The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey, it's Arvid. You're listening to the founder. This episode is sponsored by Paddle. If you're looking for payment provider that allows you to focus on business stuff instead of having to read up on tax law, check out paddle.com. I highly recommend it because I'm a Paddle customer myself, and customers are the theme of today's podcast.

Let's talk customer acquisition strategy. A few months ago, I started thinking about preparing data on PodScan for people who would be ideal customers for what the product currently is, a social listening tool. The easiest approach here seemed quite straightforward to me. Just get the names of brands and influential people that I would want as customers and start tracking their mentions on the platform for them. And over the last couple weeks, I've turned this idea into a systematic customer acquisition strategy.

The infrastructure for all of this has been here from the start. Any tracking of mentions, any brand, any name requires an alert in the podcast system that powers PodScan. So I created these alerts privately under my own account because the people that I would want to use the platform, well, they hadn't created their accounts just yet. So I would do it for them internally. And I've been waiting for results to trickle in to see how many people would get how many mentions and meanwhile thinking about how to eventually expose this data to potential customers.

I'm not just throwing darts in the dark here. When it comes to the Eugene Schwartz hierarchy of product awareness, which goes from people being completely unaware that they even have a problem all the way to them being fully knowledgeable about all products in the market, I am targeting people who are at least solution aware, if not product aware. So I want people who are not unaware or just problem aware, these people who already know that social listening is valuable and can benefit them, that's my target customer here. I'm specifically focusing on influential people in entrepreneurship, business, and software because that's where I have the strongest connections right now to make these initial conversations easier. I'm also branching out occasionally, but that's the kind of part of the market that I'm really focusing on right now.

And I have tracked the names and brands of several 100 people in these industries. The system collects podcast mentions and brand references and name jobs conversations about them or with these potential customers. And this data collection has been running in the background for months, and recently, I decided it was time to transform this passive monitoring, this passive data acquisition into an active sales outreach process. For this approach to work, there are 3 critical components that I really need to come together here. The first one is to make it possible for people to import these existing mentions into new accounts automatically, like, from my internal data into their own data, make a copy, pull it over.

The second one is to be able to present this information outside of a logged in account because people want to probably see all these things before they choose to sign up. So I need a designated landing pages for these specific collections of mentions. And then finally, the most scary one, happy Halloween, I guess, you tell these people that this valuable information exists about them. You reach out. You do cold emails or prewarm emails or you tell them in a DM, you talk to your customers.

That's the scary part. And with my designer and my engineer hat on, I spent the last week building exactly the system. And when I say designer hat on, it's mostly that I have Nick who helps me with his design skills and I just implement it. That's really what it is. This landing page now pulls in 8 to 15 recent mentions for any given alert for this track person or brand, whatever I choose to track, and then it displays full mentions and several highlighted ones showing the data's depth.

I wanna show what PodScan has to offer. And most importantly, it also presents podcast covers in a visually appealing way, which demonstrates to this potential customer where people are talking about them, that there are actual people who show their face on the visual part of their podcast and they are talking about their brands. That's the idea, right? On this landing page, on this kind of outreach system, I wanna show people that there are actual human beings talking about them in conversations that I found their name in. That's the idea.

That's the the basic principle of this whole dream customer outreach strategy that I have. And the technical parts are interesting too. The system uses a specific hash code for each alert, a kind of a a slug or a specific, like, ID, I guess, which prevents random imports of other people's mentions. But you can't really just guess somebody's name and import all their mentions. I might do this eventually, so you can import mentions of certain people that you find interesting, like, after the fact.

If you come up today with, let's say, you wanna track Peter Thiel in all of the conversations that he's been mentioned in, why not make available all the past mentions of Peter Thiel as well? But that's a maybe feature that nobody has requested yet, so I'm not even thinking about this. But when somebody imports their own data, I wanna be able to see this and I track this action and then can begin building this relationship with these accounts. Hence, the IDs so I can figure out who this belongs to. But the most challenging part for an introverted software engineer like myself that was the outreach part of all of this, right?

The actual making contact with the person. And because I do love AI but I hate when AI talks to me or when I use AI to talk to people, I did not generate any AI driven messaging. I created a human written template. I wrote it myself for code emails and direct messages, and I'm customizing each one with the prewarm data from my system. The outreach that I'm approaching here includes screenshots of actual mentions which I used HTML to canvas for.

So if you're a developer and you work in front end, this is really cool. It allows you to take any part of the website and turn that into a canvas, a rendered representation of itself which you can then turn into an image or an SVG or like some kind of blob whatever you wanna have it as and use that in any other way. So I'm taking a screenshot of a mentioned component that I have with the cover of the podcast, the name of the podcast, how many stars it has, how many episodes it has, what the topics are that highlighting the word that was mentioned all of this. And I put that in the email so that people can immediately see, oh, wow, there's a lot of data here. Right?

This screenshot has dimension, the podcast information, timestamp ratings, I automated all of this rendering this particular part of the web page directly into an inline image which can then be easily pasted into emails. So there's still a manual component but I think that's kind of what I want. I don't want it to be so cold that it's completely automatically dispatched. These are my dream customers. I want to talk to them.

Right? That's kinda what it is. Initially, I had a text version of those mentions of the conversation in the emails, but I thought a screenshot would have more of an oomph, Like, it would highlight the conversation much better. And the contextual information of what this screenshot contains makes dimension more valuable and actionable. Because people see, okay, this is a rather popular podcast I was mentioned on.

I should really reach out to these people. And I put the contact information for that podcast into this email as well to make it absolutely clear to people who might wanna use PodScan that there is a benefit in being able to immediately reach out to a podcast host or a production company right from the platform. That was one of the main points here too. And what's so fascinating is how my own database became a gold mine for this contact information. Not just the contact information for those podcasts that I would show to my prospects but when people are mentioned in podcast their social media links or their websites they often appear in show notes and from there finding their email address becomes surprisingly straightforward, right?

If people have a domain you can pretty much figure out where the contact email is and this pre warmed information makes my cold emails much more effective because they include visual examples of mentions that prospects would get if they tried PodScan and data is sourced through the platform as well and I'm reaching out as this kind of intermediary. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Even when people aren't interested they're grateful for the valuable information that I've shared and I know that some of them might actually come back at some point. And this approach has opened up an interesting recursive opportunity for me here too. Every time one of my users triggers a mention of their brand, that podcast itself becomes a new target for my outreach.

Because I can just reach out to the host because I have all their information and they're often influential people themselves who might wanna track their mentions on other podcasts and I can say, hey, somebody just found a mention of their brand on your podcast, You might find it interesting to track your own name and podcast mentions too. And all of this is kind of pre warmed with the data that I have about this interaction. Right? There's always something that happened before that triggered this, that has a kind of contextual value that I can communicate and it's not as cold an outreach as if I was just saying hey, you should really use my tool. No, I can say hey, somebody using my tool did this and you might find this beneficial tool.

And I've set up a weekly cadence for adding more interesting people from my community, from events that happen, from blog posts, books and tweets to my dream customer alert funnel. I have a script that notifies me once 10 mentions accumulate for any given person, any brand that prompts me to then either reach out immediately with the link and the image and the email saying, hey, this has just happened. You already have 10 mentions or I can adjust the alert parameters to maybe filter out a couple of false positives or add more terms if it took too long to get to 10. That's the idea. And the podcasting world is full of experts who would benefit from knowing when they're mentioned.

Like, there are so many people that I could add even just within our little solopreneur bootstrap SaaS community that I find myself right in the middle of, the moment you reach out into other tiny adjacent industries, there's all of a sudden thousands of people who might benefit. Every podcast guest that is on any podcast anywhere is a potential customer for me because they might wanna track dimensions to find new show opportunities or connect with similar podcasters and do collaboration with them. This creates a natural expansion of the potential customer base for PodScan. Every podcast episode introduces new experts to me who could benefit from using the tool. And what I've learned is that my impact is strongest when sales and marketing decisions are not just data driven, which they are, but data enabled.

Instead of convincing prospects with arguments, I can show them actual data about their online presence. And this approach aligns perfectly with my style and provides this continuous level of insight into improving PodScan as well. Because I now know what else I need to give people more insight into their presence. Right? The the things that I need to build, the things that I need to focus on are clearly the things that add more context to the data that I can present.

And recent additions like sentiment analysis and entity extraction have added this valuable context to my mentions. People can now see not just where they're mentioned, but in what context and what the sentiment was, what the feeling was, when they were mentioned, were they mentioned in a positive way, in a analytical way, in a negative way, were people shit talking them, that kind of stuff, I can now present with the information immediately. And since PodScan extracts keywords from these full transcripts to provide context for the episode, I can now show my users exactly what conversations they're part of. This is a conversation about the election or some kind of war somewhere or a potential business deal that happens or a very important expert conversation. All of this is now there at the glance.

It's really cool. And this contextual information often proves to be as valuable, maybe more even, than the mention itself because it helps users decide whether and how to act on each mention. The strategy success that is already quite apparent to me lies in providing immediate value at every step. When I send this cold email, the recipient gets an actual useful piece of data about their brand's presence in podcasts for free. They get the whole thing.

Right? They get where you were mentioned, all the data, all this actionable stuff. Then they go maybe to the landing page and that gives them free access to several mentions without requiring sign up. Now they can kind of browse through and see, is this good? Am I interested in this information or do I not care?

Some people just don't care about their online presence. They might not want to be notified. That's fine. They can kind of fall off that funnel at that point. And during the trial period, they immediately have the opportunity to import these hundreds of mentions already and that allows them to experience the full power of the platform while evaluating it from the first moment they use it.

So this approach creates a natural progression. You get a tiny bit of valuable information in email, you explore more data on this landing page that was personalized for you, and then you import the full historical mentions during a trial. The first step, the onboarding of the trial. At each step they're getting more tangible value before making any commitment. And as a developer by trade, sales and marketing are not my most confident areas, but I think using data from within my own database to create a customer outreach funnel that connects to whatever I do later, CRM or something, like, this feels like the right approach for a data driven business.

The system keeps improving as I discover new ways to present and contextualize the data, and I feel confident in operating on that data. And I keep finding new nuances to improve like showing extracted keywords from episode transcripts that gives prospects immediate insights into the context of their mentions. Every time I analyze these mentions for potential customers, I discover new ways to make the platform more valuable. And the key is providing value upfront, whether through the initial email, the landing page with this free access to more mentions or this data import that is immediate once they start the trial. By focusing on data and impact rather than pure persuasion, I have found a customer acquisition strategy that feels authentic to both me and the people that I'm offering this to, my prospects.

Thing is the system that grows naturally with the platform because the more data comes in, the more I have to act on and it's getting better with each new feature and data point that we add. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at albitkahl, a r v I d k a h l and you'll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you wanna support me and this show, please tell everyone you know about podskin.fm and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com/founder.

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