I’m super pumped! 🔥🚀 

I guess this is because I worked a lot on building this week and my inner-engineer enjoyed every bit of it. 🤣 But I know, that’s not what would make HYH successful. 😅 

I also spoke and scheduled calls with a few people in my network mostly founders and sales/marketing/GTM people to also get a better knowledge of the space.

The MVP and dogfooding

Yeah you read it right! I have an MVP. ✨ 

In the last two weeks, I talked a lot about this shift in focus and how I now I’m aiming to build the go-to platform for product distribution and launches, combining lead generation, content marketing, and social media content repurposing.

But it’s a HUGE space and there are tons of tools doing very specific things: social media monitoring, job changes signal listening, customized messaging for different channels, etc.

So, what am I doing now?

I think I can bring a different perspective on how some of these problems can be solved. The idea of building some sort of all-in-one platform stands from how I see things are heading in the future as I mentioned already last week.

However, I need to start somewhere. I decided to start by leveraging Reddit to find posts to engage with, in order to increase the visibility for a given product. I’m aware of a couple of players already in this space that seem to have some traction:

• ReplyGuy

• KeyMentions

However, I’m confident that I can provide a better execution alongside providing the fact that it would be part of a bigger vision of a product. Reddit seems to be an undervalued/underexplored path for product marketing and lead gen that is worth investing in.

Remember NextCommit? Last week I noticed that the “base traffic” increased and that was all due to a single Reddit comment made by someone. Nowadays it’s my main source of traffic.

After a week of work, I now have a working MVP where I can create a project, scan Reddit, analyze the submissions, filter the ones with the biggest potential, and generate a reply to engage.

I’ll record a proper demo at some point, but here’s a screenshot to showcase its capabilities.

As you might have guessed, I’m dogfooding NextCommit so I’ll be able to see the impact. Today I picked 10 opportunities, generated the corresponding replies, and copy-pasted them on Reddit. Hopefully, in 1 or 2 weeks we should see some results, or my account being banned. 😅 

I’m planning to also try a giveaway on X and ask people to provide the landing page, and the name of the product, and in return, I will provide 1 Reddit post with the corresponding analysis and reply. That should help start promoting HYH.

So far, this limited-scoped MVP seems to be doing its job. The only case where this might not work very well is when the keywords associated with a product have low volume (e.g. very specific / too niche, or just now many talking about that stuff).

Talking to people

This week I talked with two people in my network, a founder, and another one in a GTM role. Unfortunately reaching out to people outside of my network on LinkedIn for having a discovery call had a 0% response rate. 😅 

I learned a lot more about the space and different challenges. There was nothing specific to what I’m currently doing with HYH, but since I’m not very educated yet about this space, knowing about other existing tools out there and understanding what they bring to the table is super valuable.

I had a few confirmations and learnings:

• researching the space, the problem, the customer needs, and where they hang out is critical: the founder I talked with shared that they spend many months “just” understanding the space, interviewing people, paid ads, etc.

• a frustrated user, because he/she is not able to use yet your product, is the best signal you can have,

• you might think you found PMF, and start having revenue, but then realize you can pivot and find a better ICP,

• SaaS distribution is a nightmare because cold outreach and access to emails became cheap so people just started spamming leading to people not opening emails anymore,

• a lot of tools are used in sales and marketing and the tech/too-many-tools fatigue is a thing.

The most interesting takeaway I got was something along these lines:

Another interesting thing is that in the last 2 weeks, 4 out of 4 people I talked with told me to read “The Mom Test“. 😂 So yeah, it should arrive tomorrow. 😁 

Conclusion

I think the MVP is already more or less usable, so next week I’m going to start doubling down on spreading the word to hear more feedback and iterate accordingly, and reach out to other people in my network to discover more about this space.

I have the advantage that luckily I can move fairly fast with building. 🤞 

I hope you enjoyed this update!

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on X/Twitter and LinkedIn! 

Table of Contents

• The MVP and dogfooding

• Talking to people

• Conclusion

• Appendix

  • Personal branding

    • X

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Appendix

Personal branding

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