21 Aug 20: WORMING THE PRODUCT MARKET FIT AND SCALING THE TURTLE
Nothing like a looming deadline to see things clearly. In this case the deadline was a Sprint as organized by StartupSchool. On a whim I set my goal as 150 registered users and 2 paid users for my startup. A stretch. Then I spent a restless night, thinking and pondering.
To give some context, ToonClip already has some traction with about 100 registered users. However, I had never paid attention to getting paid users.
Tossing and turning. Spinnning and grinding. It slowly dawned on me that I was dealing with two different types of problems.
The first one was a scaling problem. I know the product, the audience that responds to it, the channels. Its a question of speeding up the process. It’s a turtle that is on its way, albeit slowly. Turn parts of the turtle into a hare, remove some road blocks and proceed. Scale the turtle.
The second problem of getting more paid users is like a product market fit problem in that I do not know the solution or the path to the solution. Its like a worm that does not know where the diamond is and can only feel about it blindly.
How would one find a solution in such a case? Once I framed the question this way, it was easy – one explores multiple avenues with a large enough sample size so as to be statistically valid. Once, the results are in and some show promise, explore those further. This also sits squarely with the build and iterate philosophy.
The platform lets users create and share animations in minutes. It is no code, uses simple English sentences and is accessible to the everyday user. I have identified the following segments to get paid users from:
- Consumers – everyday users that like to create memes and post on social media. This will be a Fremium model and requires a large number of users, only a minority of whom will pay.
- Freelancers – These are freelancers that develop animations for their clients. Our platform makes the process quick and could be attractive to them.
- SMEs – Add customized animations in their newsletters. Each receiver receives a customized animation.
- Bloggers – They can break up their walls of text with simple animations.
- Educators – Language learners and teenagers in general. The younger ones tend to be more creative and into such visual media.
- Comics – On the one hand we have comic strips and on the other full blown animations. Why not animated comics? Imagine Dilbert not as a comic strip but as a toon clip.
I think 100 contacts for each segment should give me statistically significant results, to base the next step on. Now its only a question of finding the appropriate channel for each set and executing.
Let me proceed with worming the Product Market fit and scaling the turtle
13 Aug 20: Me and my BIG mouth
Startupschool announced a Build Sprint. They are launching their first-ever YC Build Sprint for the Startup School community. This is a 4-week intensive period for founders to focus on their company and build towards a specific goal. They’ll provide a peer group and goal tracking. They are also bringing back the very-popular Startup School Grant. They’ll be funding 20 $10k equity-free grants.
Wow. That was wonderful. Within a few minutes of reading the news, I was registered.
Then PANIC!!
What did I just do? I had set my goals as getting the number of registered users to 150 and getting 2 paid customers.
You laugh!
But for me that is quite a stretch. Currently, we have about 90 registered users and 0 paid customers. In fact, I had started thinking of paid customers only a few weeks ago. Payment is not integrated. The software is quite stable and user friendly but I had never focussed on getting paying customers.
Below are the charts for the unique users and registered users. The spike on Week 15 is our release on Product Hunt.
Evaluation:
Ok. How reachable is this? The number of registered users is kind of possible if I can launch it on a couple of platforms. The paid users is going to be much more difficult. The sprint ends on September 20th. So I have a little more than a month to achieve this.
Plan:
1) To get registered users:
Launch on HackerNews
I have not yet launched here. Hackernews is finicky. It may take off or it may be a dud. Hackernews also presents me with one big technical problem. The platform has the ability to export GIFs. This is very CPU intensive. So, if two users happen to export at the same time, the system slows down, less frames are recorded per second and the produced animations appear very speeded up.
This can be solved by doing the GIF generation on the client side. During my experiments I have already done that, so its only a question of getting it back to that state. I have forgotten the details, so will have to dig a little.
Complete the Chinese version.
I have numerous Chinese connections and many of them are artists, so it would appeal to them. The Chinese version is half done. I have to complete it
Post on Twitter. Unfortunately I have not found it to be effective.
Post on Reddit. Not effective.
Post on 4chan.org. Not effective.
However, each channel brings a little traffic and the combination is sorta okay.
2) To get paid users:
I have gotten some interest from companies that send out newsletters. They can send customized animations using our platform. So each user gets a slightly different version for eg. with their name mentioned in their animation. There is already a market for such customized videos, so my hope is to piggyback on to it. I have sent some cold emails to wineries and micro breweries with not much results. Will have to continue or tweak my approach some more.
Goals for the next 7 days.
Ok. So, that is the situation. Here is the plan of attack I have come up with:1) Move the GIF generation to the browser side
2) Explore the cold emails more.
3) Continue posting on twitter, reddit, 4chan
Any other suggestions?
Current working notes
Time available: 5 weeks.
Registered users 90 to 150.
Channels: HN, Independent (these are users who share animations, other users look at it and come to ToonClip. They have the highest conversion rates. But how to make this happen?) Put posters near the library and neighborhood. CraigsList, beijinger.
Paid users 0 to 2. In this case I need more exploration first. Try many small things and see reaction, then proceed on the good ones. People to contact freelancers, startups, newsletters, kids education.
Send mail (actual physical letters) to microbreweries because it may stand out.
People creating bite sized lessons, comics who may want to go the animated route, blog writers.