Due diligence, slight target pivot, and the build continues.
Not sure what this is, start here with our README, or catch up on our last post, VRBTM We’ve Gone Too Far| Week XIV.
A month since the last weekly log, but still a month of work.
Decidedly with the holidays I took a lighter week and then got caught up in moving things forward afterward that I missed these logs. I knew sooner or later weekly would become unsustainable, and the cadence would change. Bi-weekly may prove to be a more thoughtful consideration at this stage.
Here’s what went down.
December 24–31, 2016
Week between the holidays.
Had two meeting with a couple people who expressed interest in a possible investment for VRBTM. They asked all the questions I expected, and a few more that I figured would come into play later on. Nonetheless, due diligence is required and I was able to go back to a lot of what I put together already and update it to current standing.
Sent info through and the conversation continues — likely sometime in February.
January 1–7, 2017
First week of the year.
Get back into the standard routine. Set up the outlook for months 1/3/6 of the year.
Continue to build out the due diligence.
January 8–14, 2017
Second week of the year.
Came across The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch — By Yourself by Clifford Oravec and it’s exactly what I needed. A true actionable game plan for getting to know your market and establishing a relationship with them.
Create a TypeForm with a handful of qualitative and quantitative questions and send it out to friends in the industry to further support my hypothesis. Answers come back as expected, and happily surprised by the uniformity. Another reason to know there’s a need for this, if people in different yet similar industries (creative but producing different things) all use the same tedious workflow, but don’t have a solution for it.
Also met with another founder friend of mine who is looking to start his Series A round to get a perspective on what I could be getting in to by taking on an Angel investment.
January 15–21, 2017
Third week of the year.
I submitted VRBTM to BetaPage, not to be confused with BetaList. I figured we could give it a shot and see if our message was resonating. BetaPage had reached out to us and told us they get 30k pageviews a day, however we ended up on their Trending page for about 18 hours, and received only one new sign up. Along with that, other than my ‘favorite’, the listing received just ten other ‘favorites, but they were all from private pages so who knows if those are even real people. My feeling is that the numbers we were told were inflated.
Aside from that, thinking on the answers we received from the survey I sent out and comparing that to the initial product offering we’re going to complete. I think it’ll be smart to focus our target market even more. Rather than focus on small agencies and creative shops, it’ll be easier to connect directly with photographers, videographers, retouchers, and editors. Mainly in the freelance world. The reasoning for this is that the sales cycle is less involved. My guess is that I can convert this subset with proper relationship building over email, rather than a longer in-person cycle of selling to companies with established protocol. We’ll eventually get there, but it may not be the place to start.
Up Next
Setting up a CRM, Salesflare looks great, but I’m not going to pay $30/mo just yet, so HubSpots free CRM is working out great so far. Plan is to leverage those that I follow and the discovery page on Instagram to find these photographers, videographers, retouchers, and editors and reach out to them and ask about their workflow. Basically I’m going to do exactly what Clifford says in his guide and go from there.
Also, Nick helped me get my development environment set up correctly on my computer. It was an easy solve, which is good, so now I can assist on some of the dev work. Mainly styling, while he can finish out the heavier parts of the build I’m not qualified for.
Due diligence also continues. Nearly complete, and if anything else it’s further my knowledge of the space even more. Which only helps.
Definitely coming together, and each time I realize we can take something else out it always feels better. I can ultimately believe it, but it’s wild how much this has been overbaked for the simple thing we’re doing. In the end though it just means we’re smarter for the next time.
We’d love to hear from you…
Get in touch at Founders@vrbtm.co, talk with us on twitter @vrbtm.co, and read our story on medium.
Wes Jones is on Twitter @WesJonesCo
Nick Dandakis is on Twitter @Dandakis
