Why I decided to change my target audience and build for webinar marketers?
It's been a while since I last wrote. I have been busy getting to know webinar marketers. I plan to share more about my process interviewing them in another post, but first I wanted to share why I switched from building for Early stage SaaS founders to Webinar marketers.
I feel like time is running out
It's been 4 months since I started my journey trying to bootstrap my SaaS product.
During this time I have been busy getting involved in communities of SaaS founders, trying to search for interesting problems to solve.
I felt like my audience was too broad. I did see repeating pains around building an MVP, finding a co-founder, or deciding how to structure pricing.
At one point, I even thought about building a product that helps backend developers to create beautiful looking MVPs.
After doing some thinking it felt like it would be playing on "hard mode" trying to build a business around these problems. Early stage SaaS founders have limited budgets and many tools are competing on these budgets.
So I decided to take a step back...
It's time to scratch my own itch
Time and budget were running out and I wanted to shortcut my way into finding an interesting problem to solve. I listed the pain points I encountered when building my last startup, Sorted:
- Finding users to talk to when getting started
- Engaging my product team with customer's feedback
- Creating visualizations for our landing pages
- Marketing webinars: Creating registration pages, email reminders, and promoting webinars
- Managing translations in our webapp
Why did I chose to build for webinar marketers?
It's hard enough to build a new product, with little budget and very limited time, so I wanted to make sure I am making everything I can to make life easier for me.
Eventually I decided to focus on "Webinar marketing" as my niche. I had a hunch it would be a good problem for me to build a business around. Here is what I found in this problem:
A problem I am passionate about
I was passionate about all the problems I listed except managing translations. I felt it was too "backendy" for me.
The rest of the problems were all about helping people reach their users, directly or indirectly, which is a space I am passionate about.
A problem that has a well known market
I didn't want to spend time educating people about a new problem or a new solution.
Out of the entire list, I felt like "Webinar marketing" and "Managing translations" are well know problems that people are already paying good money to solve.
Another problem I was really passionate about was "Engaging product teams with customer feedback". But I felt like people weren't paying any money to solve this problem yet, so I decided to put it aside for now and come back to it in the future.
A problem that will play on my strengths
Finally, I wanted to spend my time doing what I am good at. I shine at finding simple ways to create beautiful products and experiences.
I felt like marketing webinars could be a perfect fit. Building tools for creating webinar registration pages and email reminders would play on my strengths.
What's next?
So I picked "Webinar marketing" as my niche. I know I might completely change my mind in a couple of months, but I decided to go for it. At least for now.
"Webinar marketing" is a problem I have experienced first hand. I was marketing webinars at my previous startup, Sorted. Webinars were a key part of our marketing strategy: They brought a lot of value, helped convert prospects into paying users. The downside was that they were a ton of work to organize and promote.
This was my experience, but I wasn't sure if other people had the same experience as me.
So I decided it's time for me to get back into "hustle mode" and talk to webinar creators.
Want to share how you decided which customers you want to build for? Feel free to start a conversation with me on Twitter @nirshub