Dear founder,
After about a year of building Podscan.fm, my podcast platform and social monitoring tool, I’ve finally reached that general area of profitability. It’s that break-even moment that every founder aims for, and now I’m at a point where I really need to focus on things besides building the product.
Why? Because the product is clear. The value proposition is fairly clear. I know who my customers are, and I know how to talk to them. Now, what I should be focusing on is talking to as many potential customers as I possibly can.
The Solopreneur’s Struggle
I’m building this business as a solopreneur, as a founder of a solo software business. I’m trying to do everything at the same time - build the business, do the marketing, do the sales, do operations, customer support, and figure out where to go next with the business and with the product. All of this simultaneously.
Over the last couple of weeks, I had several demo calls with potential customers for Podscan, mostly positioning it as a social monitoring and podcast data research platform. These conversations have been incredibly enlightening.
Understanding My Two Customer Types
What these calls showed me is that I really have two ideal customers for the platform:
First, there are people that actually use the platform as a tool in their tool belt - to research where to place somebody they want to feature on a podcast, or to check what the audience size of a particular podcast is. It’s just one part of their workflow.
Then there’s another customer type that’s interested in actually providing the data itself, the underlying data, to their own clients and customers to do whatever they need to do.
So I have platform users, and I have data users. The data users are technical founders, people who run technical businesses. The platform users come from all kinds of backgrounds - PR departments, marketing departments, government agencies, and general agencies in the space that look at social media or media in general for opportunities.
Playing to My Strengths (and Recognizing My Weaknesses)
I’ve realized that I am really good at talking to founders about this. I’m really good at talking to other technical business owners who want to integrate podcast data into their business. I vibe with them because I understand what their needs are. I understand how APIs work, how businesses work, how data integration works.
That’s something that comes easy to me. It’s almost like a nerd-to-nerd exchange whenever that happens. That is an easy thing.
But here’s the challenge: these technical founders represent a more rare occasion. The most potential customers out there right now who can use Podscan as is, without the need for many integrations, are PR departments and marketing departments.
These are people that I don’t necessarily speak the same language as because I am a developer, and they work in PR. It’s just a different approach to using tools, using software, and all that.
The Self-Limiting Belief
My outreach has been almost kind of self-limited because I’ve always believed that I don’t really know how to speak to these PR and marketing people, so I didn’t speak to them at all.
But I’m realizing that, obviously, these are wonderful customers for the product. In the demo calls and the onboarding calls that I’ve been doing over the last couple weeks, I’ve seen that the platform is really, really good at solving people’s problems.
Sure, there are a couple kinks here and there, a couple things that might need to be changed or added. Like most calls, I left with a short list of features that, when implemented, would immediately make a particular job-to-be-done much easier for that customer. And I’ve seen these things actually be useful for the customer base at large.
So these conversations have been invaluable, but I still struggle demoing the product for non-technical people - explaining to them what their benefits are, instead of just telling them what the product can do. I don’t have much sales experience with non-technical people.
The Crossroads: Learn or Delegate?
I’ve found there are two options for me right now.
One option is that I just keep doing what I’m doing, and I try to become better at it. That is an option that my friend Tyler Tringas introduced me to in a call that I had with him last week surrounding the current status of Podscan. This was a catch-up call because Tyler runs the Calm Company Fund, which invested in Podscan.
The second option, which Tyler suggested, is that I either find somebody who can mentor me on these things - who can guide me through sales conversations with people from those particular industries - or that I hire someone to do this work for me. Someone who understands the market, who understands podcasts, and also understands the needs and requirements of marketing departments and PR departments.
The Part-Time Solution
What Tyler suggested, and what I’m thinking about right now, is that since Podscan is at this stage where there’s a lot of experimentation to be done - there are many things when it comes to sales that are completely untapped, even when it comes to marketing - I should consider a part-time hire for that particular activity.
I need to find somebody who is capable of selling to people in these particular markets, who understands the podcast market and what Podscan can do as a tool, as a product, as a solution to somebody’s job-to-be-done.
I’ll hire them on a part-time basis because, at this point, I cannot afford a full-time hire. Or - and this is something that I might need to experiment with - hire them on a commission-only, part-time basis.
The Commission Dilemma
There are many ways how somebody could do this work for me, and commission-based sales is always interesting because it’s a very reliable outcome - either the salesperson convinces people to buy the product, or they don’t. There’s no downside really to this for me as a founder.
I am struggling with the fact that, to me, hiring somebody means paying them no matter what. But that might just be my employment history talking, not what I need to do right now as a founder of a business that is just on the verge of profitability, with the arrow pointing up and to the right.
The Network Appeal
So what I’m going to be doing over the next couple weeks is to tap into my network. And for any listeners of this podcast or readers of the newsletter, consider yourself tapped!
I’m trying to find somebody who’s really good at sales, who really understands the market of podcasting and media monitoring in general, and who is interested in reaching out to people from PR companies, from marketing agencies, from anybody who has a vested interest in tracking mentions on podcasts and finding meta information about podcasts in the world out there - for whatever client or data needs they might have.
The First Hire Revelation
You always wonder: who’s going to be your first hire? And I believe that for Podscan, as it stands right now, because it’s a B2B product and I’m not a B2B salesperson, this will be the person I’m going to be looking for.
Obviously, this role will grow over time as it becomes more effective and more financially sustainable for me - as I can put more resources into this and scale sales. But that is going to be my first hire. It has to be my first hire because:
- The customer service load is fairly low
- The product is very straightforward
- The product development load is very low as well because it already has everything that people in this industry need (as the last couple months of working with my customers has shown me)
Business, marketing, and sales are the fields where I’m lacking. Sales is the one that I need to deal with right now. So that’s going to be my first hire.
Embracing the Discomfort
I’ve always struggled with hiring, and this is no different. But I am glad that I have capable people in my network to both help me with finding the right person for this job, and also guide me towards knowing what to focus on.
So big shout out to Tyler Tringas for suggesting to look into this particular role right now, after listening to the state of the business.
And yeah, if you know somebody who is really interested in working at the intersection of sales, podcasting, and the world of PR and marketing, let me know. I have a commission-based sales position for Podscan ready to go.
The Takeaway
Sometimes the best thing we can do as founders is recognize our limits and find others who excel where we struggle. For me, that’s sales to non-technical customers. What’s your biggest challenge as a solopreneur, and could your first hire be the solution?
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