A CEO asked me “how do we run smaller, faster experiments to test our hypothesis?”
Before we get to that question, let’s recap how we got there in the first place.
What’s our value proposition?
It was my second week at Toasty.
We wanted to run a product-led startup together.
We were less sure, however, what value we were bringing to the table.
It was about increasing engagement in virtual meetings, but we didn’t really know how to talk about it.
It put us in a situation where our website, emails, product copy was inconsistent and shallow.
A value proposition is a statement that answers the ‘why’ someone should do business with you.
“If I am your ideal customer, why should I buy from you instead of any of your competitors?”
So we brainstormed and made a few educated guesses of the potential value we bring to our target market of virtual meeting facilitators.
Engagement Tracking in video conferences to enable facilitators to improve on their delivery.
Ease-of-use facilitation methods to enable facilitators to easily use their meeting structures (e.g. Liberating Structures - a set of meeting structures that are flexible and used around the world)
More niche (facilitation) features like adding a whiteboard, timer, crowd control, etc
We ended up with another (much better) value proposition.
The exercise of taking time to write it out, regardless of its initial quality, was a key step.
The Framework to test our value prop
(spoiler alert: our first attempt sucked)
Marketing is, in essence, knowing about the WHO and the WHERE.
Validating our value proposition means we go to WHERE the ideal customer “hangs out” and invite those WHO are interested in our promise to solve their problems.
Our first attempt to validate our value proposition was to bring traffic to a specific landing page (to a “value prop”) — at first, it was one-on-one reaching out to Facilitators via LinkedIn + trying to partner with LinkedIn groups, Slack groups that were relevant to Facilitators.
Then, our validation step was whether they would talk to us about the problems they have facilitating online. And out of those conversations, bring up our value proposition and getting their initial feedback.
We ran into a bottleneck as only our CEO was able to really reach out to the audience and start meaningful conversations. Our existing LinkedIn profile, it appears, matters more than the message we were sending.
Having a Framework means it didn’t matter if you “failed”
Despite this not working well, we were gaining momentum (i.e. learnings) through establishing an experimental mindset and executing via an evolving validation framework.
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Recall that a CEO asked me “how do we run smaller, faster experiments to test our hypothesis?”
As to my answer to the original question, please stay tuned for my next post.
:)