What I Learned from a Lean Startup Experiment

My name is Hua Wang, and the individuals who helped me run this experiment is Russell Eggleton, Francisco Ramirez, Paul Peou, Chris Mecoli, Jeremy Force, Jenny Force, and Sneha Iyer.

I am part of an experimental incubator that gives startups and entrepreneurs funding in exchange for testing and sharing lean startup hypotheses)

I THOUGHT that 100 leads will lead to one sale or partnership — ACTUALLY we are in the process of finalizing 4 partnerships with 40 leads. In total, we reached out to 40 individuals who match the segment targeted in this experiment.

We thought we will have high response rates from alumni of our university. We reached out to 10 alums and received one response on LinkedIn.

We learned that a sales CRM can help organize our sales efforts. After trying Streak, HubSpot and Pipedrive, we decided to use Pipedrive because of its features and ease of use. We then talked to sales experts and read about how to sell. We learned that the first stage is the volume of leads. The main reason we are having trouble gaining traction is simply because we don’t have enough leads in the pipeline.

To generate more leads, we signed up for LinkedIn Premium, hired an associate intern to focus on getting us 100 leads a week, and created one-pagers.

We are now negotiating for complimentary marketing strategy, will be featured in our alumni newsletter, working with a cancer influencer as a potential brand ambassador, and will be announcing a large partnership soon.

In addition to focusing on getting 100+ leads a week, we are focusing on marketing. We are learning SEO, created a month of social media content across four platforms, and are running Facebook ads. We are looking into Google ads and explainer videos.