Takeaways & Learnings From The Founder of Contactually on Mixergy

Resources/Tools mentioned in full episode:

Contactually: Fast growing CRM tool that helps maximize your network ROI, get more referrals & gain more repeat business

Lean Startup: Book by Cindy Alvarez on how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research — before wasting months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants.

Crossing the Chasm: Book by Geoffrey Moore on marketing and selling high-tech products to mainstream customers

Building meaningful relationships by providing value

I would try and figure out, “What can I do to help them?” So, I’d answer questions, review software code for them for free, make introductions, do research — whatever I could to help them. That ended up being a key tenet of building really great relationships.

One way Zvi did this was by re-framing the way he saw and felt about networking. He would go to entrepreneurial events and instead of having the irrational fear that people wouldn’t want to talk or connect with him for some reason, he instead treated each person he met as if they were already friends. By building these deep, lasting, and authentic relationships, they ultimately led to Zvi tons of repeat and referral business when he was a freelancer.

Why reaching out for the sake of not being forgotten isn’t all that bad

“Emails such as, “How are you doing?” or “Just thinking of you,” while seemingly annoying, actually kind of work. It’s a baseline thing to do, but at least for a split second it shows you care and you’re thinking of them. However, there are better ways to engage.”

Although those types of emails may work, they are definitely not the best way to engage, and it’s better to go beyond surface level engagement and provide meaningful or relevant value. Whether that be making an introduction, meeting for coffee or even just showing some kind of personal interaction.

Common mistake people make when trying to find customers pain points

“We focus on people with a core business pain rather than that personal pain. 85% of a real-estate agents business comes from their existing network. So, that’s no longer just a minor annoyance. That’s honestly how they put food on the table.”

Often when an entrepreneur is trying to find customers pain points they make the mistake of thinking that an annoyance or anything that a customer seemingly wants is a pain point. A pain point is something much more — it’s a burning pain that they need solved not just a want or personal pain.

Why you shouldn’t be worried about turning off or losing customers with an MVP

“Hiten Shah used the phrase plenty of fish in the sea, meaning yeah, you might piss off these customers and they may never trust you again because you have a lot of bugs, but there are other people who will and what you learn from this group of people you’ll be able to apply to the next group of people.”

Simply by explaining that this is a beta startup would be enough for early customers to overlook the bugs and the other miscellaneous problems. “However, at some point you have to get it right.” The mistake Zvi says he made was being in the beta stage for too long just for the sake of testing, and ultimately it hurt their business in the long term.

The simple way they got their first customers from Quora

“We would go and find anyone talking about relationships, networking or CRM on Quora. We would direct message them and say, ‘We’re a startup. Can we talk to you about your idea?’ We ended up getting a lot of our initial customers from that.”

What they weren’t doing was just posting or answering questions about Contactually. What they actually did was use Quora to find people who were posting about topics that were related to the pain they were solving and direct messaging them. Such as: people talking about professional relationships, networking, etc.