Part 5: Life of a Blockchain Entrepreneur (Lets go get customers!)
Where did the time go? It’s been over 2 years since I gave my two-week notice at Bloomberg and left to start my own company. There’ve been innumerable ups and downs, but Stardust is on the path to success. If you haven’t read any of my blog thus-far, I suggest starting at the beginning, Part 1.
After my last update in this series I was attempting to raise additional capital to continue my Stardust journey, good news, we succeeded!
Product Release!
Earlier this year we released the first version of our API to the public, I was overjoyed that our two years of hard work had paid off. We’d created an easy to use API for game developers to utilize blockchain technology. As every delusional entrepreneur will swear to you (myself included), when their product is released, customers will adopt it by the millions — nothing can be farther from the truth.
In Part 4, Step 7 (number 4) we talked briefly about acquiring LOIs (Letters of Intent) from customers to show traction to investors; I had acquired 12 by the time of product release. However, I realized someone “saying” they want to use our product and “actually” using our product are two very different things. The games that were excited after hearing about the product weren’t as excited to take the time to integrate it.
I’m not going to mince words at this point, I was scared shitless. I had worked 2 years on this product, spent my own money, taken outside investment, and it seemed that my potential customers were dropping out. I was so dejected that for a second I lost faith in our product and our ability to execute, but I am blessed to have mentors, friends, and family members who were able to encourage me to keep trying and made me hungry for success.
Fixing my customer elevator pitch
The first thing I looked at was my sales pitch, trawling back through my initial conversations with my potential customers, game developers, who had signed LOIs. I realized that my elevator pitch focused on reasons why I thought customers wanted to use my own product. This had very little to do with what they actually wanted from my product. When I opened myself to asking a potential customer that had signed an LOI why they wanted to use my product, I was able to gain a keen insight into how my product could truly help them, and others like them.
My product was the same, but how I was selling it was completely different. I was no longer pitching the intangibility of blockchain scarcity, but instead the tangible benefits that could be brought with my API. It was time to get started talking with new potential customers, and see if my any of this worked.
and something funny happened…. it did.
Sell. Sell. And Sell More
No customer is unique. There’s a very high chance that if your product solves a major problem they have, other potential customers have the exact same problem. I used this to my advantage with my elevator pitch and the results started to show.
We quickly on-boarded the first game to our API. It had an extremely large user base with over 250,000 players in the past 8 months. We were soon supporting over 2,000 players daily on our blockchain-based API, over 10 times what our nearest competitor was supporting and showcasing a great potential for growth.
Every customer brings another challenge, and there have been many. Whether its so many players and transactions that the blockchain can physically not keep up, or individual players with over 2,500 unique items in their inventory, these problems are not something we even considered when building our system. This put us up against the absolute limits of smart-contracts and other aspects of blockchain technology.
p.s. I never thought customer follow-ups worked, until I started trying to sell. If someone doesn’t respond initially, you’d be surprised after 4 messages (over the course of a few weeks) how willing they are to talk — and not just to ask you to go away.
p.p.s. Fear of rejection is real, never be afraid to reach out to a potential customer, you will hear the word no, and you can’t let that stop you.
3 tools I use to help me succeed
Organization is one of the most underutilized and underappreciated skills, but spending 15 minutes to set up the correct process will save hours of lost time, work, and most importantly customers.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is extremely important, you cannot run a business without one. Everything must be tracked, from who you are talking with, to when you spoke with them, in what format, what was the context, why did they say yes? why did they say no? What are the next steps. It’s impossible to track 5 customers you are talking to, imagine 500, get a CRM and use it like your business depends on it, because it does.
Engineering is important and customer issues must be tracked and prioritized. We switched from a informal “priority list” to an actual task based system that was able to be quickly rearranged as customers issues came up.
One of the best email clients I’ve used, as I’ve had to pile more and more work onto my plate I have been able to rely more on snippets and reminders to make sure I don’t leave anything out of my daily routine. Its nice to remember to circle back with an investor 2–3 months after our initial conversation.
Thank you for reading part 5 of my series Life of a Blockchain Entrepreneur. If you enjoyed please consider following and giving this article 👏 50 claps 👏, both mean a lot to me as I continue this journey.
Feel free to reach out with any questions, suggestions, or if you are interested in becoming an entrepreneur yourself!
Email: clinder@stardust.cards
