With the poker app, I found that the poker subreddit, other poker forums, in person networking, and cold emails didn’t amount to enough leads.
[...] I think the success of this platform idea we’re talking about depends a good amount on the answer to that question, because if founders are currently doing fine with customer outreach, then it wouldn’t really be solving a problem for them.
No question that acquiring leads/customers is a huge problem for a huge number of businesses. Google and Facebook are worth a combined $trillion because they sell a solution to that problem.
I just don’t think an “email list of early adopters” would have helped you acquire leads more than you can already help yourself by using existing forums that aggregate poker-lovers plus existing forums that aggregate people who are open to testing startups.
You probably think whoever currently follows Product Hunt is a good candidate to be on your email list, if only Product Hunt had a section for pre-launch companies. Well, it’s not hard to look up 100 PH users’ emails and blast them an email to take a look at your poker bot :) you can target PH people who have liked poker-related products. This would constitute an MVP of testing your idea, even though on the surface you might not imagine it as such.
But my impression is that a) many founders struggle to get in touch with these sorts of early adopters, and b) even if they are successfully getting in touch with some, they’d still want more. Of course, this is a hypothesis that could be validated without actually building anything, eg. by talking to founders.
Before talking to other founders, a good first step is to convince yourself you would be a passionate user of this, which I’m skeptical about. E.g. would you pay $50/month for access? (This $50 threshold is a generally-applicable stronger version of the Value Prop Story test.)
I definitely agree about talking to founders and prospective early adopters as an MVP. I think it’s a great example of what you talk about on your blog, about how and MVP doesn’t actually have to be a product.
I myself would definitely have paid for it. Somewhere in the ballpark of a couple hundred dollars. Possibly more if I actually was making money and growing. I spent a lot of time struggling to get in touch with users, at various points, for various reasons, and if the email list solved that problem for me, that’d be hugely valuable.
Again, in theory I should be able to easily get in touch with people by messing around in different poker communities, but that just doesn’t seem to actually work for me in practice. I have a great example. I posted about my app on Reddit at various points. Lots of people commented saying nice things. Some even commented to say that they would pay for it when it’s on the market, and to let them know. Yesterday I took some time and DMed everyone. I sent out 24 messages, but only got one reply. And that is for people who have already said they love my app.
Well it’s not surprising that someone on a forum who said they love your app weeks or months ago is probably not super likely to respond to a DM now. There’s just a general level of flakiness that suits all of us to partake in to some degree.
How about DMing 10 users who have commented in the poker reddit in the last 48 hours and asking if they’d do you a favor and answer questions about their poker interest on a video call? I bet you’d get a couple takers. Until I understand why your specific situation is best helped by an email list of early adopters, I’m skeptical that your value prop generalizes the way you think it does.
That makes sense about them not being too responsive to this particular DM. I predict that I won’t get many more responses over the next few weeks though.
I have actually spent a good amount of time DMing people asking for that sort of stuff, and also just posting saying that I’m looking for people to video chat with. It just hasn’t really worked for me. That’s why I feel like the email list idea is interesting, because I myself have had the problem of not being able to get in touch with users. I do place more weight in your intuition though, because I’m just one data point and you seem to have more experience with startups, so if you feel skeptical then I shift that way a lot and don’t expect it to be successful. Although I’m not so skeptical that it doesn’t seem worth talking to some founders though.
Can you link to specific posts you’ve made in relevant communities for poker and/or startups asking for feedback or discussion about your ideas? If they get 1k+ views then I’d expect at least one or two leads to come out of such a post.
I was thinking about it some more last night. It feels like I DMed a lot of people, but the number isn’t quite in the hundreds, I don’t think. Maybe it’s just a numbers game and you really actually have to reach out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. But at least on forums, that could be tough, because you could get flagged/banned for spamming.
I think many of the people who were commenting in your threads would have been up to let you interview them in a video chat if you’d DM’d them at the time. I don’t think it should take more than 10 DMs to get a video interview with this kind of approach.
Perhaps. At the time what held me back was not wanting to be spammy, but as we talked about, I think I was being too shy. Next time I’m going to jump at those sorts of opportunities, so thanks for helping me realize that, amongst other things.
No question that acquiring leads/customers is a huge problem for a huge number of businesses. Google and Facebook are worth a combined $trillion because they sell a solution to that problem.
I just don’t think an “email list of early adopters” would have helped you acquire leads more than you can already help yourself by using existing forums that aggregate poker-lovers plus existing forums that aggregate people who are open to testing startups.
You probably think whoever currently follows Product Hunt is a good candidate to be on your email list, if only Product Hunt had a section for pre-launch companies. Well, it’s not hard to look up 100 PH users’ emails and blast them an email to take a look at your poker bot :) you can target PH people who have liked poker-related products. This would constitute an MVP of testing your idea, even though on the surface you might not imagine it as such.
Before talking to other founders, a good first step is to convince yourself you would be a passionate user of this, which I’m skeptical about. E.g. would you pay $50/month for access? (This $50 threshold is a generally-applicable stronger version of the Value Prop Story test.)
I definitely agree about talking to founders and prospective early adopters as an MVP. I think it’s a great example of what you talk about on your blog, about how and MVP doesn’t actually have to be a product.
I myself would definitely have paid for it. Somewhere in the ballpark of a couple hundred dollars. Possibly more if I actually was making money and growing. I spent a lot of time struggling to get in touch with users, at various points, for various reasons, and if the email list solved that problem for me, that’d be hugely valuable.
Again, in theory I should be able to easily get in touch with people by messing around in different poker communities, but that just doesn’t seem to actually work for me in practice. I have a great example. I posted about my app on Reddit at various points. Lots of people commented saying nice things. Some even commented to say that they would pay for it when it’s on the market, and to let them know. Yesterday I took some time and DMed everyone. I sent out 24 messages, but only got one reply. And that is for people who have already said they love my app.
Well it’s not surprising that someone on a forum who said they love your app weeks or months ago is probably not super likely to respond to a DM now. There’s just a general level of flakiness that suits all of us to partake in to some degree.
How about DMing 10 users who have commented in the poker reddit in the last 48 hours and asking if they’d do you a favor and answer questions about their poker interest on a video call? I bet you’d get a couple takers. Until I understand why your specific situation is best helped by an email list of early adopters, I’m skeptical that your value prop generalizes the way you think it does.
That makes sense about them not being too responsive to this particular DM. I predict that I won’t get many more responses over the next few weeks though.
I have actually spent a good amount of time DMing people asking for that sort of stuff, and also just posting saying that I’m looking for people to video chat with. It just hasn’t really worked for me. That’s why I feel like the email list idea is interesting, because I myself have had the problem of not being able to get in touch with users. I do place more weight in your intuition though, because I’m just one data point and you seem to have more experience with startups, so if you feel skeptical then I shift that way a lot and don’t expect it to be successful. Although I’m not so skeptical that it doesn’t seem worth talking to some founders though.
Can you link to specific posts you’ve made in relevant communities for poker and/or startups asking for feedback or discussion about your ideas? If they get 1k+ views then I’d expect at least one or two leads to come out of such a post.
Here are the four that actually got some attention:
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/72hcgl/free_equity_calculator_under_construction/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/88bvwx/looking_for_feedback_on_a_free_version_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/a1n819/free_app_similar_to_flopzilla_and_equilab/
https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/axfekk/updates_to_premium_poker_tools/
I was thinking about it some more last night. It feels like I DMed a lot of people, but the number isn’t quite in the hundreds, I don’t think. Maybe it’s just a numbers game and you really actually have to reach out to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. But at least on forums, that could be tough, because you could get flagged/banned for spamming.
I think many of the people who were commenting in your threads would have been up to let you interview them in a video chat if you’d DM’d them at the time. I don’t think it should take more than 10 DMs to get a video interview with this kind of approach.
Perhaps. At the time what held me back was not wanting to be spammy, but as we talked about, I think I was being too shy. Next time I’m going to jump at those sorts of opportunities, so thanks for helping me realize that, amongst other things.