The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, we're gonna talk about understanding how to effectively communicate customer value. I think it's a challenge that a lot of us founders face, particularly when it's around the product and that product serves different audiences with all kinds of needs and expectations. So I'll dive into how the jobs to be done framework can help me and, therefore, you better understand and communicate with our customers.

This episode is sponsored by Paddle.com, the merchant of record that has been responsible for allowing me to reach profitability just a couple weeks ago. Paddle truly is more, that's MOR merchant of record, because their product has allowed me to focus on building a product people actually want to pay money for. And that's also why Paddle does more for you. They deal with all kinds of things, taxes, they reach out to customers when they have failed payments, they charge in people's local currency, all things that I don't need to focus on so I can really be present for my customers and their needs in my own product. It's amazing.

Check out paddle.com to learn more. One thing that I really struggle with and have been struggling for many years is communicating clearly to my prospective customers what the value of the product is for them. I kinda know personally what the value is. It's just about communicating it in their language and for their expectation setting that I struggle with. And there are several reasons why this is the case.

I'm building a product that is both a podcast database and a podcast alerting system and a podcast forecasting system or a trend analysis system and an API product. So it has public pages that list podcast information. It has private things for people to either look into the UI or the API. It's getting better and better at building reporting for all kinds of things as well. There's a lot.

So there are many different ways of using the information that I have which then lends itself to many different jobs to be done all of which need to be communicated differently. I've noticed in particular that as I was beginning, the communication of my features and what the data was and what the data could be used for was pretty much split between marketers, people that I can understand because I'm a marketer as well. I can kinda get what the idea is that they're trying to reach. Like, where do I find certain information that allows me to monetize, or where can I find information that shows me competitors and what they're doing, that kind of thing? And on the other side, clearly, I was also talking to developers, people who are running businesses, like entrepreneurs and developers that need podcasting data that I could supply through my API.

And those two groups initially, as much as I myself am a developer, were both equally easy to talk to because it was very clear to me what they needed. Right? As a dev, I can talk to devs. And as an entrepreneur marketer, I can talk to marketers. But I talked about this a couple weeks ago.

In opening up the data and putting it on the public facing parts of the website, where before I had all this private data that only people that had an account could look at. Now it's on public pages for each podcast that I track. As these things are starting to rank more and more on Google, which is wonderful, I'm getting prospects and customers that are not technical at all And they're also not marketing minded at all. They could be podcast hosts or researchers or journalists, like people who find a lot of value in the product, but they just don't see it the same way, and they don't speak the same language. The terms that I use, the structure hierarchy, the navigation I use does not necessarily translate to them as well as it does to marketers or developers, people that I've kind of aimed it at.

So I've started trying to understand how those people use the product and what they use it for. And also at the same time, I still try to keep my focus on a main target audience. That's not everyone. Right? It's not everybody who could potentially use it.

That's not my audience. I don't need everybody as my audience. Because if I do this, then all of a sudden I have a b to c product. If I have to or want to talk to every single podcast host out there, then all of a sudden there are people that want to talk to me about particular podcasts or particular shows and nuances and data that at my scale doesn't really make sense. For a solopreneur business, that is just unfeasible.

And I recently had a conversation through my customer service chat with somebody who started a trial a couple days ago and then frantically told me they wanted to cancel his subscription, which ended up being I kind of checked and I saw that they had no subscription at all. They never subscribed, but they thought by signing up with an email and a password that I would charge them money, which I guess is something that we have to thank the mobile payment system for, whereby just installing an app on your iPhone or whatever, starting a trial, you're kind of going to pay if you don't cancel a trial. That's how it works on on these devices at least. And I think that person thought like that as well. Anyway, I had a conversation with that person, and they were of the older variety and the less technical variety.

They told me that they struggled with technology sometimes and they just wanted to make sure that they wouldn't be charged. And then they went off on a completely tangential conversation about podcast shows in Canada. Something very specific, something highly political, and I didn't really care about it. But it is evidence to me that I need to make sure that my application speaks to these people in a way that it makes absolutely clear what it does and what it's for, and maybe also what it doesn't and what it's not for. I had several conversations with my prospects, some customers, and collaborators over the last couple of weeks that pointed at the fact that I really need to focus on those job to be done methodologies in explaining to people what the app can do, which probably means that the dashboard, the initial part of the product where people go, needs to be restructured a little bit to allow people to do their jobs right.

Like, if they are journalists, they need to do research and get a report on a podcast or the charts of a certain region. If they are a podcast host, they need to see the analytics for the shows that they have kind of verified already. And if they're marketers or PR people, they need to see their list of competitors that they're tracking, see where they were mentioned and how much and what relationship exists between all these things. And I really need to drill into these specific kind of category dependent jobs to be done and create views that are particular to them. And that's one thing that I learned because I've been so focused on aggregating and providing data that the views, the kind of the presentation of this data has been somewhat neglected.

And that is where customers see most of their value, whereas they see the whole product. That is the view. And they can also show most of their value to their superiors, to people who hire them, to the people they're employed by, the people that they run a project for. Right? There needs to be something for them to show.

And that's something I noticed, which is a particular problem for me as an entrepreneur who hasn't had a job in ten years. It's very easy to forget that a lot of people do their work to prove to their superiors that they're doing their job right. And that's an integral part of this. They're getting things done. Their work is worth it and valuable.

They need to show this. So I need to make it easy for them to present the relevance of their work in how I show my data. And if I don't if I don't show that, if I don't make it easy for them, for the people to show to their superiors, their peers that they're doing good work and that my product is helping them do this or that they're doing good work to begin with, then they will not see the value of the product as easily as they should be. So that's one of the things that I'm really noticing here. Really dig into the jobs to be done that people have and then kind of map it out, make it easy for them to report, make it easy for them to get to the result that they need to show.

I'll need to have a couple pilot customers that really understand their own reporting needs, for example, and then build tooling that makes it particularly easy to get exactly the reports out of the system that they need for either the next step in the process or as a validation to even use the product in the first place. Look, boss, this product can do what you asked me to do. That's the stuff. To even put effort and time into trying to understand and learn the product, I need to already give them something. So I'll have to have a good hard think about reporting requirements among many others, but that's one that I found in almost all these segments and the kind of needs that my customers have at the stage they're in.

Be it marketers that have to provide certain target numbers, researchers that may have to show a particular kind of data quality, historical analysis, whatever it might be. And I will need to brainstorm and talk to people about this explicitly at some point and have to work with my customers to figure out what exactly they need that needs to be front and center in the interface, in how they get to see the data, their view on the data, even though it might be of little relevance to the complexity of the product that it already offers. Right? They don't know what's going on behind the scenes and they don't really care. All they see is what they see and that needs to be the thing that they need.

Reporting is something that is usually done very easily. Right now with AI tooling and all that. We can just quickly have a certain kind of file structure or certain kind of data structure generated from some random data that you throw into ChatGPT or whatever. Like, I might even build things dynamically where code generates certain kind of output formats that people need in the report without implementing them specifically, where people can just say, this is the format that I want. And then in some weird back end magical AI way, I generate exactly that file.

The actual implementation of this, probably not too complicated, not too difficult, but figuring out what people need, that's the difficult part. And what exactly I can present to them at the point is the challenge. I'm looking forward to this because I know that by making these things more obvious, it is showing the value of the product more easily. And once that is done, it should also impact the rate of customer acquisition and retention because, you know, all the little software business things that do make a difference, if they are existing in aggregate, they impact those numbers significantly. So I'm looking forward to finding out more about this and understanding my customers a little bit more in terms of their explicit job to be done or the jobs to be done that this is used for and how I can present solutions that I already offer in a better way or will be offering shortly more easily to them.

Alright. So they can see perceived value. Because that's one of the biggest things in any business. You want to be able to show what the value of your product is. And the quicker you can communicate this more reliably, you can make people dig into it more easily and find that value and draw that value from your product and pay for it.

That's kind of the moment of first value, the first surprise, oh, this is awesome moment. The higher retention and word-of-mouth rates will be because people have an easier time to describe this, the higher the chances that people will stick around and become really long term high LTV customer. And that's what I want. Right? That's kind of what I want in this product in particular.

I wanna make it absolutely clear who this is for, what they can get out of it. That's the next step. And it really got clearer to me as I opened up to the kind of customers and talked to them that I attracted to Podscan through making it public, making it a publicly available platform, people started sharing what exactly they need. And that is precisely what I need right now. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening to The Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter obitkal, a I v a d k a h l. If you wanna support me on the show, please share Podscan with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, businesses, and names on podcasts out there. Podscan is a near real time podcast database with a stellar API, so please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcasting ecosystem. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.