Entrepreneur-ing In Public: Journey Log #14
Is it cold in here, or is it just my email campaigns?
I teach entrepreneurship at Duke and I’m publicly growing a company — Autopest — from $0 to $100k/year in revenue in order to help entrepreneurs better understanding the process of building startups. Learn more about my journey here.
I’ve written it before, and I’m sure I’ll write it again (and again, and again), but I’ll write it now because it’s the most important principle in entrepreneurship: you can have the greatest product in the world, but, if nobody knows about it, nobody is going to buy it.
Right now, Autopest is a good example of that principle in-action.
I realize, of course, that Autopest isn’t the greatest product in the world. But it is wonderfully effective for the people actively using it. I know because they keep writing to tell me how much they love it.
The reason I haven’t hit my $100k ARR goal isn’t because Autopest is a bad product. It’s because not enough people know the product exists. This is, of course, why building startups is so hard. The product creation part is (relatively) easy. The hard part is marketing.
I’ve written about my initial marketing work for Autopest in previous issues. Specifically, I shared my efforts to launch an inbound marketing strategy on TikTok. Those efforts are continuing to movr forward in earnest. As of this writing, I’m up to 18 videos, 60 followers, and ~5,700 views, which isn’t terrible for one month of creating TikToks promoting a B2B, SaaS product. If I can get one post to to go semi-viral, I suspect good things will happen.
While my inbound marketing efforts are ongoing, I’ve finally taken some bigs steps toward an outbound marketing strategy, which is what I’ll expand on below. As you’re about to see, I’ve setup my first outbound cold emailing campaign, and, by the time you read this sentence, it will have officially launched.
-Aaron
Getting predictable
Before discussing my cold emailing strategy, I should mention that if you’ve never read a book called Predictable Revenue, you need to go read it now.
Predictable Revenue is written by the marketing guru who got Salesforce off the ground using an outbound cold emailing strategy. In the book, he shares the process for how he did it.
The book isn’t a masterpiece in terms of writing quality or even information. At this point, it’s also a little old. But it’s valuable because it effectively demonstrates the fundamental driver of success for customer acquisition. Simply put, if you want to build a successful startup, you need to have a predictable, repeatable, scalable way to get customers.
The specific way doesn’t matter. Sure, the book uses outbound cold-emailing, but you could use cold calling, door-to-door sales, Facebook ads, TV commercials, or maybe you’re just setting up tables next to playgrounds.
An example of this might be how I’m using TikTok. Maybe I’ll discover that every 10,000 views I get on TikTok gets me one customer. Or maybe it’s every 100,000. Maybe it’s every 1 million views. Whatever the case, once I know the cost of getting a customer via TikTok, I can do two things: 1) optimize; and 2) scale.
If my predictable customer acquisition process can be optimized and scaled to the point that it costs me less to get a customer than the lifetime value of that customer, I’ve got myself a successful business model. If it can’t, I’ve got myself an expensive hobby.
Understand?
Outbound emailing campaigns
While Predictable Revenue doesn’t force anyone to use an outbound cold emailing strategy, reading the book will convince you it’s probably a good option.
Cold emailing campaigns can be a great customer acquisition strategy because they’re easy to track and easy to scale. Sure, the process is time-consuming, but it’s relatively simple to execute. Here are the basic steps:
Get a big list of potential customers to email
Write a series of 5-ish emails (a “sequence”) trying to sell your product
Upload the above two things into a cold emailing platform and press “start”
As the emails get sent, review the results and keep tweaking your campaign until you have the best numbers possible
Once you’re running an email campaign, your customer acquisition funnel starts becoming obvious. You’ll begin to understand that for every X number of emails you send, you’ll get Y people opening them, and Z responses that ultimately convert into some amount of customers. From there, the math becomes simple. Send more emails, get more customers.
That’s the theory, anyway. The process, itself, is a pain. To explain, I’ll share a little about what I’ve built.
Autopest’s outbound emailing strategy
First things first, you can’t just start sending thousands of cold prospecting emails from your company’s email account. That could get your domain blacklisted and prevent all of your company’s emails from being delivered.
Instead, you have to buy a secondary email account. For me, that means I’m sending emails from autopest.net instead of autopest.com.
However, you also can’t just start sending thousands of cold prospecting emails from a new domain and email account without them going to SPAM. Instead, you have to slowly “warm up” your new domain, which takes at least a month.
For the record, that’s why I haven’t launched a cold emailing campaign yet. I’ve been warming up my new autopest.net email accounts so my cold prospecting emails don’t go to SPAM. (Let me know if you want a tutorial on how to warm up email accounts.)
The second thing you have to do (which sounds easier than it is) is build an email list. The reason this step is difficult is because cold emailing campaigns get tiny conversion rates. If half a percent of the people you email to take any sort of positive action, you’re doing great.
Half a percent isn’t much, which means, for a cold emailing campaign to work, you have to email thousands of people. Getting thousands of high quality email addresses isn’t necessarily quick or cheap.
Lucky for me, I spent lots of time with previous clients helping collect email addresses, so I know exactly where and how to do it, so I was able to lean on those skills to build an initial list of ~20,000. Note that even with my skills I needed a month to build my list. If you’ve never done it before, it’s going to take you longer.
After I built my prospect list, I wrote my first email sequence. Then I found an email campaign software that has a decent free tier (before I start paying, I want to make sure the strategy can work!) and loaded everything up. The emails are set to start churning out around the same time this issue releases.
I’m beginning my work with batches of 100 emails for the next two weeks (10 business days — 1,000 prospects). It’s not a large number because it’s important to walk before I run. After all, I don’t want to burn my entire list of 20,000 prospects by sending bad emails.
I’ll let the campaigns run for a couple weeks, and then I’ll report back on the results. Wish me luck!