’s Partner Marketplace. That’s where you’ll find most apps that are built on top of Greenhouse. They even have a dedicated scheduling section so we would get a comfy spot among our competitors. We’ve been talking with a representative from Greenhouse for a while now, and we know what steps we have to take to get there, but one of the biggest blockers is the fact that we haven’t launched yet. So once we do that, this will be one of our biggest priorities.
Another one that might also be effective is SEO. When we were doing our market research interviews, one of our questions was “How do you learn about new tools that you might want to use at your company?” and a good number of people said that they would just Google it. We haven’t really focused at all on SEO just yet, but it’s been something I’ve always found interesting, so I think it’ll be fun to learn more about it in the coming weeks.
Looking ahead
This past week was a pretty hard one to get through, but this next one is looking a bit brighter. And hopefully, we’ll be in a good place when things start to pick up again in the future so we can hit the ground running with a product that has bridged the feature gap a bit more.
