So I am going to try something new here. I am going to try and follow the process that Ash Maurya describes in his book and on is blog with some of my own tweaks.
Mostly because I like the concrete insights he delivers on the customer development process if you are bootstrapping. And because I would like to generally help him with his book.
The first step he describes in his book - after quickly defining a model using his Lean Canvas - is writing a sales letter.
This sales letter is not for the purpose of sending it to people but to generally practice how to explain it to other people and to help yourself build your other material like interview questions and a landing page.
My unique value proposition (UVP)
What I have mind right now is to basically create some kind of dashboard that helps people see if they are on the right track with inbound marketing. As a potential customer I chose to keep someone in mind that is starting his online business or product and wants to find new (potential) customers without doing advertisements. Actually. This is the "i" in Vision ;-)
So here is my UVP: Know how and where to reach your early adopters in one single glance.
I chose the "one single glance" as the unique factor here.
A story about the problem
You really love finding those people that might be interested your product or to generally give them great content.
You probably have all those tools out there to measure if you are doing a good job at reaching those people. Maybe you are using tools that give you your influence score or you might just be checking your Blog subscribers and Twitter followers each day.
But how do you generally know what content is most interesting for the people you want to talk to? Is Twitter the right channel for your product or maybe you need to find another channel? What tone of voice fits you and your audience the most?
Also, if you are using over a handful of tools to measure you are probably seeing just numbers all day. You need to fit them together in your head or create custom reports in every tool to see some kind of relation between what you do, and what the results are.
You know that the right thing to do is to be there where your potential customer might be. But what channels are working for you? In what places are you finding your most valuable or passionate early adopters?
The inbound marketing dashboard is going to give you a birds-eye overview of your inbound marketing activities so you can find more passionate early adopters.
This is why using the inbound marketing dashboard will help you:
- Track the combined growth and activity of people that follow you alongside the content and other inbound marketing activities you are doing. This way you can relate your actions to the results.
- Easily add all the common channels and tools like your website visitors, blog subscribers, SEO ranking, Twitter account and Facebook page without having to switch between analytics tools.
- Drill down what people you are communicating with on which channels to find the channel that best fits your early adopters.
Conclusion
So what do you think of the sales letter? Do you understand the problems and the solutions I am presenting? Or maybe you think I should change my unique value proposition or make it more concise.
Please let me know by adding a comment to this blog post.
And it goes without saying that if identify yourself in the problems I described above, please drop me a line at michiel@firmhouse.com or leave a comment.