A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:34:25 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:34:25] S2: I love this communities thing. I'm also part of many communities that have gone nowhere, right? Where you get invited to this Slack group, and it's like, cool. And then it just, there's just no activity. There's nothing. Imagine, I'm a founder and I'm like, yeah, Dan, you know what? I want to sell through communities. I think it makes sense but tactically, how do you do it? Take HR managers. HR managers are my buyers. I want to do a community for them. What are the key ingredients and the key things you have to do to at least get the core right? And then I'm sure it gets easier and easier. [00:34:52] S0: I mean, the worst thing is that you post a message in a Slack group, nobody responds and it's a weird feeling. So early on, a mobility manager would post a message. I would basically take that message, think about, hey, which other mobility manager can actually help them answer that question? And I would forward them the message and be like, "hey, can you do me a favor and respond to this person?" And I did that for a couple months. And that's how you solve the cold start problem. And now we have wonderful people who do this, who are moderators and who are community influencers. Who enable and basically keep the motion going. So people get value out of this community all the time. But as a founder, in the beginning, you have to do it yourself.
00:34:52 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:34:52] S0: I mean, the worst thing is that you post a message in a Slack group, nobody responds and it's a weird feeling. So early on, a mobility manager would post a message. I would basically take that message, think about, hey, which other mobility manager can actually help them answer that question? And I would forward them the message and be like, "hey, can you do me a favor and respond to this person?" And I did that for a couple months. And that's how you solve the cold start problem. And now we have wonderful people who do this, who are moderators and who are community influencers. Who enable and basically keep the motion going. So people get value out of this community all the time. But as a founder, in the beginning, you have to do it yourself. [00:35:29] S2: How do you get people? Because that's the other thing that matters is, who you get into that community matters. There's different, especially on the HR manager’s side, that’s the thing about community. It’s like, who else is in there? And then that drives a lot of the value of the content. [00:35:42] S0: Look, I mean, every market is different. In our market, we just went to conferences and we were like, hey, this is what we want to do. Do you want to be a founding member? Help us build this thing together. Help us figure it out. Do you see value in this? And maybe it's not even for every industry. I don't know, maybe if you sell car parts and you're selling into car dealerships. Maybe for car dealers that work at car dealerships, it's not valuable. Maybe that's already solved.
00:35:42 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:35:42] S0: Look, I mean, every market is different. In our market, we just went to conferences and we were like, hey, this is what we want to do. Do you want to be a founding member? Help us build this thing together. Help us figure it out. Do you see value in this? And maybe it's not even for every industry. I don't know, maybe if you sell car parts and you're selling into car dealerships. Maybe for car dealers that work at car dealerships, it's not valuable. Maybe that's already solved. [00:36:06] S2: But for you guys, how did you do? Is that how you do? You went to a conference, you found the right people and just kind of pulled them into your community?
00:36:06 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:36:06] S2: But for you guys, how did you do? Is that how you do? You went to a conference, you found the right people and just kind of pulled them into your community? [00:36:11] S0: We went to one conference, we met a hundred people, we spoke. We became friends with twenty, and we were like, this is the vision. This is what we want to do. Is this valuable or not? Would you use this if we build this? Would you be a part of this community if we build this? And they were like, some said yes, some said no and then that became the founding member circle. There's been eight or nine of them and then it grew and grew and grew and grew. Because they invited their friends, they told their friends, nobody paid them to tell their friends, they just got a lot of value out of it. It's weird, getting clients is so much harder than building technology. The easier it is to build technology, the harder it is to get clients and I really encourage everyone to think about user psychology as the first step. If you're not connected with your user fully, then no amount of tools are going to help you and it's not that dissimilar from managing a group chat with your friends. If you're planning a bachelor's party and you have forty people in a group chat. How do you get the group chat going? Maybe you are awkwardly posting yourself for the first ten posts and maybe you post jokes that people don't find funny and you're like brutally embarrassed about it. But ten jokes in it starts going, there is a call, you've solved the cold start problem. You were not afraid to be awkward.
00:37:22 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:37:22] S2: The other thing that we want to talk about, because the other thing that you did. I think on the go to market side, that's worth going deep on is the PR side and working with influencers. I mean, you mentioned you work with fifty influencers, and then you find that getting PR. Earned media, is something that's a little bit underrated. I know a few founders that care about it, but I will say of a hundred founders, probably ninety five don't even consider that as a way to really get traction. What have you done on that side? What's worked? [00:37:48] S0: I would say my psychology, generally in capital allocation when it comes to go to market. Is that every dollar that I invest in go to market, I want it to increase defensibility of the business. Let me give you an example. The best dollar is investing in the channel that will never churn. That doesn't exist, but I mentioned that that would exist. Let’s say, two years ago, there was SEO. If you could invest in SEO, and then you stopped investing in SEO. Then you basically, the SEO kept going whether or not you're putting dollars into it or not and that was wonderful. Because, you were investing dollars upfront, and then it had zero cost of goods sold. [00:38:22] S2: Well, this is like, you're building an asset instead of an expense. Makes total sense.
00:38:22 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:38:22] S2: Well, this is like, you're building an asset instead of an expense. Makes total sense. [00:38:25] S0: Exactly, and the worst dollar is obviously paid marketing. Paid social is the worst on that spectrum. So to me, I always try to invest in assets, and earned media is an incredible asset. It's highly scalable, it compounds, it doesn't have the added cost associated with it, and you can be so creative in getting it. Small media, you know, ManifestOS Law Attorneys publish a monthly report that gets cited by hundreds of media outlets every month. Because that report has a unique point of view. That unique point of view is the differentiator. So if you're building a company that does, I don't know, AI for pest control, and you have a unique point of view of how AI helps with pest control. And that unique point of view, you actually immerse yourself in the head of your buyer. You go hyper deep, and you actually connect with them. And you know that this is what matters, this is going to be interesting to them, you can get any amount of media for free. [00:39:18] S2: That’s what you have now, and I’m sure you have content writers and all this stuff. At the beginning where you were kind of an unknown entity, what do you do at the beginning to get the first few articles of PR and get this? Because it’s easy to well, you can have a point of view. I’m not saying that’s easy but then you write something up, you put it up, nobody reads it. How do you actually get that thing distributed?