After being a bludger for the past week or so (holiday mode!), it feels good to be taking action again and doing more of the Foundation content. I set up 50 emails to go out to Engineers at 8:30am this morning and already have two IE calls scheduled this week. As suspected, however, quite a few offices are closed until early to mid Jan, based on the out of office replies. However, it’s still a great result considering! Darren was right about engineers being available over the break.
The content for IE so far has blown me away! They’ve really carefully prepared the material so we can learn about the inner workings of successful businesses.
We can learn about how to build a successful business by reverse engineering an existing one. In ‘Copywriting Mindset’ , Dane has us ‘copying copy’ so that we can internalize what effective copywriting is – two A4 pages of copying a sales letters by hand everyday for a month! No joke.
In the same way, Dane has given us case studies of existing businesses and asked us to study them using simple comprehension- ‘who are the customers, how do we find them, what is the pain, what Qs would you ask to find it?’ Then we compare our analysis to Dane’s analysis. It’s not necessarily a case of right and wrong, but rather, we learn from the ‘master’ – someone who has repeatedly built successful software solutions. Here are some of the key lessons I’m learning:
- Reverse engineering shows us that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, it has been done before! Even artists copy the paintings of ‘masters’ to sharpen their own skills. In order to be successful, copy successful people.
- Got some great ideas about how to find customers in a market. We can look up blogs, user testimonials and of course, professional groups and associations.
- A couple of the case studies featured APIs, which are apparently fairly simple to build! Just goes to show that a lot of doubling up occurs with data entry in any industry.
- The main lesson is that a successful SaaS (or any kind of solution) does not happen by accident. It happens by asking the market and reaching out to the customers, which is what IE is all about.
Doing a few of these case studies helped me get the hang of thinking that way !
In the meantime, I started approaching Strata Managers last week. As mentioned in my last post, Strata is an industry that closes over the Xmas to NY break, so I won’t be contacting them again until at least mid January. Some key observations:
- Gatekeepers are easy to get past. Because I couldn’t be bothered setting up a batch of IE emails, like I did with engineers, I decided to cold call a few offices. I simply introduced myself, said that I was an entrepreneur conducting research within Strata management and asked if a Strata manager was available for me to interview them for a few minutes. None of them had any issue transferring my call!
- A couple of them commented on how busy their office was at any time of the year but welcomed another call from me in the new year. “This is Strata. It’s always busy!”
So, in future, I’m cold calling straight up, no email! Besides, I noticed the emails listed are the generic ‘info’ and ‘contact’ types so an email approach might be a waste of time. I also learnt that a Strata manager can receive a gazillion emails, so my email could easily get lost anyway. I’d rather take my chances cold calling.
As mentioned before, I managed to do IE with one Strata Manager. It was a very interesting conversation.
- The guy spends five hours on email in one day. FIVE. Hours. Ouch! On average, there are 500 emails per day. Yikes! This is because they would like all discussion to be on record so they make it a point to use email. Some are from contractors to arrange work that needs to be done. Others are to do with property inspections, as well as reporting problems that need fixing. He is required to respond within one day. He says it’s a duty to manage emails. Dayum! I could really feel his pain when he was talking about it.
- He also described what he did on building inspections. The interesting thing is, they have developed a SaaS in-house to manage inspections. When he goes to a site, he takes photos of faults, compiles a report, passes it on to the Exec committee, and is able to generate quotes for repairs. The whole process from driving to the site to compiling a report only takes about 3 hours, thanks to their in-house SaaS. Nice! And he only goes to an inspection once a week.
- So the real pain is in the emails. He mentioned that they are looking at how to integrate their email communication into their SaaS to see if it can be streamlined. I thought that was neat! The clincher for me was when he said that their SaaS is on the down-low because they are the only ones who have it. Wow! Does that mean that there is potentially a lot of common pain in the Strata market that is not being addressed? Is there not much competition? My mind was buzzing. It’ll be interesting to learn what other Strata Managers are experiencing when I start calling them.
I’ve only spoken to two Strata Managers so far – this one and the other who was busy, the rest were gatekeepers. This resulted in only a handful of cold calls.It makes me think that Strata must be such a painful industry to be in, for it to be easy to find someone willing to talk to me!
For now, I’ll continue on with engineers and see what else I can learn from them. However, I definitely feel that I am onto something with Strata.
Happy action-taking everyone and thanks for reading!
Saas Ninja 