Lots of things to share this week, so let’s dive right in! 🚀 

Table of Contents

• The MVP

• Learning, learning, learning

  • Customer discovery calls

  • Online resources and books

• Distribution plans

  • The ICP

  • The channels

• Conclusion

• Appendix

  • Personal branding

    • X

    • Beehiiv newsletter

The MVP

A few weeks ago I shared that I was already dogfooding the MVP, but it was still very clunky and annoying to use, so I decided to improve it.

To recap what HaveYouHeard aims to solve you can read one of my past issues, but very briefly, it aims to help founders and teams to get new customers. For sure “getting new customers” is a huge area that spans lead gen, demand gen, content marketing, etc., and across different channels like Reddit, X, emails, blogs, etc.

Today HaveYouHeard focuses on Reddit with a mix of demand gen and lead gen. I should probably pick one between demand gen and lead gen to start with, but I’m not sure yet because, in the way I tackle it, they go hand-in-hand.

Let’s see now what you can do as of today! 🔥 

The first step is to create a project. A project is the main entity of HaveYouHeard and everything gravitates around a project and it represents the product that you want to get customers for.

You just need to insert a few information like the name of the product, the URL, a description, and some keywords.

Both the keywords and the description are used to provide the most meaningful submissions that you can either interact with by replying or monitor and see people’s reactions and comments.

In order to minimize false positive matches, the filtering is done in multiple steps by first fuzzy-matching the keywords (it’s not an exact match) and then ranking by score using the description. The ranking maximizes the relevance to the product, so the more accurate the description the better, and also how easy would be to engage by replying and mentioning the product according to the subreddit rules (e.g. if the subreddit rules are very strict, it might have a lower score as it would be hard to engage).

You can have multiple projects, and you can switch between them. Each project defines what you see in all other sections as a separate workspace.

As soon as you make the project live and save it, the discovery will start under the hood. The initial discovery will take some minutes, and once the first results will come in this is what you’ll see.

All the submissions are sorted in descending order by score so that you can focus on what matters the most and provides everything that you would see from Reddit, subreddit name, OP username, submission date, etc., together with an analysis of why this post might relevant and how to engage with it.

At this point for each submission, you can go to Reddit and answer how you think works best or just monitor what is being discussed. Alternatively, you can generate a reply that will help you organically introduce your product without sounding promotional.

To keep track of what has been worked on already, you can mark submissions as “done” or archive them.

The platform will then continue to discover new and fresh opportunities for engagement.

Indeed the “Hot” tab contains all the relevant submissions that have been posted in the last 48 hours. These usually have a higher potential for engagement as recent submissions have higher activity.

Here’s a loom that I shared on X.

Learning, learning, learning

I still need to learn a lot about this space, but it’s ok. It’s an interesting and painful problem, with a lot of variables, that has a lot of potential. My current learning path is split between talking with people, mostly execs and VPs in marketing and sales, and online resources and books.

Customer discovery calls

I’m lucky enough that I have a good network of great people working on marketing and sales who are willing to help me! ❤️

I started applying what I learned from “The Mom Test“ and I have a template that I follow and prepare before the call. This includes:

1. main 3 questions: what do I want to learn from this person?

2. next steps: what kind of commitment can push this person for? (at this stage it has been always about introducing me to some other people I can talk to)

3. summary: this is where I take notes during the call that I review afterward

4. result: an indication of the outcome of the call (very bad, bad, good, very good, etc.) in terms of whether I achieved what I wanted (confirm or contradict some assumptions, learn something new, commit to a trial, etc.)

I’m still not able to schedule so many calls, but starting next week I’ll try also reaching out to demo the current MVP and ask my current ICP whether they’re open to testing the product for free as part of the closed beta. This might be an incentive for people outside of my network who would give me a chance to learn from them.

Online resources and books

“The Mom Test” proved to be an awesome resource. After that, I started looking for some suggested readings mostly around sales and marketing to further improve my knowledge in this space.

Reddit itself also proved to be a goldmine of information as I read all the top posts for the r/LeadGeneration and r/marketing subs.

I also came up multiple times across this course on lead gen that I will watch next week.

Distribution plans

The ICP

It’s still not super clear yet, and continuing speaking with people should help me further narrow this down. The features in the current MVP are more towards demand gen rather than lead gen, but the idea is to really be a mix of the two. Given this duality, I’m still interviewing both people in sales and marketing.

Probably RevOps is the best profile given this mix of flavors, and these are the same profiles that I’m currently looking for on LinkedIn.

The channels

The only things that I did so far in terms of promoting the product have been:

• posting the Loom video you saw before on X,

• some DM on X and Reddit to users that shown interest in Reddit marketing.

Next week I will write some long-form content to present HaveYouHeard. So far I’m thinking mostly about different Reddit subs, LinkedIn, IndieHackers, owned blog, etc.

In the end, it is worth resyndicating/repurposing on all platforms that support long-form content and see what converts better. I need to ask people where my potential users hang out and read.

When it comes to reaching out, having HaveYouHeard in a more advanced stage and providing me with leads would have helped a lot. 🤣 

I started identifying some LinkedIn profiles, but I still have to start reaching out and asking for interest in testing the MVP in closed beta.

Conclusion

The goal of next week is to have at least 5 closed beta users. 🤞 

I should also have a clearer view of whether this is something that people are interested in or not. An interesting data point is that a competitor has been sold this week for 6-figs.

It’s time to get heads down! 🔥 

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! 

Appendix

Personal branding

X

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