Dear founder,
One thing that I really struggle with is communicating clearly to my prospective customers what the value of the product is for them. There are several reasons why this is the case.
I'm building a product that is both a podcast database and a podcast alerting system and a podcast forecasting or trend analysis system and an API product, but also has public pages that list podcast information, and is getting better and better at building reporting for all kinds of things. So there are many different ways of using the information that I have, which then lends itself to many different jobs to be done, all of which need to be communicated differently.
I've noticed in particular that as I was beginning, the communication of my features and what the data was and what the data could be used for was pretty much split between marketers - people that I can understand, because I'm a marketer as well. I can kind of get what the idea is that you're trying to reach, like, where do I find certain information that then allows me to monetize? Or where can I find information that shows me competitors and what they are doing? That kind of thing.
And on the other side, clearly, I was also talking to developers, people who are running businesses, like entrepreneurs and developers that need podcasting data that I could supply through my API. And those two groups initially, as much as I am myself a developer, they were both equally easy to talk to, because it was very clear to me what they needed.
But I talked about this a couple weeks ago - in opening up the data and putting it on the public facing parts of the website, as they are starting to rank more and more on Google, which is wonderful - I am getting prospects and customers that are not technical and not marketing minded at all. Podcast hosts or researchers or journalists, like people who find a lot of value in the product, but they just don't see it the same way. They don't speak the same language. The terms that I use, the structure, the hierarchy, the navigation that I use, does not necessarily translate to them well.
So I have started trying to understand how those people use the product and what they use it for, and also, at the same time, try and keep my focus on a main target audience that is not everyone, right? I don't need everyone as my audience, because if I do this, then all of a sudden I have a B2C product. If I have to or want to talk to every single podcast host out there, then all of a sudden they are people that want to talk to me about particular podcasts or particular shows and nuances in data that at my scale, it really doesn't make sense.
And I recently had a conversation through my customer service chat with somebody who started a trial a couple days ago and frantically told me that they wanted to cancel their subscription. Which ended up being - I checked and I saw they had no subscription at all. They never subscribed, but they thought, by signing up with the email and password that I would charge the money, which I guess we have to thank the mobile payment system for, where, by just installing an application and starting a trial, you kind of are going to pay if you don't cancel a trial.
Anyway, I had a conversation with that person, and they were of the older variety. They told me that they struggled with technology sometimes, and I just wanted to make sure they wouldn't be charged. And then went off on a completely tangential conversation about podcast shows in Canada. But it is evidence to me that I need to make sure that my application speaks to these people in a way that makes it absolutely clear what it does, what it's for.
I also had several conversations with prospects, customers and collaborators over the last couple of weeks, that pointed me at the fact that I need to really focus on the job to be done methodology in explaining to people what the app can do. Which probably means that the dashboard, the initial part of the product where people go, needs to be restructured to allow people to do their jobs right.
If they are journalists, they need to do research and get a report on a podcast. If they're podcast hosts, they need to see their analytics. If they are a marketer, they need to see their list of competitors and see where they were mentioned and how much and what relationship to each other.
I really need to drill into these jobs to be done and create views that are particular to them. That is one thing that I learned because I've been so focused on aggregating and providing data that the views have been kind of neglected, and that is where customers see most of their value, and where they can also show most of their value to their superiors, to the people who hire them, to the people they're employed by.
This is something that I noticed, which is a particular problem for me as an entrepreneur who hasn't had a job in 10 years. It is very easy to forget that a lot of people do their work to prove to their superiors that they're doing their job right, that they're getting things done, that their work is worth it and valuable.
So I need to make it easy for them, to present the relevance of their work. And if I don't, if I don't show that, if I don't make it easy for people to show to their superiors or their peers that they're doing good work and that my product is helping them do this, or that they're doing good work to begin with, then they will not see the value of the product as easily as they should be.
So that's one of the things that I'm really noticing - really dig into the jobs to be done that people have and make it very easy to report. Like, I will need to have a couple pilot customers that really understand their own reporting needs, and then build tooling that makes it particularly easy for them to get exactly their reports out of my system that they need for either the next step in their process or as a validation to even use the product in the first place. To even put effort and time into trying to understand and learn the product.
So I will have to have a good, hard think about reporting requirements and the kind of needs that my customers have at any stage. Be it marketers that have to provide certain target numbers, researchers that have to provide a particular kind of data quality, historical analysis, whatever it might be. And I will need to brainstorm those explicitly at some point, and I have to work with my customers to figure out what exactly they might need that needs to be front and center in the interface, even though it might be of little relevance to the complexity of the product.
Because reporting is usually done very easily, particularly now with AI tooling, where you can just very quickly have a certain kind of file structure or a certain kind of data structure generated. Like even have dynamic ones that code can help generate. The actual implementation of this might not be too complicated and not too difficult, but figuring out what people need and what exactly I can present to them at any point, that will be the challenge.
And I'm looking forward to this, because I know that by making this more obvious, it is showing the value of the product more easily. And once that is done, it should also impact the rate of customer acquisition and customer retention, you know, all the little software business things that make a difference.
So I am looking forward to finding out more about this and understanding my customers a bit more in terms of their explicit job to be done, and how I can present their solutions that I already offer or will be offering shortly, more easily to them, so they can see the perceived value.
Because that is one of the biggest things - you want to be able to show what the value of your product is, and the quicker you can communicate this, more reliably, you can make people dig into it and find that value and draw that value from your product. The higher retention and word of mouth rates will be, the higher the chance that people will stick around and become like a really long term high LTV customer.
And that's what I want, right? That's what I want in this product. I want to make it absolutely clear who this is for and what they can get out of it. So that's the next step. And it really got clearer to me as I opened up the kind of customer that I attracted to PodScan through making it public, making it a publicly available platform.
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