During a recent office hours a student asked me how I got early adopters for my startup BizeeBee.  I started by telling them about what I did for the first 6 months of BizeeBee, back in 2010.

Conversations Create Converts

I had been doing yoga with a number of studio owners for many years, volunteered behind the front-desk, but I didn’t know how to run a studio.  Then one day I was telling Linda, a fellow yoga practitioner and studio owner, about an idea I had to help studio owners.  I told her it was just an idea.  We got to talking and then basically once a month we would meet at a coffee shop in Los Gatos.   At the time I didn’t even know that Linda would be an early adopter.  I just wanted to meet with Linda, to learn about her yoga business.  I ended up helping Linda through some business challenges she was facing by suggesting ways she could incorporate technology to solve them.  Linda was nervous about using technology, which only made her a more interesting person to interact with.

After the first 6 months, I not only understood Linda’s challenges, but I was starting to think like Linda.  Using my close network, I met with other yoga studio owners like Linda.  I took all of their challenges and started to create paper prototypes, which I then showed them and got feedback.

When we were getting ready to launch BizeeBee in December 2010 I went back to my network, and all those who had given me feedback and asked for them to start using the product.  But I didn’t just ask them to use the product, I also asked them to pay.

Valuing Your Product

After spending months listening to people’s problems with managing their studios and working with current tech products, I just assumed that everyone I had talked to would be an early adopter for BizeeBee.  Wrong.  While many people were excited about what I was building there were few who were willing to move away from their existing way of doing things, and even fewer who were willing to pay for our product.  I didn’t just take no for an answer.  I pushed back and asked them why? Why wouldn’t they switch? Why wouldn’t they pay?  And that’s when I started to learn even more!  I learned all the objection points:

• You don’t have XYZ feature.
• You’re a startup, we’re more comfortable with the incumbent even though we think their product is crap.
• We’re too big for your simple solution.
• We’re too small for your software system.
• We want something for free.

Great!  I started to compile all this feedback and conveyed it to my team, because after all I wanted them to understand what was going through the minds of our potential customers.  Plus I figured they’d come up with more and better solutions than me. Then I made it a point to follow up with everyone who signed up but didn’t convert to a paying customer.  This is a practice I still follow.  Why?  Because I’m a masochist who loves getting rejected, but only when I get answers to the following questions:

• How do leads heard about us?
• Why do leads reject us? (Something which can only be inferred by analytics tools.)
• What are leads actually looking for?

Going through this process made it even easier to identify who a potential early adopter was, and moving forward where we should focus our efforts to attract them.

Street Smarts

I made two decisions back in 2011 that most people would think were pretty dumb.  The first was I pounded pavement.  For a $27/month product?!  Yeah I know dumb given the price point, and probably not very “lean”.  Well I’m a big fat idiot.  After launching the product,  I spent 6 months visiting almost every studio I could in SF, NYC, and LA.  Sure there were yoga studios where I got the door slammed on my face, but there were also some who were pretty excited at a founder who was willing to travel a long distance to meet with them. (Hey guess what those people have been customers of BizeeBee now for 2 years.  How’s that for an LTV?!)

I actually didn’t care about making a single sale.  I already knew their push back, because I got it from those who didn’t even want to be early adopters.  I pounded pavement and showed people my face to build awareness.  I wanted the community of yoga studio owners to know who I was because I was competing with a 10 year old competitor who had become pretty well known over those 10 years.  I wanted them to know first hand that there was a new alternative.  Hence my challenge wasn’t to just build a better product, I also had to make sure people knew that I was building a better product.

Then my team replicated this awareness building strategy aka marketing through the following channels:

• Cold calls
• Postcards
• Social Media
• Content Marketing
• Referrals from Influencers
• Partnerships

Yeah its a lot.  You thinking building is hard, try selling.

Scaling Sales

I hired a sales guy, actually I tried out a couple.   I thought that they would be the answer to all my sales problems. Wrong. I ended up spending more time answering push back they received from potential customers, that’s when I learned who the real closer was. Me.  As a founder you are the most effective closer on the team.

I fired all sales guys, and instead came up with sales scripts.  I gave the scripts to my teammates to do calls.  But once again I didn’t count cold calls as actual sales, I just thought of them as awareness building.

So where is BizeeBee now?  Doing all of this has lead to a nice sustainable business with a self-service product.  This is pretty great given that I actually just ran a bunch of sales experiments on the side while focusing mostly on building the product, but I’ve got my sights set higher for 2013!

To stay scrappy and scale sales I know what the next set of challenges are:

• Shortening decision making time
• Making the product market itself
• Even clearer value proposition
• Discovering more effective distribution channels

And that’s enough to keep me bizee and buzzing in 2013!

Did you enjoy this post? Do you want more step-by-step guidance for attracting and selling to early adopters? Then check out our Lean Product Development Course Learn more!