Yeah… Outreach is boring.

Table of Contents

• GTM strategy

• Case studies through dogfooding

• Better references attribution

• Crossroads?

• Conclusion

GTM strategy

I miserably failed with my goal of reaching out to 20 leads a day. 😅 

I only reached out to 17 leads this whole week, for a total of 37 LinkedIn DMs. Yeah, that’s a very low number. Given the low number, it’s also too early to draw conclusions, but only 1 person replied making the reply rate ~2.7%. On top of that, that person was also very doubtful about why someone would pay for such a product. But we ended up having an interesting conversation and that made me realize the importance of having a very clear positioning compared to ChatGPT.

So far, I’ve been reaching out to VPs of Marketing and Directors. Again, the number is low, but I’d like to try a different approach. I’ll try to reach out to the actual writers. I’ll start with the accounts that I already reached out to to. Many of them already have a blog, and most of the time, the blog shows who the author is. Probably the actual users of HeyEcho would resonate more and would be more likely to reply. 🤞 

Having a so low reply rate was demotivating, let’s see what happens by changing the target persona.

I’m also considering opening HeyEcho as an open beta and being more active on social media, Reddit, etc. to hopefully start getting some organic users.

Case studies through dogfooding

After the last update of HeyEcho, I’m way more confident to start dogfood. ✨ 

I’ll post a few blog posts for:

• NextCommit,

• HeyEcho,

• HaveYouHeard.

I’m curious to see the impact on Google Search Console. These would be great marketing materials for promoting HeyEcho. 🚀 

Better references attribution

One of the beta users noticed that sometimes the data shared in the blog post was correct, but the linked source was not actually citing it. This immediately causes a lack of trust. 😭 

For this reason, this week I worked on making reference attribution more robust and trustworthy. This is achieved by also showing how a specific reference is used in the original source or sources if the same data for example is mentioned across multiple ones. 💪 

Crossroads?

This week I started feeling a bit at a crossroads, and tbh I was not very motivated. The very low reply rate played a role as well. However, what is contributing the most is that I’m considering more and more the option of looking for a job either part-time or full-time. The short runway remaining is taking a mental toll. But that would strongly impact my ability to move things forward on the entrepreneurship side. The accountants telling me that I’d need to pay >11k in taxes in June is the cherry on top. 🤣 

The thing is that I’m not used to failure. 😅 

It might sound overly self-assured, but I usually achieve good or great results with every goal I set for myself, and this is the first time I've missed by such a wide margin.

Well, that’s the good and the bad about entrepreneurship, right? 😂 

I know that some are able to work on their own venture aside from a 9-5, but I am very doubtful that I’d be able to do it. Does this mean that I’d need to put this journey on pause? 🤔 

I don’t know yet, I know that looking for funds would be an alternative option, but that would be a completely different thing.

Conclusion

Not many updates for this week as improving the reference attribution was quite demanding.

I hope you enjoyed this update!

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