How to Gain Traction in a Crowded Market – Ryan Battles – MicroConf Starter 2017

0:00[Music] [Music] I want to start by saying thank you to all of you who have been encouraging to me knowing though I'm coming up on the stage today it's meant a lot I feel like everybody here has been just so friendly and in interesting I've enjoyed getting now a lot of you and what you're working on for example today at lunch I was talking with Dan ver Dan for you in here yeah so he was telling me that his he's you know looking to build a product and his interests are programming sailing and kungfu so I'm thinking oh that's awesome like there's two three totally great areas and so I asked him more

0:50about the programming and I was like what about programming like what kind of programming do you do he's like Python and go now I've heard of Python I've never heard of go how many people here have never heard of go as a programming language all right two of you so I'm like the third anyway I didn't know about it so I'm just like I must not be that many people using it so I was like that's perfect it's like small it's you know niche and you should use that so I went up to my room right before this talk and I googled it apparently when you search for go

1:20tutorial there are so many there's fifteen million six hundred thousand results so and in the whole pages filled with like go by example learn go programming a tutorial with code examples resources for a new co programmer so I was like yeah that's crowded so here's the thing they're all these markets are crowded so many of them very rarely will you find a product that is like brand-new and never been invented before and it actually takes off I mean there are people that make brand new products they've never been invented but there's usually a reason why they haven't been invented because there's no market for them so I'll talk

1:56to you a little bit today about harpoon which is my app which is time tracking an invoicing app for freelancers it is certainly not the first one to do this nor the only one in the world but we decided to do it when we first started harpoon it was actually just a way for you to track the payments that your clients gave you we would track it on a calendar on the monthly basis you would see how much you've brought in minus your expenses and how that tracks towards your goal and we even showed up at the top what your forecasted revenue would be based off of

2:32the invoices that were outstanding so we built that but the only catch was you still use tarp or you still use fresh books or or harvest or whatever tool you were using to invoice the clients we just helped you to visualize things in a new way we also showed graphs and charts showing you you know more information about your business we even showed vacation days based off of how many days you work what you've been bringing in and according to your yearly goal how many days you could safely not work or make any income and still hit your goal so we thought people would love this we

3:09created a landing page that showed what the app does briefly kind of vaguely we had you know the the ever recommended opt-in form there where you put your name and email in there and we'll send you a lead magnet and we actually got many people to sign up we purchased ads on email newsletters from people and we got about 3,000 signups before we even launched the product so we were super excited when we did launch we had a great launch and a lot of people did sign up but they signed up and then turned quickly they realized like this wasn't the tool for them like what's

3:51going on here and everybody's response was that I don't want to enter my payment information twice I don't want to enter it into one tool and then come over to your tool and enter it again so we realized we had a problem we needed to create a product that people wanted so I googled startups oh well I searched on Amazon for startups and this really amazing book by some guy named Rob walling showed up and so I purchased the book brought it home started reading start small stays small the developer's guide to launching a start-up and in there I was thinking how can I get advice on building a small business

4:31online accounting software being a self-funded startup so I got to this quote in the book building a general small business online accounting an application is a really bad idea for a self-funded startup but ironically I thought we're not general-purpose we're serving freelancers we have a niche which we realized was not really a good niche so then I was like alright this guy we're gonna go ahead and ignore him sorry start I find this other guy who's writing stuff on the Internet it figured like alright we're gonna we're gonna build this SAS app time tracking invoicing that's going to be popular this guy Justin Jackson says in

5:17many ways those first cred base SAS products address books time tracking and invoicing were the low-hanging fruit the opportunity to be first and those segments is past so I did what many good entrepreneurs do you just ignore what everybody's saying you just go for it anyway so I we decided we were gonna take on these guys fresh books harvest free agent we're gonna build the features that they have been building either bootstrapped or with with funding and having been around for 10 years we're gonna try to take them on and as we did more research we realized ok these actually aren't the only players in the space there's a few more tools

5:58and once we started thinking of all we wanted harpoon to do we realized there was more perhaps that we're already out there solving this problem so we looked at this list we knew what we were up against and we still decided to go ahead and give it a shot do I tell you guys hate paint chips as a kid so so why did we do it we did it namely because we wanted this tool we were freelancers ourselves we were actually using some of those tools that were up on that slide and none of them had this like goal setting and tracking component that we wanted so we were

6:34doing all this in spreadsheets in addition to what we are getting out of the tools that we were using to track our time and build our clients and we were like if anything we will use it so the other reason is like I said we thought we had in it each niche so with freelancers like a lot of these other tools they're starting to to serve like agencies and small businesses and we thought if we just focused on like a freelancer a solo user so we didn't have all this added stuff like team information and adding people we thought we could keep it simple and you know that would be the

7:12way that we niched into it and finally we thought we would keep it simple by only supporting the US dollar so we figured there's enough freelancers in America that will just you know support the dollar and hopefully all the American freelancers will sign up well we turned out that on our Google Analytics the people coming to our site that we're finding out about us and signing up for our list we're actually all from all over the world this kind of shocked us we thought you know like I don't know like other parts of the world speak different languages like why are they even on our site but they wanted to

7:48sign up but we didn't support any of their currencies but then we realized we probably could support their currencies because the way harpoon works is we tie in with stripe and we have them sign up for a stripe account and then we just do a direct tie-in we don't take any cut off the top but they can build their clients using straight so we figured ok maybe all the currencies of stripe supports we can support but there's other things in addition to currency that we had to figure out that we needed to support like number formatting I didn't realize this was a thing in some parts of the world commas or decimals

8:21and decimals or commas and 1.000 means a thousand I did not know that and thankfully our customers let us know when they tried to use our app date formatting apparently apparently everybody does everything a little differently so we had to support a lot of that even down to clarifying your dollar we're like the dollar symbols right there and they're like as a Canadian is that Australian oh gosh so we were a little bit in over our heads but we started to solve these problems and one by one we got people to sign up now these are actual sign ups now not just visitors to our site but people

8:58using the product from was that different cities around the world so I want to revisit this slide that shows us kind of like dropping off in a combination of starting to support other nationalities and also like building these features that would put us on par or at least have the feature said of harvest and fresh books and the other tools that people were using we started to see growth it was right around 2015 the end of 2015 that the feature sets that we were releasing started to get people back into the app and the more we fixed the the bed of the curve became and there was one point there at the the

9:41beginning of 2016 where it looked like we were hockey sticking and I was like oh my gosh we're gonna be millionaires and and then it like rode out and I had to tell my wife I was like all those dreams I just painted for us we're gonna have to hold off on those just a little bit because I don't know if that was really a hockey stick I just think it was a bump so the lesson we learned there first of all is build what people need we did not build what people needed on our first revision and that's why everything went flat but it took us some

10:10time it was not an overnight success it still isn't an overnight success it's something that we continue to plug away at but we've realized that once you discover what people need and you do that by researching your audience and getting feedback and sometimes just continuing to put the hard work in finally we validated what people needed and then the second part of that is to find a way to let your customers know about your solution so the second half of my talk here is going to be about marketing your product once you have one that that's starting to fit a need even though there are competitors that have

10:45already have bigger audiences already have deeper pockets you know why would you go into a market that already has plenty of people there doing it already so I want to remind you you are not the first one to do this whatever your idea is you are probably not the first one to do this and I was reminded on a podcast I was listening to a guy named Mike said the landscape of SAS business is starting to become more crowded most of the ideas that people have for an sass product have already been done and I heard that and I'm like yeah you're right so I'm gonna change the subject I

11:22turned off the podcast I did listen to some jazz jazz is something I got into since watching lalala and anybody watched la-la-land alright not that many of you either that or you don't want to admit it and that's fine too so jazz is a type of music that usually starts off with a melody that the whole band knows to play and it ends with the melody the whole band knows to play and in in the middle they just kind of go around and each one takes turns improvising they stay within certain key ranges and you know there's certain like rules that they stay within but for the

11:55most part they just improvise to make it up and some of these songs you cannot hear the same way twice if you buy some of the older jazz albums you'll hear the same song played 40 different ways depending on the album you listen to and I was reading a book about this it says jazz can be played on any instrument by ensembles of any size when I started thinking about that it reminded me a lot of building a product and marketing a product because it's really just a bunch of improvisation of little riffs little chords little tricks that you've done in the past but like mixing them up in new

12:29ways adding your own voice to it and just like jazz can be big band or it can be a trio your product can be you know with it with a large team or it could be just one person going out there trying to make a product so finding out what your unique way of doing things is your unique combination of tactics will help you to have a product that stands out so I say in this slide here to embrace your unique not just find it but realize that that is what is going to help you to stay ahead of some of the competitors in certain areas so as another example I've

13:07been talking about time tracking and invoicing for freelancers email marketing is another very saturated market or it's a market that has a lot of competitors in it and there are certain ways that people have come up with new products in the last several years that I've been able to compete with other stuff that's out there and one of which is drip like the reason why I like drip so much the first time I heard about it was that it was a better way to solve my problem of email marketing I got into this tool and instantly I could figure out how to use it it was very simple the tool I was

13:42currently using was very cumbersome and just took a lot it was really hard to maintain so I felt like drip was clearly better at solving a problem another tool that takes a unique approach here to be unique in your solution is SendGrid SendGrid is another email marketing tool that also has transactional email capabilities and so by combining those two services there they're doing they're they're adding features that some of the other tools don't have so in that way they're unique another way you can stand out is by leveraging your advantage my friend Nathan berry came out with a tool called convertkit and the thing about convertkit which was great is that

14:23Nathan had spent years teaching people how to write email sequences and just teaching everything he knows really writing books and and he became an authority and so he came out with this product that said I will take my formula and already put it into this app for you so when you sign up you just have to tweak some things and then you know you have like his game plan so that was an advantage that he had that he leveraged to help get his app off the ground Gary Vaynerchuk says the only assets you have against bigger wealthier competitors are raw talent in time corporate America isn't as nimble as you of course they

15:01have deeper pockets but the talent you're the only one that has your talent they have a different set of talent but there are things that you bring to the table that are not going to be at the bigger competitors and you got to find out what those are and try to leverage those also time you know sometimes companies have investors and things need to be done like right now they're you know if you're if you're launching a product you might have the advantage of being able to wait a bit a little bit longer or also putting in more hours and being a little feisty err by staying up

15:31late working hard and hustling a little harder and maybe getting it out faster because the bigger a company is the longer it takes for them to make a change when your company has thousand of customers you can't just go rewriting it every few weeks until you find what sticks but when you don't have that many customers you have that advantage you can tweak things and and you know you have more leverage in that regard so something I've learned that's really helpful is to measure everything the temptation that I have is to just try something and keep keep working at it and just going off my gut is that

16:07working is it not but once I like decide I'm gonna measure this I'm gonna determine you know scientifically is this working or not then excuse me then I'm able to know what to double-down on so at harpoon we have this sheet that we make for every one of our marketing projects we we start off by asking what is the main idea so for example I'm going to talk about Facebook Ads so if you say what's the main idea of trying some Facebook ads to get your product out there and I know I'm talking about a SAS product for myself but this applies to just about everything podcast info

16:43products whatever it is you're working on you know it'll apply so the main idea of a Facebook ad is to drive traffic well drive sales traffic is worthless sales are better so to to get sales that's the main idea through Facebook's ads what are we hoping to accomplish to get more sales how are we hoping to accomplish this we're hoping to accomplish this by and this is usually where I say like we're gonna use these keywords and we're going to you know try to get them over to this page and so I maybe pull it out a few specific tactics that we're going to do and then I write

17:18down what are we measuring and this is the key part are we measuring click throughs are we measuring how many people sign up what are we measuring defining what that is helps you to you know be accountable to actually getting that number when you're at the end of your trial and what is the time for time frame when I say trial it was intentional I think every marketing activity that you do needs to be a test you just because you because things change so quickly that you need to be trying it measuring it and then you know if it works continue double down sometimes scale back sometimes new

17:53opportunities come up thank you brother Justin Jackson everyone that's better all right time frame so you know some of these some of these might be two weeks some of them might be three months some of them might be six months and what is the cost for Facebook Ads we decided how much are we going to spend on Facebook Ads we spend that we write that down specifically how do we know if it's a success that's when we say you know we know about how much we need to pay per lead so if you know if we're getting this range then we'll know it's a success and

18:33what would failure look like this is a I think a really important step is writing down like visualizing what failure looks like because before you run the task you know you'll be able to say like well the failure would be you know people clicking but not signing up or something like that and then when you actually realize that's what happened you're like okay well this this test failed and that's okay because a lot of tests will fail and the whole point is to find what works and then you can double down on that and finally what was the result and what are the key takeaways so you know what

19:04to do next time the tool we use to keep track of all these is Basecamp we just do notes you can use notepad you can use word Google Docs Evernote doesn't really matter it's nothing fancy we just write down the questions and start putting bullet points you can also measure these on a Gantt chart like what when you're running these tests for your marketing and any everything even from like your Twitter presence it's like alright you're on Twitter while you're on Twitter like we did one of these just for just being on Twitter what are we hoping to accomplish how do we measure if we're doing that simple stuff so you

19:41might have a ton of these things running at the same time but it's just really helpful to identify what they are and so I have a little trick to I'm for those of you have talked with me before you know that I'm the kind of guy that just likes to throw a spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks so in order to throw as much spaghetti as possible I recycle everything that I can so I'm gonna give you a little formula of something that I've tried before which is starting by going to Korah in finding your a subject matter that you're trying to you know write content for you find a

20:15question you answer that question then you take your answer and turn it into a blog post you take that blog post you put it on medium you also put it on Facebook and LinkedIn then you take some pool quotes from that article put them into an Instagram little pull quote then you take that little pool quote put it back into your medium article you share both of those on Twitter then use a tool called Q to get it into a bunch of people's automatic tweet use and drive traffic like crazy and then you could even go in different directions with paid advertising or combining some of your

20:52content into guest posts so that you can you know increase your exposure so I want to show you an example of some of the Instagram photos that we did these are just some pull quotes we just took out we made a Photoshop file that just has a gradient over some random mountains and put our logo on there and then just you know put it put in a quote we also found quotes from other people that were out there on the internet that we would just put together and throw them up on Instagram I mean that was one of our little tests that we did and turned out to work out pretty well so

21:24looking back at our chart here just just as a reminder like if we would have stopped there after the first hump when it was flat which is what most sane people would do you know we would we would not have a product today but we chiseled away at it there's no secret sauce there's not this one thing that I'm just like if you just do this one thing you're gonna achieve success it's uh it's usually a combination of things it's determination and perseverance so all those quotes that I had from other people in one of the episodes will start up for the rest of us when they

21:57talked about how SAS is becoming overcrowded Rob also said even though that that's the situation I still see people executing and just making it happen so to you guys I see all of you executing on stuff talking about products and even if it's in a crowded crowded product or a crowded market I think a lot of you guys have what it takes to execute and make it happen it just requires you know measuring perseverance trying new things getting creative and putting yourself out there so I wish you all the best as you gain traction yourself and yeah that's my talk I'm wondering if you were able to

22:45get anything from your competitors so you're in a crowded marketplace were you able to watch what they were doing and replicate any of that or is it always about coming up with something new um there are two schools of thought on that some people like Gary Vee says I don't even know what my competitors are doing because I'm too busy doing it myself I think that there's some health to it and some danger to it we do keep tabs on a few of our competitors just so we're smart about what's going on but we don't try to match them feature for feature we listen to our customers and if enough of

23:20our customers say I can't use your tool because the tool I currently use does this then if enough times that happens then we listen to that but I'm not going to look at what FreshBooks is doing and go oh they just came out with this now I got to come out with this because how do I know that that's what our customers want I don't one of here Ryan what's some examples of spaghetti you threw at the wall that didn't work very well Twitter trying a variety of things actually last year I talked on Twitter automation as an attendee talk it was something that we tried for a while and

23:58while it grew our follower base it didn't actually land in people signing up for our product so it was something that we determined was not worth our time to continue to pursue and that's just for our product for other products I talked to some people that said they heard that talk last year they implemented it and it was awesome so I really think that you can't you really can't predict how things are gonna go until you try them and test them on your own your own stuff

24:35competing in a crowded market and knowing that takes a lot of guts to go into business to try to get into that market so my question is how did you landed your first thing clients and how do you convince them that your solution was better than the status quo I think it started with us doing content marketing and paying for ads before we launched I mean so even though a lot of those people churned we still had people on our email list so when it came time to reboot harpoon we let all of them now we had changed a few things and we're back so we by starting with a list that

25:11that helped us to get our first customers but some of them were just friends of ours like people we met at conferences as freelancers we'd just be like hey we have this product now try it out and yeah we up but we also did a lot of paid advertising and that drove people at the beginning too that's how we got some of our first customers and one last one over here hey so that that whole recycling site was amazing by the way I'm wondering compared to like the more traditional stuff like of course we talk about emails here and email feeds and everything what percentage would you

25:46say roughly of your income or your leads or really any of that comes from that that sort of experimental third party like social media like pull in so like how much of our customers are coming from like that funnel that I showed like all the spewing of content all over the internet that is something we just started doing a couple months ago and we have not it's not a great percentage yet we still find the best return for us at this stage where we're at is launching a new feature and then emailing our list because inevitably there's people on our list that have not pulled the trigger to

26:34come to harpoon yet because we don't have this or that feature and so as we continue to plug these feature holes and we send it on email saying hey we just launched international support you know that was like a huge email that generated a ton of signups for us you know we just launched a Mac app there were people that were waiting for us to have a native Mac timer before they would join in so we launched that we sent out our email lists and then we get a ton of signups again so for us it is the feature completion emails that's driving the most sales at this point but

27:04all the content marketing that we're doing is continuing to funnel people into our list so that we have more people to email when we come up with new features so it's all kind of circular all right that's it Ryan thank you very much thank you

27:22you