The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid: 00:00

Hello and welcome to the Bootstrapped Founder. I recently learned of the dream customer list approach to sales and marketing and I love it. I wanna share that with you today. The idea behind this is extremely simple. You think about who your best possible customer is and you add a 100 or so real world examples of them.

Arvid: 00:18

Just do a list. And by best customer, I really mean dream big. Like, if you run a SaaS that, I guess, renders movie and titles like end crawl, I think is the name of the business that does this and that's kind of the example I'm using here. You probably wanna sell to Pixar or the legendary picture studio at some point in the future. Right?

Arvid: 00:36

So that is a dream customer. And maybe if you run a video effect software business you would put in people or creators like mister beast and his team on that list just as the ultimate dream customer. What this exercise allows you to do is to contextualize the product as if you already had these customers. I'm gonna explain all of this to you today and it has massive benefits. I will share them with you including who's on my list and why.

Arvid: 01:01

This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later. Let's talk dream customer list. I'll start with mine. I recently realized something about PodScan, my media monitoring business.

Arvid: 01:11

The time to value in that business, getting a new trial customer to their moment depends entirely on how quickly they can find their first mention on a podcast. It's kind of the idea of PodScan. Right? We scan the podcast and we tell you when you're mentioned. If it takes a few days for the first mention to trickle in, well, that's quite some time for them to have to wait and I can't assume everyone to be this patient.

Arvid: 01:35

But PodScan is not just alerting. I just recently transcribed my 5th million podcast episode. And the full text of those conversations that I've been transcribing over the last couple of months, well, that lives in several databases ready to be searched and analyzed. And that's when it clicked. That's what made it obvious to me what I should be doing.

Arvid: 01:57

If I ever wanted to attract my dream customers, I needed to start tracking their mentions long before they signed up. And for that, I needed to understand who they are. Not just as a kind of nebulous audience, like, oh yeah, people who will use my product. That could have been, well, the description of my audience up until a certain point in the past, or even just an ICP, this ideal customer profile. But the actual real people that I wanted to actually have end up using my services.

Arvid: 02:26

That's what I needed to know. And I also noticed something else over the last 2 weeks that actually combined this, that made this a fully fledged idea. My existing big profile customers love talking about the product. From Jack Ellis of Fathom Analytics, who unwaveringly tells his Twitter followers and founder peers about PodScan, to Rob Walling, who mentioned being a customer on the latest episodes of Startups for the Rest of Us, where we we talked about MicroConf 2024 in Atlanta. That was a couple weeks ago and we did a little episode going through our our favorites and all that.

Arvid: 02:59

And now Noah Kagan as well, who brought it up again and again in our conversation on my podcast earlier this week. These amazing and quite their where they, their business or their friends are being talked about. And they talk about it to their business, collaborators, to their friends, their audiences and all that. In case it's not abundantly clear just yet, this actually is my ideal customer at this stage. Someone who already is mentioned on podcasts, wants to know when it happens, where it happens, and has a sizable audience of other successful founders and creators and people with a budget to share the joys of PodScan with.

Arvid: 03:42

And that is the list that I created. I went through my Twitter feed and wrote down every single active amazing founder, creator, and influential person that I followed, I knew, and I liked. It's pretty much a list of all my heroes. It goes from like Sam Parr to Rosie Sherry, from Amanda Gutz to Amanda Natividad, from Nathan Berry, April Dunford, j Klaus, Brandon Dunne. These are just a few of my Twitter friends who I admire and know that they are already being mentioned on podcasts all the time.

Arvid: 04:12

Several of these people have been on this podcast which is really cool and others I hope to eventually talk to on the show. This kinda this that you will find that this is kind of on purpose even though it's not intentional. I'll explain what I mean with that in a second. With that list when I when I had it, I had like a 100 or so names on it. I immediately went into my PodScan account.

Arvid: 04:33

My own admin account, I guess. And set up individual alerts for each of them. And that's the trick. Now whenever they're mentioned anywhere on a show, any podcast anywhere, PodScan will quietly note that down and add a record to my account, which can be theirs in the future. Because over the next weeks months, these mentions will accumulate and very soon I'll have thousands of mentions gathered up neatly in my database and that will be my time to first value advantage for when I ultimately reach out to every single one of these people on my dream customer list.

Arvid: 05:06

I will allow them to sign up and immediately claim or import their mentions from the database, from my account into theirs. I'll be building some kind of semi public page with a, you know, a random name that I can send to them with all their mentions on it. And on that page will be a link where they'll see all the things or the page itself will be the place where they see all the things that they've missed in the past. And the link will allow them to register a new account that then immediately after being created pulls that data from my account into theirs. They'll hit the ground running with already super actionable data that was custom collected just for them.

Arvid: 05:45

And that is the power of a dream customer list. You can do targeted preparation but at scale. I think its biggest benefit is that you actually have a list of prospects that you can start reaching out to long before they're customers. And reaching out to doesn't necessarily mean you could write an email or a DM. You can already work in their favor.

Arvid: 06:05

Because it's quite unlikely that your 2 month old SaaS business will land a client immediately like a movie studio that created the most recent Dune movie or something like that. That's not gonna happen. But the old adage of marketing, the rule of 7 is also true about getting on someone's radar long term. It takes 7 or many more touch points before someone considers working with you. Or even thinks of you as a viable thing to maybe look into.

Arvid: 06:32

And having a list of future customers makes this a much more achievable goal. You can leave these little things along the way. You can leave traces of your ambition and you can leave evidence of you trying to work for somebody already even though they are not paying you for a service that you want them to ultimately pay you for. And if you know who you're going to sell this product to, you also know what the product needs to look like for them. Let's get back to Jack and Rob and Noah, the people I mentioned that are already talking about PodScan and are using it themselves.

Arvid: 07:05

With every single one of these amazing people, I had extensive Twitter DM exchanges about the usability of the product, maybe missing features that was talked about and things that it didn't do too well just yet and could improve on. They have formed the product to suit them better themselves as they're using it by just talking to me. And I have zeroed in on customer product fit because I listened to them. And I knew that they were people that I should be listening to because they were well connected, already successful. They had a budget for these kind of tools and all of that.

Arvid: 07:39

It's effectively validation that I've been doing here. Right? But it's important to understand that this is about people. Like actual human beings. And even if you're selling 2 businesses, you're selling 2 people and businesses.

Arvid: 07:51

And those people exist outside of their role and inside their role of course because that's part of their identity. And you can already build these connections even though they're not paying you for anything just yet. And, you know, it's a it's a pretty sizable group of people like even popular celebrities in the Indiana community is quite a sizable group. So I was finishing thinking well, is is that all? Like should I also look for other people that are in my dream group?

Arvid: 08:18

Like where should I go? Why not stick to this group? I know who they are. I know where they hang out And as I'm deeply embedded in their communities, I have the means to reach them through pre warmed connections. Sometimes I already know them, like the people that I had on my podcast.

Arvid: 08:32

Clearly, this is a customer segment that is worth putting in extra effort for. And yet, and this is the important bit. I needed to be careful not to dream too big. Because my dream list pretty much tops out at the celebrity level of somebody likes Tim Ferris, who is the biggest name on this list. Now, Tim's a celebrity who might still be able to go shopping without being hounded by the press, but people will recognize him if you put him in front of a couple nerds like us.

Arvid: 09:01

And from my data, I know he's being mentioned a few dozen times each day, and that is okay still. It's still manageable. It's so meaningful for a couple dozen mentions. That's still something somebody could engage with, but I'm intentionally not aiming higher. No people like Taylor Swift or Arnold Schwarzenegger or definitely not Elon Musk.

Arvid: 09:21

Some people are mentioned so often, way too often, and they frankly don't care about that anymore. They don't need to engage with these things. They are in the public eye and they're not looking. So I am looking for popular in a niche, maybe even a little celebrity in a niche, but just popular not famous. That's the big distinction.

Arvid: 09:41

So deciding who's not gonna be on my list was just as important as who would make the cut. And I think that goes for the lower bound too. PodScan can definitely serve yet to be popular founders and creators, who want to explore the wide landscape of podcasts and book placements and all that, learn about who appears where and all that. But the culminating use case, the overlapping Venn diagrams, if you will, lies with already somewhat popular people who I have direct access to. I learned this very recently from, the workshop that I I was part of from the CMO of Paddle.

Arvid: 10:21

He said that over 30% of successful startups jump start their customer base through the personal network of the founders. 30%, 1 in 3, of all these businesses that often, like, hit hyperscale at some point and, you know, hockey stick and whatnot, VC stuff. But these businesses all start with a tiny, tiny network of connections, and that then cascades into like a bigger market domination strategy. That's not necessarily what I need with PodScan, but it's a good start either way to get some customers. And that's what's happening here.

Arvid: 10:52

And the dream customer list is the guide book for it. Of course, you can change it over time. You can add new customers if you want. You can remove some that you now feel are not a good fit or something like this. But, hey, it's a really, really good document to have because it's the benefit is something that I've just realized a couple days ago.

Arvid: 11:12

Like this document is gonna be around in 2 months. It's gonna be around in 6 months. It's gonna be around in 2 years. And if I just were to add all of these people to a CRM and started engaging with them, like regularly on social media, through email, or whatever, like, the chance that some of them would bite over the next 2 years is so much higher than if I were to only do it 2 years from now. And if I were to start 2 years from now and had done nothing along the way.

Arvid: 11:38

So clearly this is a way for you to invest into relationships as you are building the product that eventually will sell to them. So here's a rundown of how I created my list and how I think you can create yours. You start with defining your over ripe customers. The customers that are too big, so you know who to exclude from the top. And you then define your not ripe yet customers for lower bound exclusion.

Arvid: 12:02

The people who are not there just yet in your perfect group. And then you go into this middle middle ground, middle part, and you start listing the people who you want to talk about your product. And for each item, you add a link to their best social media profile that you have. Maybe Twitter, might be LinkedIn, but I mean, depends on where you are present. That's the one, usually that's the best.

Arvid: 12:23

And you name their brands, their personal brands, their businesses that they're working in or on or for, and their names and things that you think they might wanna listen for as mentions. And if you know them already from your community, you kind of know what terms they might be interested in as well. So that might be something to also put in like for me for example in the alerts, right, that I put up. Like I look at these terms and they might also find things interesting around them. So I put them in an alert so they see okay yeah this person gets me.

Arvid: 12:53

That's the idea of this right? It's not that you necessarily have to do the exact same thing that I'm doing because it's very specific to PodScan, but showing these people that over time you have thought a lot about them, that's a pretty clear indication of trustworthiness. And then if you have a couple of them, a couple dozen and you can't really come up with any more, feel free to paste the whole list into chatgpt and ask it to fill it up with a couple more items up to a 100 or whatever when you run out of ideas. Chatgpt is pretty good at determining similar things to the things you mentioned, particularly if the people or the businesses that you mentioned have been around for a bit. Right?

Arvid: 13:30

If they have some kind of notoriety or popularity in the communities that you're in, Chatgbt will be pretty good at filling in more. And you can always sort them out later. What you'll end up with is a battle plan for the next months or years. And you will get to these customers eventually. So just take time to often reflect on what you can do today to leverage a positive interaction in the future.

Arvid: 13:54

And then you start working on making this dream list a reality list. And that's it for today. I wanna briefly thank my sponsor Acquire.com. Imagine you've built this amazing business with your dream list. You had a 100 people on your dream list and you kept working on this for months and maybe years.

Arvid: 14:12

And 2 years after, you have this really, really good business. 50 of these people have tried the business or tried your product and 30 of them have actually subscribed and you've repeated this over and over. You have a really solid SaaS. It's making money, has good MRR, but it's kind of not growing. You're kind of stuck.

Arvid: 14:29

And you don't know what it is. Right? Focus problem, skill problem. You don't know. You just want to do something else.

Arvid: 14:35

Well, lots of people will tell you you should just battle it out and keep slogging away and growing it and, you know, get better and whatever and you triple your revenue and you're super depressed. I think that whole situation is not optimal. And the reality for a lot of founders is the the situations all look slightly different, but in the end, what they don't do is act. They just become complacent and they stagnate. They are inactive and the business itself becomes less and less valuable over time or worse, completely worthless.

Arvid: 15:05

So if you find yourself in a situation like this, where you have something valuable, but you don't wanna keep doing it, just consider the 3rd option here, which is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you would capitalize on the value of your time today as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as somebody who wants to burn for something. And I think that's a pretty smart move. You can always convert your business into money. Acquire.com will do this for you.

Arvid: 15:26

They're free to list. They've helped 100 of founders already. Go to try. Acquire.com/arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. It's always good to keep an eye out on these things.

Arvid: 15:36

So just to look at it and see, is it good for me today? Is it good for me next month? Maybe a year from now? If you don't know, well, then you're never gonna do it. And if you know what to do, you can still wait, you can still see it through, or you can sell.

Arvid: 15:51

Having options, that's usually a good idea. Thank you so much for listening to the Boots of Founder today. You can find me on Twitter at abetkahl, aavidkahl. And you find my books and my Twitter core stat too. If you wanna support me in this show, feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel, get this wonderful podcast in your probably equally wonderful podcast player of choice, and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com/founder.

Arvid: 16:14

It makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds And that's where I would love for it to be. Any of this will help the show. So thank you so much for helping. Thanks for listening. And have a wonderful day.

Arvid: 16:26

And bye bye.