As both a former agency owner and a marketer working with other marketing professional, I know how important influencer outreach is. A small network isn’t going to help you achieve your goals, which is why I’ve always made it a point to invite people I don’t know out to lunch and to reach out when I mention their work in my blog posts.
The problem? Doing all of that work by hand is seriously time-consuming.
After spending 10 years researching authority figures manually, I decided to do something about it. And last week, after six months of hard work and sleepless nights, my business partner Colin and I launched our SaaS tool, Content Marketer, and generated over 1,000 trial memberships and 100 customers.
Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, but the lessons I’ve learned in the process have made me a better entrepreneur and marketer - and they can help you as well.
Lesson #1 - Solve a real problem
This lesson seems more obvious than it actually is - and I know that because I’ve failed at launching other businesses because they didn’t follow this rule.
I knew that Content Marketer had potential because it would solve a problem that I actually had. But I got confirmation of my idea from the dozens of emails I received from happy customers following our launch. I even got one from a guy who used the tool to help get in touch with a Microsoft exec and land a job. Funny enough, he mentioned that it wasn’t just the tool itself that helped him - it was the whole Content Marketer onboarding experience and our “customer service department” (me, LOL) that gave him the idea.
That said, I have to say that, as you focus on the real problem you’re solving, you can’t be everything to everyone. Instead of trying to make a product that appealed to everyone, we focused on a few different buyer personas: in-house content marketers, savvy bloggers who sell ebooks, webinars and courses), and startup marketers.
There are plenty of other groups that could use Content Marketer, but building the product to their needs won’t help me get my first 100 customers - or even my first 1,000. There are more than enough people in these personas to help me hit my goals. Eventually, we’ll expand our features and capabilities, but traction is our first priority right now.
Lesson #2 - Focus on the goal
Once you’ve got a real problem in mind, you need to set two types of goals: financial goals and product goals.
Financial goals are fun to dream about, but what you need to do is start big and break things down until you’ve got something that’s actually achievable. When I first started thinking about this product’s potential, I wanted it to make a few million dollars. And that’s a great overall goal to have, but it’s probably not reasonable from day one.
So instead of a few million, I scaled back to one million. Then, since that’s still pretty lofty, I thought about getting 1,000 satisfied customers (2,500 customers is about $1 million in annual revenue at our pricing, with marketing tool churn rates taken into account). But I decided to narrow it down even further. Now, I just want 100 extremely happy customers. That’s not going to make me rich, but it’s something I can achieve in a few months, and - once achieved - it’ll set me up well to go for 1,000 customers, and then $1 million in revenue, and then a $5 million in revenue.
Money goals are fun, but you also need to think about what you want your product to do. With Content Marketer, we had three goals:
- To empower people to do influencer outreach. Too many people skip this process because it’s time-consuming to do manually, and because there are too many points of failure (for example, wondering what you say to get your point across without telling your whole life story).
- To make influencer outreach easier in order to save time. This is the particular problem I wanted to solve for myself. In my agency days, I was sending millions of emails and needed 4-5 people to coordinate the whole process. Not only was that hard to manage for the company, it’s unattainable for those without teams behind them.
- To help people succeed. I’ve seen so many bad pitch/promo emails out there that I partnered with top marketers to develop sales, business development and recruiting templates that actually work (I’ve tested them myself).
Having goals like this lets us know if we’re on track with what we want Content Marketer to achieve. It’ll also help in the future as we look to add features by giving us a framework to determine whether or not potential upgrades are inline with our vision for the tool.
Lesson #3 - Invest in pre-launch promotion
Back in February, when Colin and I started working on the idea, I put up a landing page early on using Instapage so that I had something to reference when I was talking about the kind of content marketing I was doing and how I’d used influencer outreach to score guest columns on sites like Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur and others.
Over time, this landing page became a way for us to recruit early users. While I was promoting the idea that we’d be solving the problems of how to promote content and reach out to authority figures, we started to reach out to people we thought would be interested in the tool. At this point, we really pumped up the exclusive nature of the trial, which made people want to get in even more:
In particular, the one sentence that crushed it for us was, “If you’re impatient (like me) and want to join our pilot program, email me back with one sentence on why you should get access.” This made people want to earn access, and it made them willing to do something for us in exchange. From this, we had 53 people offer to write a blog post about their experiences. 11 of them did (including Skylar), which brought in about few hundred more new trials.
Now, I have to admit, I was pretty embarrassed by the tool at this point, but the way I see it, if you aren’t embarrassed when you release your product, you’re moving too slow. In all, opening things up to early users snagged us about 50 customers three months ago, all from people getting excited and seeing the potential of the tool early on.
Lesson #4 - Get active
Once you’ve got your mechanism in place for capturing pre-launch alpha and beta users, get out there! Get active! Blog! Guest blog! Get as many eyes on your landing page as possible, as early as possible.
A lot of people think of blog posts as being super low-value, but every guest post I did that mentioned Content Marketer brought us 35-40 new people who requested access and, from that group, 5-6 new beta users.
Lesson #5 - Don’t forget about UX and UI
As I said above, our product sucked in the early days. Colin and I decided to spend the extra money to make the design sexy and the experience polished. It wasn’t cheap or easy, but it helped people see the potential in the tool and take us more seriously - definitely a worthwhile investment. Even though our tool sucked, it looked amazing.
Lesson #6 - Focus on your MVP
This was a big one for us, as it was both a mistake and a success. From day one, we focused on creating the minimal viable product (MVP) people would buy. The mistake? Back in April, we tried to launch just the research part (finding email addresses and Twitter handles) and it failed.
Conducting feedback surveys showed us that, although people could use the product, it still took too much work to get real value out of the tool. Even though users could get the lists they were looking for, they’d still have to export to a CSV and use tools like Yesware and Streak to send out the messages. Although the initial version worked, it was only appealing to a small set of users, limiting our ability to make money.
So we went back and focused on building the second half of the tool - the outreach features. We still focused on building our MVP, and it worked. We actually had 15 or so beta users begging to pay us so that they wouldn’t lose access to the tool before we even had the ability to take payment.
Lesson #7 - Listen to your users
Throughout the beta test process, we had 307 trial users, including around 15 “power users” that I looked to for feedback. They weren’t driving where the product went, but they helped me focus on the right areas and fix problems I didn’t even know we had. They also gave us plenty of new ideas on ways to use Content Marketer. As an example, I had one user who discovered that he could scan Google Docs, so he’d scan his blog posts as he was writing to help get ahead on promotion.
Pretty cool, right? Between that kind of thing and other comments we received - like “If this button could do XYZ, that’d save me even more time” - we were able to come up with something that meets the needs of all the different buyer personas mentioned above.
Lesson #8 - Build (and follow) a launch plan
Getting 50 users before launching our finished product wasn’t an accident, nor was getting 163 customers on launch week or the 25 new trials a day we’ve been receiving since then. It was all well-planned to include the following elements:
- Product Hunt. I’ve had successful experiences with Product Hunt in the past (the service generated more than 2,000 sales for my 100 Days of Growth ebook), thanks to its perfect audience of savvy entrepreneurs and marketers who are trying to save time and money. I listed Content Marketer there and sent traffic to specific landing page and offer for the group.
- Email marketing. Through regular promotion, we built an email list of about 5,000 people that have requested invites over the last six months. Emailing them on launch day, in addition to including a discount offer, made for some easy conversions.
- Beta users. As a “thank you,” we offered beta users a custom offer they couldn’t refuse - and they proved their worth by helping us fix bugs and problems in our checkout flow…
- Social sharing. Because our early users were so passionate and vocal, we added prominent social sharing tools to three key places: our homepage (3% of visitors share it), our “try” page for Product Hunters (15% of visitors share it here) and within our app.
- Guest posts. In addition to all the guest posting I’d been doing leading up to the launch, I wrote six guest articles and planned to release them within seven days of launch to keep the buzz going.
- Favors. Don’t be shy. When Content Marketer launched, I asked everyone I’ve helped in the last six months to get the word out, in addition to emailing all my friends and family to let them know we launched and posting messages on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I’m not 100% sure how much this helped, but it was really gratifying to let everyone know.
Oh, and speaking of a well-orchestrated launch? Things were so well-planned that I actually wrote most of this post a month before launch so that I could include it in my metrics.
Lesson #9 - Measure your ROI
Speaking of metrics, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to measure your ROI. I can’t even begin to account for all the time Colin and I have put into this tool, but it’s nothing since we’re just getting started.
I can, however, count the money we’ve spent. Over the last six months, we’ve spent a total of $12,483.32 cents (which would have been closer to $6,000-$7,000 if we hadn’t tried to launch our alpha version in April). Most of this went to design ($7,500), while the rest went to hosting and services needed to run the software ($3,500), software like Intercom.io and Google apps ($940) and legal fees. We were lucky that we were able to bootstrap things since we could do most of the work ourselves, as I’m a marketer that writes frequently (at least six times a week) and Colin is a developer.
But regardless of whether you’re bootstrapping or well-funded, you’ve got to know that building a SaaS product people actually want to buy is hard work. I definitely put in my time, but I’m immensely grateful to Colin, who pulled all-nighters even while having his second kid along the way. It hasn’t been easy, but as the result of all this effort, we’ve been able to put out a solid product - one I’m confident will eventually help professionals in all industries take advantage of the power of influencer marketing.
Have a question about how I launched Content Marketer? Have your own story to share? Leave it in the comments section below.
