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How to efficiently follow up with new customers using Tout

Since both Tout and Braintrust are in their infant stages, I like to get in touch and personally talk to most new customers who sign up for one of the services.

I wanted to share with you my process for doing this, since it has been working out reasonably well for me.

  • I set up a template in Tout called “New Customer Signups.” Here is what it looks like:

Subject: Greetings from Braintrust

First of all, thank you for signing up for Braintrust. It is a new service and we’re really excited about it.

I wanted to reach out to you personally to see how everything is going with your new team Braintrust.

Since we’re constantly looking to improve our service, any feedback would be immensely helpful as well.

There are two ways you can give us your insights, you can either fill out this brief 8-question survey: http://survey.io/survey/a6db6 (it usually takes about 4 minutes to complete) or you can just hit ‘reply’ and write out your thoughts over e-mail.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

TK

Founder and CEO of http://braintrust.io

  • I don’t like to blindly send out these emails to every new customer. So, I set up a little link in my admin console so that for every new customer, I get a special link to Tout with the name and email pre-filled in. It looks something like “http://toutapp.com/pitches/new?name=TK&email=tk@email.com”

Pitch Stats

  • Based on the stats from Tout, you can see that I’ve got a reasonable amount of success. I’ve already tweaked my message a bit, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it more, but having the ability to track these emails and the stats around them has been immensely helpful.

Being able to keep track of these kind of emails for customer development has been hugely helpful. Both in terms of delivering a consistent message but also in terms of having actual stats so that I can iterate over the message.

Tout is a simple web-based application that helps you templatize and analyze your business emails.

Braintrust is a web-based private social network and discussion forum that helps organize your team’s conversations.

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Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— April 27, 2010 at 9:41 am

How I gained more confidence as an Entrepreneur

When it comes to being confident as an entrepreneur, and being confident about the likelihood of your startup’s success, it makes a huge difference on how you got there.

The first way to get confidence is what I call the “hopes and dreams” confidence. You have relentless passion for what you are doing, and tons of hope and faith that you are going to make it big. You feel ready to take on whatever that comes up next. Good luck with this one.

The second kind, the one I prefer is the “I know what I know, I know what I don’t know, and I have a design for taking the things I don’t know and understanding them. Therefore, I am confident I will make it big.” This is where you want to be if you want to truly have a high probability of success and feel confident about it.

Its so easy to go around and say “I GOT THIS” and exude confidence — what I didn’t realize before is, it is actually EVEN EASIER to just say what you don’t know. Surprisingly enough, not only is doing the latter easier, it also increases the likelihood of my success.

Which category do you fall into? How did you get the confidence that your venture will succeed? Did you figure it out yourself?

To get your confidence the right way, just sit down, and write out what you don’t know and how you plan on attacking the things you don’t know. Believe me, at the end, you’ll feel way more grounded, confident and it’ll actually help the next time you’re on the bottom cycle of the entrepreneurial roller coaster.

For example, here is how I thought through it:

What do I know?

  1. I want to build technology that help people communicate using Braintrust.
  2. Building something awesome isn’t enough, I need to craft a compelling message that matches with people’s world view and figure out an effective and cheap way to distribute that message.

What don’t I know?

  1. I don’t know how to do PR and get featured in prominent business articles that are read by my target audience
  2. I don’t know how to run an effective social media campaign
  3. I don’t know how much money I should be spending on marketing
  4. I don’t know how to make Braintrust’s website show up first when someone googles “braintrust” or “group collaboration”
  5. I don’t know if my free plan should have ADs or whether it will turn businesses off.
  6. I don’t know whether I should start an affiliate program
    (The list goes on)

What I didn’t know but now know

  1. I didn’t know how to think about defining my price points. So I did some research, thought through it, looked at what others were doing and then established my principles behind a freemium pricing model. You can check out the pricing model for Braintrust to see the end product.
  2. I didn’t know how to build an effective landing page for my product. So I bought a copy writing book, read a lot of articles online, read some marketing books and then established 9 principles behind an effective landing page. Now, I’m pretty proud of the landing pages for Braintrust and Tout.
  3. I didn’t know how to think about an effective social media strategy. I’m still researching this and am getting close to establishing some principles around it.

You see, it is SO liberating to think through things this way. Sure, I don’t have all the answers, but I’m confident I will get to the right answers because I know what I don’t know, and I’ve got a solid principled process.

I’d encourage all startup entrepreneurs to blog about what you don’t know — chances are, we might find we have a lot in common…

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Categories: entrepreneurship.

By Tawheed
— April 26, 2010 at 11:14 am

My 1-page Wireframe for Tout

As I was flipping through the pages of my Moleskine, I ran across my initial sketch of Tout. I’m so glad its there when genius strikes.

Its funny how Tout (originally called Pitch) went from a simple paper sketch to a product (in 3 days) and is now generating solid revenues. I love the web business. I love what I do.

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Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— April 22, 2010 at 9:27 pm

Tout integrates with Highrise

Although I use Tout to send out my customer development emails, but bulk of my relationships are managed in Highrise (the awesome CRM software by 37Signals).

Today, I spent an hour integrating Tout into Highrise so that the people I pitch to are automatically added to my Highrise address book.

Tout Highrise Integration

That wasn’t enough for me though, so I also integrated all the website-like analytics that Tout tracks for my pitches. Now, as events are tracked, they also automatically get added as Notes under the Highrise contact.

Tout Events Integration

Tout + Highrise has made an awesome secret weapon for my customer development and PR efforts both for Tout itself and for Braintrust.io

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Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— April 18, 2010 at 3:20 pm

How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud

I’m a huge fan of the 37Signals mantra of “scratch your own itch.” Inspired by their book for “Getting Real” which I’ve read atleast twice, and “Rework” which I’m reading now, I decided to write a small web application to scratch an itch around customer development emails.

Do note though, 37Signals mantra here probably roots back to a saying my Dad, also an entrepreneur, has always said to me: “Necessity is the mother of invention”

Either way, here’s the problem I solved with Tout: as I’ve been ramping up customer development for Braintrust, I realized that typing, copying, pasting, re-typing all these emails was becoming a huge pain. Even worse, it became even harder to keep track of all these emails.

“There had to be a better way!” — and while there are tons of CRMs out there, the simple “get in, get out” type of solution didn’t exist. So, I decided to create one.

Introducing Tout – the simplest way to templatize and track (like you do for websites) your customer development emails. It helps me create e-mail templates, send emails quickly, and track when someone’s viewed my email, and whether they clicked on my link. It also lets me track whether my overall email was a “success” or not.

It took me about 1 day to get the app working to fit my own need. After realizing this could probably help other people, it took me another 2 days to get it production ready. WOW!

I think we’re at amazing times right now. With all the different “common services” startups cropping up, building, releasing and opening up shop for a web application has never been easier.

Here are the common services/technologies I leveraged to take Tout to market in 3 days:

Heroku

All of my development is on Rails, and Heroku puts Rails on steroids. Thanks to their amazing cloud infrastructure, I had to do ZERO sysadmin stuff and was able to get my app online in literally 3 commands. More importantly, setting up DNS, E-Mailing, and SSl was all done through the web UI as well. I highly recommend them for starter applications, especially ones that are still testing out the market.

The only downside for Heroku is that they have no way to support real-time applications (i.e. run an XMPP or NodeJS server to push out real-time updates) — can you guys start working on this?

SendGrid

Even though the biggest “feature” of my web-app is sending emails, I had to write next to no code for actually sending out emails or even configuring e-mail servers. All of this got taken care of by Sendgrid.

They were also very diligent about validating my site and making sure I was compliant with CAN-SPAM laws and ensuring this doesn’t turn into another spamming machine (Thanks Jose!)

Chargify

Tout has a premium feature, and charges credit cards, handles recurring billing and even sends out invoices. However, I didn’t have to write more than about 50 lines of billing code. Chargify takes care of all of this — all I have to do is build out hooks to keep the subscription level of the customer up to date.

The reality is, it has become so ridiculous easy to take web applications to market now that I don’t have to spend time working on plumbing — instead, all of my time and energy goes toward the creative aspect of the product — which is the way it should be.

And, if you’re wondering what Tout looks like, here’s a 2 minute screencast showing what it does:

17 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— April 17, 2010 at 5:02 pm

The most fundamental principle for startup success

It bothers me how there is so much dogma going around on how to effectively build your startup. The latest was Paul Graham’s essay on how you should only work on organic problems.

Although I love his essays, this particular one inspired me to think about the principles around picking the right problem to solve, because I don’t think its simply about “my problem” vs. “others.”

While thinking through this in a principled way, I think I came across what I believe is the most fundamental principle for any business (including startups). The principle is: Focus on problems you can understand.

The goal of a startup

To get to this principle, I started with defining what the goal of any startup is.

The goal of any business, including startups is simple: Profit by providing a valuable solution to a problem.

If profit is not your goal, you are not running a business, you are running a charity, or even worse, a business doomed for failure.

Picking whether you should solve a problem that is organic vs. someone else’s problem is part of the design that achieves your goal. Similarly, Business models (Freemium, Free, Paid), Funding options (VC/Angel/Bootstrap), Platform choices, Distribution strategies (walled garden/open integration) are all other options that feed into your design.

Focus on problems you can understand

Now, to achieve your goal of Profit, there are a number of things you have to define in your design.

The most important thing that people back into without realizing it as they define the design is “the idea.” With luck, just focusing on the idea works for some, but as we all know, most businesses just fail since people are so focused on the solution a.k.a “the idea.”

Keeping the the most fundamental principle, if I were to create my business in a principled fashion, the most important thing for me to do would be to choose a problem I already understand or I can figure out how to understand.

Thinking about it at this level opens up a world of clarity and more importantly a world of possibilities for my startup to make profit.

For example, I don’t quite understand all the problems CEOs face, but I could easily talk to 30 of my CEO friends and get a threshold level of understanding of what their problems are. If I can do that, then I can most certainly pick one of those problems and solution it.

As you can see, it is not just about “scratching your own itch”, or picking “organic problems,” or just about attacking problems others may have. This is why Paul’s essay came off as too… specific to me, too dogmatic even.

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Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— April 16, 2010 at 12:35 pm

9 principles behind an effective landing page

It is no secret that I’ve really been struggling with marketing and customer development for BrainTrust.io (a conversation management tool for companies and teams). Along with trying to start a mastermind group to get myself some help, I’ve also been reading a ton of marketing books (All Marketers are Liars, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Web Startup Success Guide, and the Copywriters Handbook) to get better at this. This entry outlines what I’ve learned after reading a handful of these books and after carefully looking at some of the most successful sell/landing pages out there.

As a follow-on the my principles for defining a freemium model, I’ve distilled what I’ve learned into a set of principles for creating an effective homepage that can sell your product.

Goal: Convince the customer to purchase your product

The most important thing to keep in mind:

Don’t think of this as a website. Think of this as a kiosk at a crowded mall. How would you design your kiosk to attract attention? How would you make the potential customer feel comfortable even though you are not a huge established department store? How would you, in 30 seconds explain what your product is, if you were speaking to the person? And most importantly, if the potential customer’s interest does pique, how do you make sure you sufficiently answer all of her questions?

Principles:

  1. Have a clear tagline that identifies and categorizes your product in the viewers mind
  2. Do not tell them what it is, show them
  3. Establish credibility, why should the viewer trust you?
  4. Tell a story. A good story communicates the problem you are trying to solve, and explain the benefits of using your product
  5. Define what you are delivering. Don’t try to explicitly define, relate it to something that is already defined in the viewers mind. Use “like” not “is”
  6. Have a clear call to action that leads directly into achieving the goal
  7. If the user has taken an action beyond initially landing on your page (eg clicking on a call to action) you’ve mildly piqued her interest, and chances are she has questions. PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY READING AT THIS POINT. Have an extensive FAQ visible anticipating and answering all pertinent questions.
  8. Put off as many decisions as possible, make it frictionless to achieve the goal.
  9. Make it easy + encourage viewers to help spread your story

I’m still working to apply these to BrainTrust.io’s homepage, but it always helps me to establish principles before designing, so I’m posting them here for debate/discussion.

3 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, marketing.

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By Tawheed
— March 29, 2010 at 12:25 am

Entrepreneurs: You have “FOUR YEARS. GO.”

Have you heard about the Four Years. Go. project? I came across their video and was a) impressed by what they are trying to do and b) hit with an epiphany. This blog post is about the latter.

First, so that you have the context, here is the 3-minute video explaining what they are all about. The basic gist of which is “You can actually achieve a whole lot in FOUR YEARS” along with the usual “this may be our last chance to save the planet.”

The video got me thinking… 4 years is indeed a long time, heck, I’ve achieved so much in the PAST 4 years, what will I be achieving in the next 4? And THAT is when my epiphany hit me.

See the thing is, I have been SO focused on getting my business off the ground, I haven’t really been thinking about a timeframe beyond this week and the next… forget 4 years.

Sure, I’m all about “the dream” and so is this blog, but my dream of attaining freedom and never having to worry about $$ is this idea that is in the “future” somewhere — there is no timeline associated at all. I just know that this is my best idea, and this will get me there… eventually.

However, I think that is the wrong mindset to have. I think it is easy for entrepreneurs to get sucked down to the day to day, just trying to make sure you get that demo video out, or that landing page updated and then end up completely falling out of synch with your goals.

I’m not proposing that you make a 4 year project plan and a path to get there However, I am proposing that you sit down and think about where you want to be in 4 years. What does that feel like? What does your business look like? Having that north star will give you perspective, and having that perspective will make you prioritize today better.

So. Where do YOU want to be in the next 4 years?
I have no idea, I actually need to sit down and think this one through.

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Categories: entrepreneurship, my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— March 26, 2010 at 3:44 pm

I’m starting a Single Founder mastermind group

I’m starting a “mastermind group” of like minded single founders.

I am a single founder. I haven’t diagnosed why, but after co-founding two prior startups, I decided that I like it better being the sole founder. While I can code, design, and have picked up some business acumen, there are still deficiencies that you face when you don’t have a sidekick. To make up for not always having a co-founder to bounce ideas off of, I made up an imaginary friend named Charlie (No, I am not joking).

However, Charlie can only go so far, and its probably kind of weird,  so to compensate I’m starting a Single Founder “mastermind group.”

I mentioned this a few months ago on Hacker News, and now am talking to a few people that expressed interest. It looks like it is going to be a bit of a tango dance to zero in on a like minded group of people to create the mastermind. I’m posting this blog entry to widen the audience a bit and make sure I talk to enough people and get to a real quality group to form the mastermind with.

I believe that part of this is going to be serendipity, but it doesn’t hurt to have some principles established either. Here is how I’m envisioning it to work:

My goal is to bring together a small group of like minded single founders.

Ideally, this is the profile of people I am looking to bring together:

  1. Actively working on an idea
  2. Focusing on it full time or on a track to focus on it full time
  3. Has an actual skill, i.e. A graphics designer, or developer, or a pro marketer — NO IDEA GUYS
  4. Has a blind spot/lack of skill in a recognized area (for example I am working hard to develop my marketing and customer development skills).

Given the principles above, I think the value of the group becomes clearer. You’ll contribute to the group by helping others on what you’re good at, and you’ll get value by getting help on what you’re bad at.

Once we get the initial group together (which will be a bit of a tango dance), we can work to figure out where we are deficient as a group, so we can work to recruit more people from there. I’d probably want to limit the group to about 11 people. The key idea here is to give each other support, help each other, and just be available to the group.

The main commitment would be a 1hr conference call once a month or so, we can define the format later. And, if the group agrees to it, a private community online where we can talk about stuff in between meetings.

If you are interested, please get in touch with me, and if you have any ideas on how to make thjs better, just comment below.

23 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship.

By Tawheed
— March 26, 2010 at 10:23 am

A great product isn’t enough. Why your startup needs a STORY

Here is how a ‘story’ comes into play

Last night, I was out with three of my closest friends. After a few drinks at some random pub, getting dinner on curry row, and hitting up a roof top party, we decided we needed to take the night to someplace a bit more low key. We all agreed that we wanted it to be a wine bar. I decided to take them to The Immigrant.

Now, there are literaly HUNDREDS of wine bars in the city, many highly rated on Yelp. The Immigrant was not even within the vicinity of where we were and yet, that was still everyone’s place of choice. Why? Because I had a story to tell them about this particular wine bar. It wasn’t much. I just said “its this awesome wine bar, they have a reasonable selection, but its run by these two guys that run it like they OWN the place. They really go out of their way to make sure you’re happy.” That story was enough for my friends to get back on the FDR and make the trek.

What does it mean for startups?

It means that having a character, a story, a personality is SO much more important that your idea, and your product. It seems like there is SO much emphasis on these nitty gritty details about your business plan, term sheet, acquisition strategy, people are forgetting the single thing that will get people to use your product: A STORY.

I drive a BMW because I buy their story of a joyful driving experience. I use Twitpic over the million other photo sharing services because I think Noah Everett is a great guy and has a great story. I use 37Signals products because I buy their story that says simple tools can help you get shit done. And finally, my friends all agreed to go to the Immigrant because they bought the story of choosing the place where the owner is serving you and REALLY taking care of you.

The moral of this story

Now the important thing is, just telling your story isn’t enough. You have to actually back it up. I wouldn’t keep using 37Signals if their tools weren’t actually simple. And similarly, my friends wouldn’t have had a good time if they didn’t get the experience my story promised. A great story will attract people to your storefront, but a great product is what will make the sale.

As for The Immigrant, when Jason (who indeed turned out to be one of the owners) saw us trying to get in through the door in the crowded place, he ushered us in, and lead us to the back where there was plenty of room. He shook my hand and said “its been a while!” and then proceeded to take care of my friends. When we asked him about the crowd, he said “yeah, we’ve been open for 2 months and its starting to get real busy.” That’s no surprise. That’s a great story and a great product in action right there.

The moral of this story? Its okay for you to create the 100th Twitter client or iPhone app of the same genre, just make sure you have a compelling story to tell. That is what people want the most.

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Categories: entrepreneurship.

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By Tawheed
— March 21, 2010 at 4:11 am