Today’s going to be on the shorter side as I’m still busy emailing folks. Also, I’d love to do a comprehensive post on my early validation attempts in a few days, after I’ve tried a few more channels.
The start of validation
I have three primary goals with this early stage of validation:
- Find which group of people have the best response rate
- Find which channel of sourcing these folks yields the best response rate
- Of course, find a real interest in my idea
#1 and #2 are to let me find one or two specific channels that work in terms of response rate, and double down in what works.
Yesterday, I mentioned there were 5 different groups of people I might sell this to. Today, I’ve focused my efforts on the two groups I assume will have the best response: UX leadership/seniors and Product Managers.
I hit my goal of reaching out to 10 targeted prospects, and even this small number turned out to be a great exercise in finding my audience. For the first few rounds, I’ll be testing two different cold audience channels:
- Leveraging Twitter search
(you can search for tweets containing images which is super handy in my case: filter:images “error message”)
Using this, I found companies who were having a recent influx of customers pinging support with errors Bystander.io could help fix. - Blog posts about error messages
This helped in solidifying who’s thinking about these user-facing error messages the most — authors were exclusively UX folks. I followed this breadcrumb trail to see what business either the authors or interested commenters belonged to.
So for my cold outreach, I had a blog post to discuss or a real example use-case from their customers.
Here’s a pixelated view of my prospecting spreadsheet:
Press enter or click to view image in full size
There’s better ways to track this, but at this early scale a Google doc will do just fine!
Tomorrow, now that I have the beginnings of a method to prospect these two channels, I’ll push out messages to another group of folks. And I’ll message 10 people in a new channel, to begin opening up testing response rates from different sources in parallel to these two.