$1 Series
I was talking to my brother during family dinner last night. He's the CEO of proxycurl.com and is pretty much retired now. We were talking about how entrepreneurship is like. I realized I have never earned a single dollar from selling a product that I have built. It's incredibly hard to get a random stranger on the internet to give you $1.
Throughout my corporate career, I have tried to build multiple projects on the side. This is why I'm beginning this series to document down my own journey in pursuit of this elusive $1.
This is my high-level plan today for this first $1. I have been working to validate this idea to "drive traffic and build authority for businesses through reddit". I have built out a landing page (check it out here).
I believe that [marketing managers and founders wearing the marketing hat who works in USA's small/medium-size technology/software businesses] struggles to [filter the noise on Reddit to identify relevant conversations about their brand and competitors] and that a [social listening tool that automatically discovers and scores relevant Reddit discussion] will lead to the [increase in traffic, improved authority, enhanced insights and higher conversion in leads].
This was my hypothesis coming out from Iterative. Refer here if you want to see how I got to this hypothesis.
Now the next step is to sell it. Since this is a B2B product, I wanted to do this validation across a few channels that I know is most likely to work.
- Paid Ads – Google Adwords
- LinkedIn Cold Outreach
- ProductHunt & Y-Combinators Email Outreach
- IndieHacker & Hackernews Post
So far, I have launched a Google AdsWord Campaign for the first time. It was pretty jarring considering that it was my first time navigating and setting up an advertisement campaign. The tricky part was finding the right keywords to do ads on. I learnt from a fellow Iterative/Amazonian batch mate about keyword analysis and it gave me a better idea on figuring out what keywords to advertise on, but I mainly play it by ear. The plan is to run this campaign throughout the week and analyzing the results.
I'll focus on the other channels next and update again. I'm excited for the validation experiment results.