Pre-sell Your Product to Early Adopters and Test Ideas Quickly
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This document provides guidance on pre-selling a product by finding early adopter customers. It recommends defining a target customer segment and small initial solution, then writing an expected result. Tools for telling a compelling story like problem description, credibility indicators, and call to action are presented. An interview script is outlined to qualify potential early adopters by understanding their needs, solution fit, and next steps. The goal is to get customer feedback and pre-orders through in-person and phone interviews before fully developing the product.
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Pre-sell Your Product to Early Adopters and Test Ideas Quickly
- 1. Pre-selling
- 2. INGITE CANVAS CAN YOU FIND EARLY ADOPTERS? CAN YOU SELL EARLY ADOPTERS? CAN YOU BUILD A PRODUCT THEY LOVE? ? Can you… get lots of customers?
- 3. Why pre-sell? Can’t I just build my product and then sell it?
- 4. Reasons to pre-sell: One Avoids you building something no one wants
- 5. How most startups launch Business Plan Launch Product Development Learning happens here!Months / Years
- 6. Warning!!! What happens if you don’t pre-sell? 0 /1700
- 7. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 1 day 365 days Do you want to waste 365 days?
- 8. Reasons to pre-sell: Two You can test ideas quickly
- 9. The story of anyperk: 3 months 1 Dating site Mieple (Through friends) 2 Introductions to investors (Through friends) 3 Introductions to jobs (Through friends) 4 A translation company 5 Movie advice company 6 Teaching through Skype 7 AnyPerk (Offer discounts and perks to employees)
- 10. Reasons to pre-sell: Three Thousands of other entrepreneurs have pre-sold
- 11. $1.6B pre-paid 80 677 projects successfully funded
- 12. Example 1: dropbox 75,000 emails
- 13. Example 3: Business model generation 470 strategy practitioners co-authored $250 each $117 800 in pre-orders
- 14. Solution interviews How to pre-sell
- 15. CAN YOU FIND EARLY ADOPTERS? CAN YOU SELL EARLY ADOPTERS? CAN YOU BUILD A PRODUCT THEY LOVE? ? Move once you have found a customer with a problem / disatified with current solution
- 16. 1 Choose target customer
- 17. CAN YOU… sell early adoptors?Customer definition 1 Brainstorm 5 early adopter customer segments 2 Select what you believe is the best early adopter customer segment 3 Write it on a sticky note and place on the canvas Hint: Choose a small market, reachable market with a budget and an unsolved pain.
- 19. Build something a small number of user love Source: YCombinator
- 22. To build a great product start small
- 23. Create a compelling one line pitch
- 24. Solution advice 1 Make it great by keeping it small 2 Do a few things extremely well rather than many things okay 3 Perfect the one line pitch
- 25. CAN YOU… sell early adoptors?Customer definition 1 Brainstorm 5 potential solutions 2 Select the solution that will best solve the customers problem 3 Write it on a sticky note and place on the canvas Hint: Keep it small with a few great features and a compelling one line pitch. Solution description
- 26. 3 Write up expected result
- 28. Early adopter customers will be willing to be part of pilot / pre-pay, buy or show a strong signal they are interested.
- 29. Interviews in groups of 5. 1 / 5 Sign up, pilot or pre-pay 5 / 5 Sign up, pilot or pre-pay B-to-B (No customers)
- 30. Interviews in groups of 5. 2 / 5 Sign up, pre- pay or pilot 5 / 5 Sign up, pre- pay or pilot B-to-B (With customers) What is your current conversation rate?
- 31. Interview in groups of 10. 1 / 10 Sign up, pre- pay or pilot 10 / 10 Sign up, pre- pay or pilot B-to-C (No customers)
- 32. Interview in groups of 10. 1 / 10 Sign up, pre- pay or pilot 10 / 10 Sign up, pre- pay or pilot B-to-C (With customers) What is your current conversation rate?
- 33. CAN YOU… sell early adoptors?Customer definition Solution description Expected result 1 Write up customer segment 2 Write up solution 3 Write up expected result Time: 10 mins
- 34. 4 Selling tools
- 35. Tools
- 36. Create a compelling story!
- 37. Create a story: Who?
- 38. Create a story: Why?
- 39. Create a story: Credibility indicators • Famous people organisations • Testimonials • Proof you can build the product or service
- 40. Create a story: Reasons to buy and price
- 41. Create a story: Timelines
- 42. Create a story: Risk reversal
- 43. 5 Create interview script
- 44. Solution questions Set up the interview by saying you are looking for advice. Describe the problem. Ask if they agree if that is their problem. 1 What part of the demo / product do you find most useful? 2 Which features do you think are most important? 3 Is there anything you think is missing? 4 Would you be an early adopter customer for a special price of X? 5 What are the next steps. i.e. Sign up for pilot, proposal, meeting
- 45. Write script & practice solution interview (15 mins) Set up the interview by saying you are looking for advice. Describe the problem. Ask if they agree if that is their problem. 1 What part of the demo / product do you find most useful? 2 Which features do you think are most important? 3 Is there anything you think is missing? 4 Would you be an early adopter customer for a special price of X? 5 What are the next steps? Google “Solution interview questions lean startup” for more advanced questions.
- 46. Interview customers • Get out of the building • Conduct customer interviews (Phone and face-to-face) • Aim to do at least 5 • Ideally, run 3 sales experiments before leaving • Feel free to ask for help from Justin or Paul after each round of interviews • Mentor session 16:00
Editor's Notes
- My Startup Failed. Fuck. I finally said it, my startup failed. Fuck. I felt like I was coming out of the closet when I first stated it aloud to my co-founder. We both knew for months it was not working out, but we never explicitly defined our situation as a failed one. Now that the elephant in the room has a name, we’ll call him “Dumbo” which stands for “Didn’t Understand Markets Brain Outline”. That right there was our main problem. Our market demographic was musicians, and although a few of us had worked around the industry, we concluded recently we were not music SALES domain experts. The product was a flash sale platform for musicians to release their music using dynamic pricing (zillionears.com). To us, this software was a no brainer for musicians to use. The artists get to engage their fans while enticing their community to share with friends. So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated! After that moment we basically stopped talking to artists for a year and built (and rebuilt) the software until we thought it was acceptable. Our first beta test was a disaster when Amazon (who was our payment processor) suspended our account for not complying with money transfer issues. Fans were able to participate in the sale, but we were unable to capture their billing. We ended up paying the artist out of our own pocket and giving everyone his music for free (and we never told him that happened until now). From that beta test we found out that our software needed to be rewritten to comply with Amazons terms. More importantly though, people really didn’t really LIKE anything about our product. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. In fact, some people that participated in the sale didn’t even like our “dynamic pricing” system. They were trying to support the artist, so saving a few dollars didn’t excite them. They could easily have just gotten his music for free elsewhere. We should have packed it up early right then, but we felt like we had already gone too far to quit. We rebuilt (and re-designed) the majority of the software, got approved by Amazon, and reached out to over 1,700 artists (each individually through different platforms). We got between 1 and 10 artists interested. Again, this just screams “PUT IT OUT OF ITS MISERY!” But we kept going. Finally the day came for our second beta (which was totally gonna kick ass for sure). The artist we had on board set up his sale page and was ready to go. Only problem is he totally misunderstood what our software was all about. Once he found out about the dynamic pricing he tells us “I think I am just going to release with another platform.” FUCK! Are you serious???? After that we spent another month slowly letting it linger in our day to day lives. We went for one last ditch effort to make a press release, but couldn’t get a single artist (out of the 1,700+ we talked to) to run a sale. My co-founder called me to tell me this news. I asked him “Would you like to use my gun?” I was referring to the scene in The Social Network where Zuckerberg’s lawyer asks Saverin “Would you like to use my pen?” to manipulatively sign his shares over. I, of course, was referring to shooting this fucking company in the head and moving on with our lives! He agreed. We took Zillionears out back, and shot it in the head. It felt good. Although our company did not succeed the way we would have hoped for, we all learned more in the past year than we had in college. Our insights and experiences have been invaluable. For each of my future posts I will go into detail about the things I learned while on this journey, and how to apply the knowledge to future startups so you can avoid ending up in a room with “Dumbo”! Hit me up on twitter! I just got on there. I love to talk to folks about startup experiences! @nemrow