My new company just created its first post for our new blog. It’s an odd choice. There are no deep explanations of our service, no hard sell. Instead the first thing we decided to do was to talk about a the purchase of a competitor. Here is the first part of the post:
So why would a perfectly sensible person choose this as the topic of the company’s first post? Sometimes a subject chooses you. Let me explain.
Our plan
We are practitioners of the leanstartup and customer development methodologies. That is to say, focus on building your product as quickly as possible with the minimum feature set you think is required to satisfy the customer problem you’ve identified. Launch, test and iterate. Conversations with potential customers=great, PR before product/market fit=missed opportunity.
Blogging
Blogging can fall on anywhere on the conversation<===>PR spectrum. And the left-hand side of the blogging equation certainly fit into our plans. But being deeply focused on speaking with customers (one on one) in combination with building a product and the billions of other details associated with building a business on limited resources leaves little time for anything else. Obviously blogging can be a brilliant way to create a dialogue with like minded people around the world. It can also be a giant sinkhole for time and productivity and frankly I remain concerned about living up to the commitment to blog regularly. Entrepreneurship is all about making hard trade-off decisions and up until now, blogging was too far down the list.
Changing Needs Meets Timely Opportunity
Up to this point we’ve had perhaps 60 anecdotal customer conversations and are up to about 15 formal recorded interviews. We’ve just begun to open the aperture to increase the volume of interactions. We’ll still regularly talk with customers and potential customers one on one but as a consumer oriented business we need to broaden the conversation meaningfully in order to really learn what we need to know.
The opportunity hit us when Cake Financial was acquired by E*TRADE a few days ago and decided to shut down – straight away, no warning, leaving customers out in the cold. Compared to Cake, our service has some similarities and what we think are big improvements and radical new features. What better group of qualified potential customers than Cake customers who are now without a service they liked and enjoyed?
The Punchline
We wrote a post directed at Cake customers to create a conversation. The result is that our first post for blueleaf talks about a competitor and we think it’s right on strategy. What do you think? Love to hear your opinion.
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