Edit: this post has made the front page of Hacker News, and a few requests have come in for the interview audio. It’s now live on the link below.
Click the link below to listen to or download the audio for this interview.
http://startah.wistia.com/m/RS3jig
This in-depth 60 minute interview and the transcript below features lessons learned about cold calling for customer development by Robert Graham of WhiteTail Software.
You will learn the specific tactics Robert uses including exact scripts that you can tweak for your cold calls when doing market research for your own SaaS product. We also discuss the importance of a ‘market first’ approach to SaaS entrepreneurship advocated by founders like Paras Chopra of Visual Website Optimizer. Finally, Robert shares how having the right mindset is crucial for creating and maintaining momentum for your SaaS venture.
Let’s dive right in to the interview.
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Dan:
I Initially heard about your through your Hacker News submission about your 100% conversion rate when cold calling prospects to do market research and learn about their pain points. I was quite intrigued by that. I checked out the article, read your ideas, and I think it’s a really smart way to approach market research, and finding out what your prospects pain points might be.
Robert:
It just kind of happened, honestly. It wasn’t something I expected. I’m sort of surprised about how much interest there has been in that particular blog post and that line of thinking. It has been so successful that I think I’m going to write an ebook about cold calling aimed at engineers and startups. It’s not a place I pictured myself. (laughter)
Dan:
This book about cold calling you mention, is that the one mentioned in the sidebar?
Robert:
Yeah, that’s the one. That web site has been up for a while, and I have seen enough conversions on that page and interest to merit creating the book.
Dan:
Cool! It sounds like it’s the perfect storm approach where you have some demonstrated demand, and no supply, so that’s a great ‘market first’ approach.
Robert:
Yeah. It’s another thing I just fell into. I really like Derek Siverss book where he talks about having hits, and sticking with the things that work and resonate. Sometimes it’s not what you expect or what you want. But if it works, it works.
Dan:
I heard that Sheryl Crow for one of her albums wrote 100 songs, and 20 were picked. I’ll bet she was in love with quite a few of those 100 songs, but the reality is it’s the dance floor and the concert floor that chooses which songs it likes.
I haven’t had the chance to read Derek’s book yet, but I have been in contact with him through email. Really great guy, really smart, and I’m looking forward to reading it for sure.
Robert:
It’s a good read for sure. He’s just so unbelieveably down to earth, really grounded.
Dan:
It’s very refreshing to see. It’s also refreshing to see that most of the proceeds from the sale of CD Baby went to charity.
Robert:
Yeah, it’s structured that way at least. A charitable trust.
Dan:
It’s refreshing to see that considering the feeding frenzy that the Valley can be sometimes.
Robert:
It’s a different perspective than you see from entrepreneurs.
Dan:
So I have prepare a list of questions, Mixergy style, to go into a deep dive about some of your lessons learned through experience. So we]ll just chat about it, and go from there.
Today I’m very pleased to be speaking with Robert Graham, the founder of Whitetail Software. I first heard about Robert through Hacker News about how he got a 100% conversion rate for his cold calling. Welcome Robert!
Robert:
Hi Dan, nice to be with you.
Dan:
Why don’t we start off by giving folks your background and bio.
Robert:
When I finished my bachelor’s I was really interested in academia and research, so I got into a PhD program. I spent some years there, and did some work with Google at some point, and decided that was way more fun than working on a dissertation. I got to the point where most of the interesting stuff, learning the course work at a fast pace, was over. I just needed to grind out the paper, and I decided that wasn’t worth the majority of my 20′s, and I decided to move on to other things. I found a job, and went down the road a lot of people go down, not really being satisfied with the experience of being an employee. I wanted to do my own thing, and eventually, after many years of talking about it, I actually went out and did something. That was about 2 or 3 years ago now.
Dan:
So that was Whitetail Software, or other projects?
Robert:
That was Whitetail Software. It was funny – I did projects that were aimed at the whitetail industry, but Whitetail was not conceived that way. The first thing I tried to do was a fitness app for mobile. I was really into cross fit at the time, and I still do that, but a bit less structured. I was into fitness, and I really wanted to help people track workouts, generate new workouts and track their progress. I didn’t know anything about marketing, I didn’t talk to anyone, I just went into a cave and started creating. The Whitetail Software name just came from thinking about what a regional “_______” software name would be. There’s a lot of deer around here, and people are familiar with it, so that’s what I went with.
Dan:
Awesome. I’m curious to know then – the turning point where you decided you really wanted to do something on your own, and have your own business - what were your first steps with getting the ball rolling for that goal?
Robert:
It’s hard to say. I spent a lot of years talking about starting something, or half starting something with friends from grad school or after work. I was reading stuff, whether it was Slashdot or Hacker News or Bob Walsh’s stuff. It was all really interesting, and good advice, I just didn’t act on it. It’s hard to say whether the first thing I went out and did was because of all that buildup or totally unrelated.
Dan:
Why don’t we start with the whitetail industry. How did you become aware of that market aside from the prevelance of deer in your area? How did you become aware of that market?
Robert:
I grew up in southeast Texas which is fairly rural. My dad is a big hunter, and I have hunted and fished all over the state. All sorts of things – ducks, geese, saltwater, freshwater, spinning, fly, deer, pretty much anything that lives in this state I have hunted. There’s a quirky story I tell sometimes to give people a picture. I was shooting a shotgun before I could really hold it right. I couldn’t walk through the marsh to get to where we needed to go to hunt the geese. Usually the fields are like a rice paddy that’s flooded. Then we take all the decoys in a mesh bag that would float because the decoy’s had to float. Then they put me on the bag and dragged me through the water. So I knew about it because I was one of those guys.
Dan:
So you had some insider knowledge of the industry, so to speak…
You decided on that industry because you could marry your passion for and knowledge of the whitetail deer industry. At what point did you decide you wanted to get into some nitty gritty market research? Why don’t you tell me how you actually did your market research?
Robert:
I think the first thing I did was simple market research. Looking at what people had done, and what people were selling to guys in the deer industry. If you do just a couple of Google searches you’ll find some very ugly software that does some of the same things. Some of it is cheap, some of it is not maintained anymore. That was my initial pass at market research. Oh, somebodys doing it, I think I could do it better, I’m going to go and start writing code.
Dan :
So the initial market research was realizing that there’s some sort of a market there because there were competing products out there clunky, or ugly, or hard to use, or expensive, and so you decided to take that proven market and just make something simpler and more elegant.
Robert:
Yeah, that was the strategy. There are really good things and bad things about that strategy. I think in some instances it pans out, and in others it doesn’t.
Dan:
So that was your first phase of market research, and your second phase of market research, according to the article, was going out and actually speaking with people. Why don’t you describe your first pass at speaking with prospects. I think you said that you pitched something, it didn’t go so well, and then you changed your pitch a bit on these cold calls, and then you got what you’re calling a 100% conversion rate. Let’s talk about that.
Robert:
(11:20)
I decided to start with connecting directly.
My first approach was to ‘cold email’ people. I had such a terrible response rate. Email is so tremendously easy to ignore that I completely gave up.
Dan:
Let’s get right into it – what did those emails look like? What was the subject header, and what was the content of the emal?
Robert:
That’s a qood question. I can actually search right now and look for them.
Dan:
Go for it! It sounds trivial, but these are the nitty-gritty tactics that I think are really important to know about, and how they performed.
Robert:
I remember desperately looking for content about this type of information.
Dan:
That’s what I love so much about Andrew Warner and what he does with Mixergy. When you’re looking for really nitty gritty, specific stuff, he just delivers.
Robert:
Yeah, so I have seen a couple of emails here, from early on. It looks like I spoke with a gentleman from Pennsylvania, and he runs his own wildlife biology consultancy.
The email subject line is: “Trail Cameras and Managing Whitetail”. It’s about a product I had called Whitetail census, and its purpose was to gather statistical information about the compositon of the herd, and there was some technology to figure that out.
I just mentioned to this gentleman (in the email) where I found his web site, and: “I’d love to speak with you about how you’re doing this”.
Dan:
So this is one of the early emails you sent out.
Robert:
This email has a link to the site which had a tour and some things already complete on it, and my name plus founder, Whitetail Software, and a cell phone number. This gentleman did actually get back to me eventually. After I had done some tradeshows, and he spoke to people who had met me along the way, he circled back almost a year later, and was interested.
Dan:
So plant a seed, and let it grow into a tree.
I would be curious to know – if you did those cold emails again, would you change your approach at all? I’m thinking – if you use some sort of an email marketing system such as Mailchimp or AWeber could you do some A/B testing of these subject lines? Maybe one would get an 80% open rate, and one gets 20%. Or is that just going too fine grained?
Robert:
I think A/B testing when you’re getting started is overkill. You probably don’t have anything that’s going to be statistically significant, and if you do, then I probably can’t help you.
Dan:
So you did some of these emails, and it sounds like they didn’t perform well as fast as you wanted, but that some of them did perform over time. So, you changed your tactics to do cold calling instead. Why don’t we discuss what you learned and how that peformed:
Robert:
I have a collection of scripts from different places. I should have brought these up already, but I’ll bring them up while we talk about it. I know that my initial scripts were extremely naive and more or less begging on the phone. As in: “Hey. I’m doing this project. Please talk to me about what you do for getting census information or tracking herd statistics”.
There was no sophistication whatsoever. I was just hoping someone would talk to me.
Dan:
Are you still making these calls? And if yes, are you positioning the calls differently? What is your script now? How is it different? How is it less desperate now?
Robert:
THe biggest thing that you realize, especially when you cold call someone, is that you can target better by selecting people more effectively. The first way to make the call ‘less cold’ is to pick people who are more likely to be interested. After you do that, you’ll realize that nobody really wants to hear about you at all, so the faster you can make the conversation about them, what they are doing, and what they are interested in, the better. The more effective you’ll be in having a conversation.
Some of those conversations are not going to be what you expected, or even what you wanted, but you’re going to have a much better experience making the calls, and you’re going to a get a lot more information than if you started out with a 5 or 6 sentence paragraph about yourself. If you do that, you won’t keep anyone on the phone.
Dan:
Those are some good insights. Do you have some of those scripts handy? Let’s hear them.
Robert:
In July, I was trying: “Hi, sir. I’m working on some projects in the deer and hunting industry. I’d like to understand the problems and successes you have had a bit better. I’m not trying to sell you anything, I would just like to hear your thoughts on a few things related to the industry. Do you have a few minutes to answer questions?
Dan:
So this is a cold calling script, and not a cold email script?
Robert:
That’s a call script.
Dan:
How did that one perform?
Robert:
I would say that was one 50% successful for getting people to answer questions and have a conversation. It might have been a little bit better than 50%. It gets jumbled up in terms of who rejected you, or who was just busy and didn’t get back to you. It looks like 50% of the people did talk to me.
Dan:
What was the next iteration of the script?
Robert:
I just tighted it up. So there’s less information directly about me. Did you see some of the examples in the 100% conversion rate article, and some of the examples on the version I wrote for Jason Cohen’s blog? I know there’s some other examples of the iterations and the thinking there.
Dan:
I have read both, and it’s really valuable stuff because when you connect the common themes that we’re hearing about here from Lean Startup, Customer Development and all these methodologies – they all depend on a deep understanding of the pain points of your customers. There’s ways to do that well, and ways to do that not so well. I just think it’s really valuable to hear lessons learned from people like you who have been making these calls in the trenches.
Robert:
We haven’t really touched on it, but when I started making these calls it was a really terrifying experience. My heart rate would go up. I knew, in my head, that the worst thing that would happen is that they might hang up, or say something mean. This is a person who I have never met, and it doesn’t affect me in any way, but for whatever reason it’s a really intimidating thing to do. It’s something that you have to do for a while before you’re comfortable with it.
Dan:
I have done it as well. It’s one of those things that you work up into being this monster, but once you start doing it, and get on a bit of a roll and you experience some small successes, that monster just disappears.
Robert:
It helps to have some success along the way.
Dan:
What would you suggest for folks who are a bit more introverted, and what they really love to do is code, but they really need to do this market research, but they don’t have a cofounder who is more marketing or sales oriented – what would you suggest for them in terms of getting pumped up to make these calls?
Robert:
There’s never a replacement for actually, doing it, but I think you could get geared up by – I had a great experience reaching out to people. You mentioned you had emailed back and forth with Derek Sivers.
There’s a lot of people in the community who have been successful in different ways, and are really willing to help.
You can just contact them, and say: ‘Hey, this is what I was thinking about using as a scrip – what do you think”? That’s one way to go. Another way would be to just get some friends to role play with you. Maybe that gets your confidence up a bit, maybe that gets your script to a slightly better place. Getting anybody else’s eyes on things you have written will improve on what you have. Beyond that, I think you just have to jump in a couple of times and absorb the hit of just doing it.
Dan:
We went over what a couple of your scripts were, and what the iteration was. We won’t read it verbatim now – if people want to see it they can go to your blog and check that out, and also your article on Jason Cohen’s blog.
Going back to your process – by this point you had spoken to a bunch of people and found out what their pain points were. How many calls, and how long do you think it actually took you to deeply understand what these pain points were?
Robert:
That’s a good question. I wrote an article last year about a different idea that I had done research for. I think the best bit of advice about knowing when you have done enough research about their pain points would be when you know what they are going to say before they say it, and there are no new surprises in the calls. That’s when you know.
Dan:
So you have an understanding of their psychology. As Ramit Sethi said, he talks about really understanding the emotion and psychology of the buyer or the prospect so that you can say what they would say, before they even say it, and inject that into your marketing copy and messaging.
Robert:
I’m a big fan of the deep psychology that Ramit goes into. It’s really interesting, and useful too.
You can say – talk to 10 people, talk to 20 people, but you might learn enough after talking to 5 people, or it may take 100 people. It depends a lot on yoru market, and how big you’re framing your market to be, and what kind of access you have to those people.
Dan:
Absolutely. So, it’s great if you are Ramit Sethi and you have thousands of people who respond to your surveys. For somebody just starting out who doesn’t have a big blog or an audience already for something who wants to find a market using this process to research it and understand prospect’s pain points, and the deep psychology and emotion around those pain points, how would you suggest they go about doing that? Should they try a combination of cold emails and cold calls? Do you have any specific tips for people who don’t have an existing platform to leverage?
Robert:
I think cold calls are a pretty good way to go. It’s pretty easy for people to ignore emails and blow you off, but because they are rejecting you personally or because they might not like your product. Usually they are just busy, and its the lowest priority email they have in their inbox. If it sits there for a couple of days and moves down the line it just gets lost in the shuffle.
You will find if you’re doing cold emails that if you are consistent, perhaps once a week, or once a month, whatever you feel like it needs to be, you will get an answer eventually. I just found that it’s harder to ignore a phone call, and it’s a little more urgent and more immediate to get that feedback.
You need to find exactly what you think your ideal customer is. I know a lot of different people talk about this. I read a book called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes that’s a really good book. He talks a lot about nailing down your ideal customer. Even if you can nail down 50 people who are perfect customers it’s good – just focus on them, and be consistent. The more you know about those people, the more you can get inside of their heads and present them with something compelling specifically for them .
Dan:
In your experience, have you found that when you frame these phone calls as wanting to speak to them or interview them about their business, have you had more success when you have framed the calls as an interview, or as you’re doing research? Any difference?
Robert:
The interviews have been the most successful format. In my original 100% cold calling conversion rate post I was talking about having a blog in the deer management industry, and I was offering writing an article about deer breeders, in exchange for visiting their premises, taking some photos, and talking to them about their operation so I could understand more about how to develop something that would interest them.
(27:45)
Dan:
I felt like, when I was interviewing them on site, I need to be asking them questions that were geared toward writing an interesting blog post, rather than the types questions I should have been asking to learn about their pain points. Some of those questions didn’t include things that I might be interested in. I had to strike a balance there.
As far as market research and getting the most raw information, I have had more success in the last 6 months with just talking to people about their business, and what their problems are. I think you should keep it pretty open ended.
I got some really good advice from Harry Hollander, he works at moreware. They do some really good business. Really active on Twitter, and they really have a handle on running their own software business, and he has been really helpful to me.
Harry basically said that the most valuable question they ask is just: “What is the biggest problem in your business”?
They don’t even start with: “We’re trying to solve some problem, what do you think”?
They’re just looking for what people are struggling with, and working from there.
Dan:
By taking that approach you’re almost positioning it as a value added experience where they get to vent a bit, perhaps their friends and family are sick of hearing about their business, and finally somebody is listening and enabling them to vent a bit, so that’s pretty cathartic.
When you position it as an interview – it’s kind of flattering to have someone want to interview you. I have done some of these cold calls as well, and when you position or frame it as an interview you seem to get a better response, for sure.
Robert:
An interview is by definition focused on them. They tend to open up a bit more, and you can start with easy questions to answer. Some of the people I spoke with in November and December gave me a lot of information I didn’t expect to get.
I started adding more and more questions to the tail end of the interview about their revenues, competitor’s pricing, and some other topics where I didn’t expect to get answers. For a while I was enabling people to pass on the question, but most people by that point in the interview were totally comfortable, and they were just talking business, and having fun.
Dan:
Are you publishing these interviews on your site, or are they just private?
Robert :
No, these were just for market research. I do have notes from some of the interviews, and maybe I should roll that into the book. I know I want to do some case studies as part of it.
Dan:
I wasn’t implying you should publish, I was just curious if you do.
Robert:
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it. You just gave me the idea.
Dan:
Well, I quite enjoy doing these types of interviews, and in terms of content, you can use a transcription service like Andrew Warner does, and get them transcribed. If your prospect is comfortable with that, number one it’s a value add for your other customers, and number two it’s a bit of content for you that doesn’t take too long to get created.
I think SpeechPad is $1 or $1.50 per minute or something like that for the transcription service. If you are doing 10 – 15 minute interviews for market research anyway, it’s dirt cheap to turn that into some easy content for your blog – as long s your prospects are OK with it.
Robert:
That’s a pretty good idea, especially if you are doing interviews that are industry focused, or you have a customer centric blog. I know the other people in the industry would love to read that stuff. I actually only have notes, but even those might be valuable for people.
Dan:
It’s knowledge that’s in their heads, that may not be published anywhere. It may not be published in books, it may not be published on any other blogs, so you have some valuable knowledge there. And as long as your customers are comfortable with you sharing that knowledge it could be a value add for your other customers.
I would be curious to know what your overall marketing strategy. First of all, what are your products, and what are your overall marketing strategies for each of those products seperately, or together, or however you do it.
Robert:
I think the overarching theme with all the marketing I do these days is a combination of getting insider the customer’s heads as much as possible. People talk a lot about eating your own dog food or solving a problem you yourself might have. I think that’s a pretty good idea in some instances, but it just wasn’t something I wanted to do, which adds a bit of challenge.
To solve a problem for an industry that you are not familiar with it takes a lot of research to understand not just the high level of the fact that your customer wants to manage certain data in a certain way. They have some specific day to day things they do that are different than everyone else. That’s true comparing industry to industry and probably company to company as well. You have got to find out what the key pieces are there, and what really would improve their day to day work the most. What’s the biggest win. I think that’s the hardest part – to get inside an industry that you aren’t really a part of. It really just takes time. You have to engage with people, and that takes cold calls, industry events, and other things. I have heard some really good things recently about doing webinars with people in the industry – along the lines of what you just mentioned with transcripts. Basically doing your customer development, but doing it as a webinar, and just talking through things in the industry. I think that’s a great idea. I think that would also serve as an inbound way for people to get in touch with you so you can learn more from them.
Dan:
Let’s use as an example to illustrate. Let’s say you decided you wanted your market to be wedding photographers because you had some insider insight about their workflow or something. The way we could apply this, in terms of the customer development process, is to create a blog around the industry or business, and do perhaps 10 – 20 interviews with wedding photographers. You would need to be really well prepared for the interviews, get them transcribed, put them up there. So that way, you’re giving value first, and you’re positioning this research as interviews, and as value adds for these people. You are in essence giving value first.
Robert:
That’s a really key piece that I have done in the past. A lot of people in industries that are tightly connected by relationships, and most of them are, but some are more so than others. People in the tech community are far more comfortable with finding something online, buying it, and moving on. People in some other industries are a lot less comfortable with that. They would rather shake your hand, and know about what you’re interested in, and what you do in your spare time before they buy anything from you. It’s a little bit of a different challenge, and there are ways to meet that kind of a challenge online.
I think a key to getting in the door is just starting that relationship in a way that they are getting something out of it from day one. That’s what makes building a blog like that and then engaging those people so valuable – it just starts the relationship.
Dan:
It generates some great results for you as the entrepreneur, and also for these prospective customers it creates some value for them. if you think about the time input required for that, it doesn’t take that long to set up a simple WordPress blog. it could be a free blog on Blogger.com or WordPress, or you could set up a WordPress blog on your own domain. You could do a combination of cold interviews and cold calls to get some interviews scheduled, do the interviews, get them transcribed and then up on the blog, and boom! That would be an interesting way to do customer development.
Robert:
I think before you start doing interviews you have probably done enough research to make a post or two about the industry, and make the blog look like something. If someone asks you for a link, you’ve got something going, you can send them to something, and you have some trust markers there. Those are some key pieces. But yeah, something free, something simple, just get going.
Dan:
It sort of provides a mini platform so that when you make that 21st call to that 21st prospect they see, oh these people are serious about this, and you have proven that you are willing to create some value.
You mentioned that your target market may not be as comfortable going online. That suggests that, although SEO and SEM might be some channels that you do engage with, they might not be at the top of your list.
It sounds like tradeshows, and some of the more old-fashioned relationship building techniques are more important for you. So you mentioned tradeshows. Are there any other techniques you are using? Are you trying any direct response marketing techniques such as postcards or flyers or anything like that? How are you reaching your customers and acquiring them?
Robert:
I haven’t done mail yet. I don’t think those products would be suitable for mailings because they don’t have a high enough price tag to make that kind of marketing work. That’s one of the considerations you have to make when you’re picking what type of marketing you will be doing.
One of the problems I have with the Whitetail industry is reaching people in a cost effective way. That can be a challenge with markets that are not online. I have some other products that reach people a little more effectively online, but besides tradeshows – if there are local meetups, industry events, those are good. I did some research on a product for civil engineers, and there are a lot of different professional associations that these individuals are involved in weekly with 20-30 people at each of these events. The organizers are usually just dying to have speakers, so if you an scrape together some content that is interesting to your market then you can go give a talk and have an instant collection of people who might be really interested to talk with you.
Dan:
I would be curious to know if you have tried connecting with people that have an audience already, and who’s audience is your target market. Have you been able to leverage other people’s audiences at all?
Robert:
I try to reach out at tradeshows to some of the guys who were selling the herd tracking cameras. I have a product that is used to figure out statistically some of the information about the population. It’s pretty much automated, but you still had to have a certain number of cameras to make it effective.
We did a little bit of cross promotion by email, but the overlap in the market wasn’t really strong enough. This other company was trying to sell cameras to consumers, not the business customers we are trying to reach. I really needed a more targeted list of people that owned land, or had a hunting club. That was not something that I found at the tradeshows I went to. There wasn’t a business that had direct overlap, and who I could do cross promotions with, and try to leverage their audience.
Dan:
Ok so you mention two things there. It sounds like number one, you did some cross promotion, and number two, you mentioned that there wasn’t enough overlap, and so the targeting wasn’t strong enough.
What did the cross promotion look like? Did you guys plug each other to each other’s lists? What did that look like?
Robert:
We ended up sending out an email to their list, it was a really brief email> We just gave them a few sentences about what the product could do, how it tied in with their cameras, why their cameras were effective with it, and we put some links in there.
It also had some educational information about the method in general. There is a lot of research in the deer industry about how to use infrared remote to conduct a population census. The software just automates it. You can do it yourself if you wanted to. You could even do it with one camera on a small piece of property. We tried to reach out with that.
I’m a really big believer in educational marketing. I believe you need to offer value there as well. It makes it less of an interruption. Marketing is implicitly permission based, but a little less so when you do a cross promotion.
Dan:
Have you read the book “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin?
Robert:
It’s on my bookshelf. I bought most of his books, and have read 5 or 6. I really like what he has to say, but I stopped short of permission marketing because it started repeating itself.
Dan:
I think the big idea in that book is the power of both having a list, and a great relationship with that list. Jason Fried also talks about this in Rework – he is the founder of 37 Signals with David Heinemeier Hanson, and he talks about how valuable it is to just have an audience who is eager to get your content. The channel is not super important, we’re talking about blogging, we’re talking about an email list.
Having access to a group of people who actually care what you have to say, and want to hear from you at some interval is one of the most valuable business assets you can have. What I hear you saying is that it can be tricky to do that in such a targeted, focused niche like the one you’re in.
Robert:
Even the overlap between vendors in the niche is not always there. It’s tough to find other vendors who reach our target audience, who we can do joint ventures with, and do an email cross promotion to each other’s lists. You need to be careful with that kind of stuff too because you can make people unhappy in a niche like that and really mess up some of your opportunities.
Dan:
Absolutely. So the strategy that 37 Signals uses on their Signal versus Noise blog, and in their talks of being brash, opinionated, and even a bit arrogant sounds like it wouldn’t be a smart strategy in your niche.
Robert:
My background was in software, and not wildlife biology, and it was sometimes tough to overcome objections. If I had an opinionated and arrogant tone I think a lot of industry people would just tune me out.
Dan:
Let’s apply some of your techniques to you now. What are some of the biggest problems in your business?
Robert:
That’s a good question. I would say – probably still the same old, same old. Some of the things that people told me in interviews such as finding quality help, you mentioned setting up a blog – something I have gotten into is outsourcing some of those tasks. I think it’s a challenge to do that. I know some people have had some success with it. I even ran an experiment where I tried to use Craigslist to outsource some of the phone calls I was making for customer development. It wasn’t a full outsourcing of the interview, but just setting up and coordinating times. A friend of mine, Ferris…..
Dan :
First name Ferris, or Tim Ferris?
Robert:
First name Ferris. He gave me this idea of outsourcing the interview set up and coordination. He had good success with it, and I had so so success with it. I found with a few people it worked well – they set up interviews, got them booked, and I saved a little bit of time, but I’m not sure that it was a huge win for me. I would say that’s one of my problems. The more I could outsource those little things, the more I could focus on those bigger challenges. Those bigger challenges are really fine tuning the message, marketing and language to exactly what is in the customer’s head. And that takes a long time to form those relationships, talk to people, and understand how they talk about the pain points, what parts of it are really important to them. They don’t always know.
47:00
(technical issues)
(Interview resumes)
Dan:
So two things that I heard you say there. The first challenge being delegation – outsourcing overseas is one approach, outsourcing domestically is another. I have personally tried outsourcing some things overseas via Odesk, and I have had mixed results depending on what the tasks were. it’s a major pain to speak to someone at 10 or 11pm at night when you’re wiped after a full day of work and they are just getting started and want guidance and direction.
The other thing I heard you mention is deep customer insights. So, really understanding the emotions and psychology of your target customer so that you can fine tune your messages and your marketing. For a niche like yours it can be tough to get enough qualitative and quantitative data to about people’s emotion and psychology. How are you approaching this not just from a market research perspective, but from a continual perspective in order to inform your marketing messages?
Robert:
A big part of it is just building relationships, and going back around to the people that I have spoken to already, or that i have more than a touchpoint online with. So circle back every once in a while, see how they are doing, see what they think about the product, see what new problems they might have in their business. I know as any business grows the types of problems it has tend to change a little bit. Or even if you have the same problem the character of it has probably shifted a little bit. I think just going back around is really important.
And anytime somebody gives you an opportunity – whether you get a support question or an unexpected inquiry – take the extra minute, really reach out, and try to start something there. Those have been pretty effective to me. I think most people are excited to tell their story if someone is ready to listen.
Dan:
It sounds like you can take either an inquiry, question or pain point that someone expresses to you, and you can try and answer that through multiple communication channels. You could even go so far as creating a blog post around it. I don’t know if your prospects are on Twitter, but you could tweet it out. You could even take a minute or two and go on YouTube to create a short video answer, and send them the link. You can engage with them in multiple channels so that they can consume it the way they want to consume it.
Where do you store your data and insights about all this stuff? Is it in your head, or do you have a wiki, or any kind of a system for it?
Robert:
I have lots of notes. The best system I have probably used is a really big text file that I have in Dropbox. That has probably been the most effective for me. You probably noticed me scrambling around when I was looking for some of my scripts. I have some in Highrise, I used that for a while, I have some Google Docs, it’s a little embarassing, but it’s a bit of a hodge podge.
Dan:
It makes me think – is that an actual pain point for you, or maybe that system actually works.
Robert:
I don’t think it’s a real pain point for me. I feel like there are a lot of solutions out there for this, but I just don’t think those tools fit where I am at.
Dan:
The way you’re approaching it – I’m sure you have tons of data points in your head – essentially, you are the guy creating the marketing messages, and it’s all going to come from your head.
What are some of the SaaS apps that you use and pay for Robert? You mentioned Highrise.
Robert:
I never paid for Highrise. I never needed to. But it was useful to organize prospects for a while. I kept a lot of notes in Highrise about when I called someone, what I said, what the script was and how effective parts of it were. That was pretty useful. I switched over to the end to just the text file and I just have an extremely long text file where I put in my scripts, and talk about what was said, and list out the questions – just a running brain dump. Even using command line stuff like Grep in the middle of writing some code and improving a feature you might just go back into the text file and say – oh – this is what that customer was talking about. There are a lot of tools for dealing with text so sometimes it’s nice. If you have a software background it’s just easy.
Dan:
What would your advice be to someone who knows they want to do something and start their own business. They are ready to go. They are starting to look at markets. What would your advice be?
Robert:
Advice on selecting a market?
Dan:
Yeah, advice on selecting a market, and the headspace required to actually act on that.
Robert:
That’s a really difficult question, and something I have thought a lot about in the last few years.
Dan:
Some people struggle to just get started, and to actually do it, and they endlessly read Hacker News, and they just can’t find it within themselves to just start, so that’s why I ask.
Robert:
I think the best answer I have come across so far is a really unsexy one. But it was in Derek Sivers’ book. He said the most important thing is to just get started.
Minimum viable product probably does not involve writing any code.
Dan:
Not even one line.
Robert:
It’s probably just calling one person, making a post on Craigslist, and doing a bit of consulting. If you want to change the world of education I think Derek Sivers example was – start a tutoring business and take it one step at a time.
Dan:
I really like what he said about creating a manual prototype first. So if you want to start a movie review service, then start manually emailing your friends about some new movies you have seen, and get them to forward your stuff to their friends.
There are ways to do these things that don’t require coding for 6 months only to find out nobody wants the product.
We hear it again and again from people like Derek, Eric Ries with Lean Startup, Steve Blank with Customer Development. In terms of my own lessons learned there’s no doubt that creating the right type of minimal viable product which in your case, in a very focused niche, it’s going to involve old school relationship building. Old school techniques. Shaking hands. Going to tradeshows. Going to events, forming relationships, and getting your prospects to know you.
We are coming up to 1 hour, so we are almost out of time.
Is there anything you would like to add that we didn’t discuss?
Robert:
Some of it is cliche, but I really think the most important thing you can do is get experience. You need to go out and do some things – whether its marketing or hiring a developer or just putting something out there, whether it’s consulting services or a product. The first product that I finished and launched, by the end of working on it – I had connected enough with the startup community and the market to know that it probably was not going to be very successful. But there was something in me that just said: ‘i have been down this road before, I’m going to finish it. It may not make me any money, it may not change my life in that way, but I just need to know for myself that I can put it out there and finish”. And there are things that you learn that you don’t expect to during the process of giving something 100%.
Dan:
We have gone over an hour here, and I can already think of 10 more questions I would like to ask you, but I think we should end it here. I just would like to thank you very much for your time, and for your insights.
Robert:
Thanks a lot for having me on Dan. It’s really fun to talk about this stuff.
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