My first customer, my first disaster
I had finally finished to code the MVP of Alfred. Everything seemed perfect, the flow was simple and intuitive, the colours attractive and the whole system finally in place and live.
The beta tester
I decided to let one my friend try out and ask me something as if he were a customer; it turned pretty fast into a disaster.
I want you to find a flight around those dates for me and my girlfriend, be it as cheap as possible
That’s the kind of requests I was expecting, no problem. So I started to search and answer it as good as I could, I replied and billed him 15 minutes of research, which I found decent.
Well it wasn’t. He was not satisfied and was all like “meh” in front of me. I asked him what I should do to make it worth his while, and that’s when he replied something like
I don’t really know, I could do it myself
I was so focused on the vision that I forgot to check the 2 most important things:
- Am I a good virtual assistant?
- Will people pay for such service?
For me, it was obvious that people would pay to delegate someone to do small tasks, and they would pay on the time worked on a task, but I was severely underestimating my capacity of giving out great service, and also overestimating what people are willing to pay.
Is the pricing model all wrong?
People may not want to pay for this, and the only reason I had the idea to make it is because Revolut had it originally included in their app. I wouldn’t download an app for that. I wouldn’t delegate this kind of things. In short, I would be a terrible customer, and my friend too.
I realised that I was mixing up the concept of great specialised service, which people usually pay on a time base without thinking twice (like translators, lawyers) and literal assistant, which only wealthy people want to pay for. What is my target?
So I panicked and tried to think of changing what didn’t seem to work: the pricing model.
Maybe I should make a subscription and people would use out tickets (between 5 and 10 per month) without the “time” stressing them out. Well, that’s obviously a better model for the customer, because it might attract more people, but is it sustainable and scalable for me? I don’t fucking know, I’ve to try.
I started to review my tables, and some of the design and figured I could make this within a week; not bad for such a change.
Figure what’s before the pricing.
That’s when I got a call from another friend, which I believe is way more advanced in term of business and marketing than me. We talked about Alfred, I told him about my issue, and he stopped me straight with the best advice I could ever hope for:
The pricing model doesn’t matter. You need to check if there’s any demand. Asking your cheap-ass engineer friend won’t answer that, launch a campaign and see what people ask you.
He wasn’t wrong. The demand comes way before all that. We figured that if there’s a 1% conversion rate, then there’s something to work on even if I give a crap service, but if there’s 0% it’s definitely a dead-end whatever I do on the payment side. If people don’t even click to check prices, why would I bother?
After some research together we also realised a B2B pivot would make way more money, looking at the somewhat competitors. That wasn’t impossible, but it was just not my current vision of this project. Also, I already gave too much; I was getting into the sunk cost fallacy.
I didn’t try all that for nothing, so let’s figure it out.
My problem was now that by launching a campaign into the void, I was about to face real customers. I was afraid to suck at doing this.
Then again — even if I failed — I could give away free time to them, try to improve and work on the process, most customers aren’t utter assholes. At least there would be people asking stuff, which’s all that matters at first.
I shouldn’t ask people around me, I should let the demand show itself, and adapt in consequences. Simply speaking, I must let my customers come to me by themselves, then I’ll know what to do for the pricing.
I stopped to think of changing the payment, and decided to put 100–150€ on the table for a first row and see if there would be any registration.
