[Day 14] Zero to MVP in 30 Days — Can’t stop, won’t stop, prospecting

Hey there! If you’re new to this series, I laid down some ground rules in day zero, and explain the idea for my first project on day one. I document, a little every day, what I’m working on.

As warned a few days ago, we’re really hammering out some cold outreach to get people in my market on calls to explore pains/challenges. The hope here is to explore if my solution is compelling enough, if we should look at solving similar pains, or if we just need to do some repackaging on what we have.

I’ll share further stats, in aggregate, regarding cold validation at the end of this challenge. After putting quite a bit of thought into this, I don’t want to share anything too specific, now that I’m chatting with other folks (It’s really nice of people to hop on the phone to help my by sharing their challenges and I want to be super respectful of that!)

A small update on our ad experiment for testing headlines

Our LinkedIn ad experiment to test headlines has helped some. It turns out the headline I’m really happy with doesn’t perform as well against some other headlines I tested. So the one I initially liked, my headlines related to:

Stop losing money from your error messages

Doesn’t perform as well to UX professionals as headlines similar to:

Maximize your users complete rates

And similarly, towards customer support leaders, headlines like this performed better:

Reduce your support team’s workload

This seems obvious in hindsight, and we did hint at having this problem around day 9, but generalizing a single landing page when at the moment I’m targeting two different sets of professionals, means we’re not getting our message across as effectively as I’d like.

That’s given me a direction to go with the landing pages in the future. But that effort is on hold until I get done talking to a bunch of people about their challenges, to make sure we’re tackling a pain that provides high enough value for our target customers. And I also want to determine if we need to double down on just support teams instead of trying to sell to & provide value to UX teams in parallel.

Tomorrow’s todo list

• More prospecting, again! (It doesn’t stop until we have some answers!)
• Since I’ll just be scheduling emails to go out on Monday, we’ll have a lull in actual emailing to do. I’m hoping to have some time to lay down some code for the fun of it.

Thanks for reading! And as always email me with any questions! My email is on my personal site where this was originally published.

→Forward to day 15: A small checkin←Back to day 13: Some calls scheduled