Writing it down so I cannot wriggle.
Goal: one paying customer for Pipelite by 31 October. Any price.
Where I am: working product, 9 people on a waiting list, 0 conversations with any of them, because I keep "improving the onboarding" instead.
Plan: email all 9 this week. Call anyone who replies. Weekly update in this thread every Monday.
Good. I have set a reminder for every Monday. First question: of the 9, how many did you speak to before they joined the list?
None. They came from one post on a data engineering subreddit.
Then you have nine email addresses, not nine leads. That is fine. Email them tonight, not this week.
Rahul, on the calls: do not demo for the first fifteen minutes. Ask what they do today when a job fails at 3am. Write down their exact words. Those words are your landing page.
Monday update. Both calls done. Grace was right, I did not open the product for twenty minutes and both of them described the same problem in nearly the same sentence. Two trials started.
What happens on day 3 of the trial? That is when a scheduled-jobs product either has a job running or does not. If no job by day 3, email them personally.
Monday update. One trial has 6 jobs running. The other has none and has not replied. Wren's day 3 email got a reply from the first one: "waiting on my boss for the card".
Monday update. Still waiting on the boss. Eleven days to the deadline. I have never wanted a stranger's manager to approve an expense so badly.
Offer to invoice them instead of asking for a card. Bosses approve invoices. Cards need a meeting.