FiP9 - ✉️ 8.3% Cold Email CVR, ✍️YC Application and 🎯 Bullets before Cannonballs
FiP9 - ✉️ 8.3% Cold Email CVR, ✍️YC Application and 🎯 Bullets before Cannonballs
Firing bullets before Cannonballs
Picture yourself at sea, a hostile ship bearing down on you. You have a limited amount of gunpowder. You take all your gunpowder and use it to fire a big cannonball. The cannonball flies out over the ocean…and misses the target, off by 40 degrees. You turn to your stockpile and discover that you’re out of gunpowder. You die. But suppose instead that when you see the ship bearing down, you take a little bit of gunpowder and fire a bullet. It misses by 40 degrees. You make another bullet and fire. It misses by 30 degrees. You make a third bullet and fire, missing by only 10 degrees. The next bullet hits—ping!—the hull of the oncoming ship. Now, you take all the remaining gunpowder and fire a big cannonball along the same line of sight, which sinks the enemy ship. You live
- Excerpt from the book Great by Choice by Jim Collins
First, you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments) to figure out what will work—calibrating your line of sight by taking small shots. Then, once you have empirical validation, you fire a cannonball (concentrating resources into a big bet) on the calibrated line of sight. Calibrated cannonballs correlate with outsized results; uncalibrated cannonballs correlate with disaster. The ability to turn small proven ideas (bullets) into massive hits (cannonballs) counts more than the sheer amount of pure innovation.
We are still in the phase of firing bullets, but we know what ship we are aiming at.
Things that went well
I.
8.3% conversion rate for cold emails
We received early validation that people wanted a media kit, but we didn’t know what our Go to Market (GTM) would look like
After some trial and error, we hit success by using a very personalized approach to reaching creators (See below)
After cold outreach to 100+ creators, we had a conversion rate of 8.3% with our target audience.
Takeaway lesson: Show, don’t tell; we found that showing people what we were talking about dramatically increased the likelihood of a positive response.
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II.
Firing more bullets before firing the cannonball
We have a strong signal about media kits, but for a product that
Creators are not willing to pay for
Helps them with the brand deal process but doesn’t directly lead to more deals in their inbox
Other points we considered
Building a self-serve media kit right now looks to be of high effort, medium value, and no guaranteed return for the creator.
Our mission is to increase the net worth of creators
We believe media kits help creators pitch themselves to get deals, but we are building something where the time to value is still low, but the value itself is higher.
It’s not that we won’t return to media kits, but we are pausing on it.
Takeaway lesson: You only have so much gunpowder, use it wisely.
III.
YC Application Complete
Drop me a message if you want to see how we answered these questions.
Takeaway lesson: The YC application is worth doing regardless of where you are at. It forces you to answer questions you will eventually have to answer about the business you are building.
Things that didn’t go to plan
I.
Changing servers at the same time we got approved by BetaList
Takeaway lesson: Shit happens; be ready to roll with the punches.
Secondary takeaway lesson: Keep the homepage generic and focused on the vision in the early days. Use subpages with highly personalized versions of the products you are validating via direct outreach.
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II.
100% open rate with 0 responses
Background context of why we are emailing marketers in the B2B space
B2C creators/influencers is a crowded space
Monetizing B2B creators is still in a nascent stage
We wanted to understand in more detail how B2B Marketers are currently thinking about their marketing efforts and how much budget would they allocate to paying creators for partnerships
Campaign learnings
Personalized subject line works
We must find a way to demonstrate value similar to what we did with the media kit campaign.
Twitter DMs led to a 3% CVR with the same messaging
Takeaway lesson: Personalization matters for cold outreach and likely needs to demonstrate some form of actual value.
A Question For You
What type of messaging do you think could help convert more people to complete a user interview?
Newsletter Feedback
Misc
This section essentially abuses the structure I tried to commit to above.
Current outreach stack
Woodpecker - What I’m currently using for cold email outreach
Firstx.ai - What I’m using for Twitter outreach
Links to click on
Personal things I’m considering working on
Immersive fictional podcast - I’m considering creating a fictional podcast. I’m not sure what the storyline is yet, but to make it more immersive, I want to deliver it through voice notes over a messaging service. The general idea is that you are a group chat member and get to see the story unwind in real time. I don’t think this is something I can do on my own, so if you are down for collaborating hit me up.