Wk 4 - Naive and Ambitious

  • 593 conversations
  • 7,440 sessions
  • 16 demos
  • 23 free trial users

In this post I'm writing about how I got the word out on my MVP, got initial users, and what's going on now.

Chatty is a tool for professional sales people. Instead of sharing content within cold emails and hoping for a response, they use Chatty to chat with prospects the moment they engage. All from Slack. No sending 10 emails waiting for a reply. No seeing them sharing your prospecting and not being able to act on it. Just quick connections, more meetings booked, and a better B2B sales experience for all parties.

My focus was on getting in front of as many salespeople in SaaS as possible. I was an AE for a big SaaS company, and I've experience the constant hunt to find an edge. It may apply to other salespeople but I understood these ones the best. So here's where I shared my product.

Reddit - fail

Years ago, I saved a posting from a user in r/Sales who successfully got reps to join his beta. I replicated it as much as possible and posted it at the same time he posted his. I thought mine would be received even better on account of the problem I solved and my earlier contributions to the community.

No such luck. I had one comment from someone telling me it's the same thing as Pardot (it's the furthest thing) and was downvoted to 0 immediately.

Cold Email - great

When I left my job, I made a Linkedin post about my intention to build tools for salespeople. That post got more than 30,000 views. I shared my website which was just a mailchimp signup form. I had about 40 signups on that, 15 of which I think were relevant.

I made a personalized Chatty link for each of them, had them all in a Google Sheet, and Mail Merged them all. It was very personalized for sending 40 emails in 2 seconds.

I got probably 50% of my calls, demos, and signups from this method. People were able to click on the personalized link, and I was able to use Chatty to engage them, just how they would engage their own prospects. Using your product to sell your product seemed to work.

Social Posting - meh

I shared a few things on Linkedin and Twitter. Mostly about what I was doing for the launch, not so much about the product itself. While this got a lot of social engagement and likes, it didn't translate into anything but tire kickers.

Linkedin messaging - great

I took the same strategy I used in cold email and did it here. The reason I like Linkedin messaging is I think it's my prospecting channel long-term. There's social proof on the platform that I am indeed like my target market. I can find and reach out to just about any potential customer. I'll need Linkedin to find my first ten paying customers.

Slack communities - pretty good

I'm a member of a couple of Slack communities of salespeople. As you can imagine, there's a lot of salespeople selling to each other. I shared a similar post to what I put on reddit, and individuals are still reaching out to me about trying the tool. I didn't share the link directly. Instead, I asked them to DM me.

The results

In the last two weeks, I've met a lot of people and generated a lot of interest for this. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I do have some major bugs that are preventing some users from even using the tool. They're not super happy, which ironically feels like proof that this is a good idea. They've seen the demo, they want to use it, but they can't.

So there's a lot to hunker down and do. I'm going to use the next week or two to act on all the feedback I got from the demos and come back with a version that costs money. That will be the true test of this idea's validity. All the kind words have been nice but this is what I'm really striving towards.

It's my dream to build and create the tools that others use to become successful. It's exciting to have these initial results and a path forward. It's nervewracking to hold so much trust, have no true idea what I'm doing, to think about the hurdle of my first paying customer, and all of the hurdles beyond that. It's easy to get overwhelmed. I'm actively practicing being compassionate to those thoughts and feelings and coax the optimist to the forefront of my mind. I think we're wired to worry and stay in our comfort zones. I'm trying to rewrite that wiring and be okay with the uncertainty.