Tag Archives: sales

Reflections on start-up life: Week 42

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This is one of those "it's easier to write you're going to do it than it is to do it posts".

Last week the focus was public relations.  Well we have set the wheels in motion, but nothing big has happened yet.  Like so many things we dive into, there seems to be some magic sauce we are missing.  Turns out that just writing articles isn't all that it takes to have people falling over themselves to publish them (OK, that's very tongue in cheek – I didn't really expect that).   But turns out PR professionals do have a role in this space after all :-)

Time kills us.  It takes longer to write an article than we think (especially when targeting a niche publication and we want to make sure it's really good), or we try to put together a general release that reads like self-indulgent crap that I'd never read anyway, so why would anyone else.  So there lots of effort for what with the benefit of hindsight is a very uncertain return.  Then in conversation with my Dad whose been involved sales and marketing for years he describes PR as "the soft stuff". And he's right – it's still not tackling the direct problem head on which is we've got a product, you've got some money, how is our product meeting your need such that you'd pay us to help you with it.

It's weird.  People from the UK write to us and say " This is an amazing tool! Is Tribalytic planned to be available for the UK?" but we can't seem to drive new sign ups in Australia.

Twendly had peaked after a few weeks at something like around 8,000 people on one day searching for people talking about things, yet as a product it did only one very very small slice of what Tribalytic can do.

The big difference?  Twendly was global and free.

So how much of a barrier to entry is a paid sign up? Things I want Alex and I to ponder this week.
  1. We stepped away from an Enterprise Play to be a Consumer Play (http://timbull.com/reflections-on-start-up-life-week-9) Are we back at being an Enterprise Play and if so, are the reasons we stepped away from it the first time still valid?
  2. For a consumer play, scale matters – at least "all" of AU or a lot more of a global market.  How can we tackle this (for example, should we get on to the Twitter sample hoses, scale out and go nuts).  The reasons why we wouldn't do this in the past might still be the same now however (money, time).
  3. How married to the pricing model that we have are we?  What's more important, a few premium paying customers or lots of cheaper paying customers?  Have we actually tested the cheaper consumer model yet? Should we.  Are we even at a premium price yet? Maybe we are too cheap!
At one level nothing changes, keep at it, keep trying to build the publicity, keep trying to meet with people – but sooner or later I think we need to acknowledge that this current approach is not optimal yet.  We need to tune it, and I think we need to do more than tweak, we need to try something very different in our approach to market.  It could be a different way of selling (start cold-calling) or a different pricing point, or a different target client market or any number of things, but I don't want to get to next week without having tweaked one of the dials all the way around and see what happens.

As Alex said in his last post "Be patient and persistent".  In this roller-coaster that is a start-up, perhaps the most amazing thing is how I can completely agree on Wednesday morning, but by Friday night feel frustrated that things aren't moving fast enough and quite convinced that we need to do something radically different.

On a positive note, our Techfluff.tv article went up on The Next Web – here's the interview.

Highlights

  • Next Web Article
  • Some nice positive comments about Tribalytic from paying users and also others interested in it
Lessons Learnt
  • It's always harder than you think, even when you think it's going to be hard:-)
  • More a pondering… are we repeating some earlier mistakes?
Goal this week
  • Keep pushing the PR angle
  • Review and reconsider the business model / pricing plans – implement any necessary changes.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 37

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Typically we know how to do whatever it is that we need to do (we may not always be the best at it, but we know the mechanics on how to go about it), but we sometimes don't do it because of blind spots in our thinking.

The realisation I spoke about last week, that we are in a direct sales model, really opened up my eyes to a range of things we should be doing that we weren't.  Monday I was "out of the blocks" in a rush and tried hard to focus on getting back in touch with lots of different people and contacts that I hadn't been chasing for a variety of reasons.

While it hasn't generated more sales (no, I didn't meet my target of 4, or even 1), it has generated a lot more meetings which I hope lead to sales or at the very least, more knowledge about why we are struggling to sell.

It's beginning to get very frustrating this "pause" in sales.  The first few went by in such a rush it was misleading in many ways.  It's turned out to be a very lean month.

On the engineering side, Alex is kicking goals – the performance release is coming on very well.  The new HyperTable implementation has already improved speed substantially and now he's ironing out other bottlenecks which mean we should meet our performance goal (of sub second searches).  He's also found other places we could improve even further which would enable us in the future to improve performance by 10x or more.  This is important for us in so many ways, although we can live without the future performance improvements for now.  I'll return to performance in a moment.

As well as the "usual" activities (coding, blogging, meeting, emailing, accounting etc.) that go on, we had a hard think about product value.  Sooner or later (in our case 3 – 4 weeks since the last sale) you have to ask yourself if the product is worth it.  I keep meeting people that love what we are doing (they love it, the get it, they think it's a great idea) but that won't pay for it, or at least won't pay for it yet.

So what does this mean?  I think it just means we aren't a must have product yet.  We don't yet have our MVP and need to continue to pivot.  It's a bit like a game of "hot or cold" – we are getting good warmer signals, but we aren't hot yet.

Here's where we now think we are at.
  • We charge ~$100 per month for access to Tribalytic.
  • Let's assume that (because some people have bought us and returned) we deliver more than this in value.  The question is, how much more? More importantly, for who?
  • I think realistically, the value we generate is currently at best a borderline amount. Why?  All our existing customers have other benefits – relationships, early adopters, a really specific business problem, that the more general customers don't.
This is OK, because it shapes our thinking on what the "next thing" we should do is.  The short answer is "something that generates more unique value and that customers want".

It has to be both of these.  For example, reports are desired, but don't generate unique value (of course something like reports may have retention value which is also worth considering however it's a different problem).  Although we may not necessarily change the price of the tool, another way of answering this question is "if we did X, could we charge more for what we do?"

We think we have it.  Something that takes advantage of what we think is our Unique Selling Proposition and delivers significant added value that will support the way customers are using Tribalytic and turn it from something that's "a convenience – we do it better than you could do it yourself but you still could if you had to" into something where we deliver something you couldn't do.  For perhaps obvious reasons, we plan to sit on this idea for a bit until we work it through, but I think this was the week were we saw how to pivot into something that isn't just useful, but that certain companies and marketing agencies will really want to pay for.

Highlights

  • Vision – excitement despite the challenges.
  • Finding a good niche where we can really help (but can we make money there… more on this in the future).
Lessons Learned
  • Matching your activity to the mode you're actually in really works.  Direct sales time.
  • Continually challenge and critique why you're doing what you're doing BUT stay focussed too.
Goal this week – Customers
  • More meetings and setting up more for next week.
  • Explore the idea we've come up with and see what the appetite for it really is.
Goal this week – Engineering
  • Fingers crossed, an early test release of the new improved engine ready for launch next week.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 32

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We closed two more sales this week, one of them three months up front (end of financial year special).  Officially we’ve now taken more money through the door this month than we’ve spent. A nice feeling.  Now we just need to make enough to start paying ourselves.

I think we are starting to see the chasm ahead of us.  We’ve got a few early sales and there are several more in the pipeline, but which one(s) of these is going to build us the bridge to get to the other side?  Although we are getting a much better idea of what our “ideal” customer looks like, we still have a way to go.

I often find that we invest a lot of mental energy in things that we already know the answer to.  Usually our gut tells us one thing, but our head is over-rationalising and trying to find some smart way out of a situation.  One feature we’ve had strong feedback on is white labelling (an unbranded version of Tribalytic).  Logically this makes sense (Agencies want to deliver their customers the Tribalytic experience but under their own logo / brand).  The problem for us is that when we added the sharing features, we envisaged this as viral component to what we do and white labelling removes this.

The quote that sums it up went something like this “I would love to share this information with my clients, but I don’t want them signing up directly with you once they see how easy it is.”  Do we change our iteration plans now to White Label, or do we hang back and make sure there is a enough to build a bridge to the other side before we rush on in.  The head is desperately trying to rationalise doing it for the money, the gut says no.

Truth be told, we ended up unintentionally dodging the issue – the relevant decision makers are all heading off on holidays for a few weeks (this seems common across a few agencies at the moment) which has brought us a few weeks to have a better answer.  How do we get a better answer?  Well, it means we need to really access the size of the agency market – if that’s going to be our niche, we need to get a few more on board and also have a much better idea on how large that eventual market really is.  Then we’ll be in a position to start building features, customising and targeting that niche.

Pricing has also been a topic we’ve debated on back and forward.  It’s a balancing act between needing to be flexible again (testing different markets and price points), but it gets more complicated as we sign customers.  Ultimately we needed to settle on something, even if just for a few weeks.  We’ve made a decision early on to largely target the same set of features in different product tiers because it greatly simplifies the tool at this point in time, however this become problematic in creating price tiers – how to make them look different?

In the end we’ve gone with three differentiators – accounts (tier up and get more accounts for less), reports (tier up to be able to generate more reports) and custom reports.  The custom reports one is interesting – right now we really want to build more reports into Tribalytic, and we want to do it with customer input – we need to know what’s valuable rather than just try guess.  By explicitly pricing this in, we are actually articulating that value up front to customers in a way that we weren’t before.  It didn’t change anything we were going to do, but it does help the customer understand the value.  

Once I started thinking about it like that, lots of things we do have a customer value that we can explicitly express.  So my challenge for you is this – what are you doing as a “matter of course” that is actually something with a tangible customer value – should you be pulling this out and listing it? For example, if you’re developing on two week iterations, is “New features monthly” something that your customer will value?

On an engineering perspective, we eased off the accelerator.  We’ve pushed our release back a week – sometimes you wake up and realise you’re burning the candle at both ends.  It’s a marathon and not a sprint, making sure you cruise and conserve energy every now and again is critical.

Highlights

  • Two more customers.
  • New branded design coming together.
  • Good client meetings with potential new customers.
Lessons Learned

  • Think more about dates up front!  We lost a day with the leadership spill which highlighted (because it was so short and sharp) that we were a few hours out on our time handling (to do with having a server in LA, storing some things in LA time, some things in UTC and displaying them in Melbourne).  All resolved now, but has highlighted some engineering challenges for the future when we expand our market.
  • Go with your gut more often.  Don’t try over-rationalise your way out of something if your gut feel says you were right first time.  Otherwise known as “learn to say No and take the tough decisions”.
Goal this week – Customer

  • Preparation and then a significant pitch to a major “brand name” key client – if we get this one, we’ll be well on our way.
Goal this week – Engineering

  • Continuing to implement the new look and feel and inbound site design.  Hopefully launch towards end of this week.