Looking for Go-To-Market Feedback for High-Quality-Product, Low-Reach scenario

[dr_tan]

Hey everyone! As the title suggests, I'm looking for feedback what your thoughts are in which directions I should go in terms of GTM.

1) Quick introduction to the situation (probably necessary to know for feedback):​

So after 16 years of freelancing and trying out what feels like every "productivity" tool on the planet I was so fed up with the actual-non-goddamn-productivity. Every basic task takes ages, all data is fragmented over 6 services and you just keep clicking save buttons into overlays into loading animations while you open up 6 old proposals while you forget your timer while you forget project 4 was over deadline while you forgot to invoice those 40 hours on project 2 and so on. If you want a truly custom invoice template with actually nice licensed fonts you're fucked anyway.

My stubborn ass felt like I can do better. Instead of shipping half-assed MVPs as everyone else does I spent 6000+ hours over 3 years 100% solo bootstrapping and building something polished that just makes me really feel productive, something I haven't felt in ages with freelance software.

I don't want to go overboard since that's probably not important for you, but in short: It's Time Tracking, Project Management, Task Management, Proposals, Invoices and Planning capabilities in a single polished desktop app with innovation in all of these domains to maximize efficiency as much as possible, so less time is spent with organisational/business freelance-tasks.

If it helps you to understand the product better, here's the link: https://fugoya.com
(mods: feel free to remove the link, but I'm not posting it for promotion but rather context)

I ran a closed beta for 6 months to get early feedback and reached a point where the product has the maturity to launch, which happened this week.

2) Let me breakdown the situation a little further so you have a better understanding:​

• I'm not an influencer of any sort and I don't own channels with a huge following, meaning my base reach is pretty low.
• The product is highly polished and feedback has been amazing, people are suprised of the high quality.
• Early adopters think the features it has are above competition, but in some cases they would love to see more (well, that's probably the case with anything really, but still. Top 3 are: Collaboration, Financials, Mobile App; all of which are on the Roadmap anyway, but not necessary to drag out launch further in my opinion)
• Important: The product is quite complex to get into (by nature of the field). It's not a spontaneous buy.
• Since it's for self-employed people it's a weird hybrid of: in theory it's B2B software, but since it's for solo-folks that often feel like consumers, often it feels very B2C-y
• You don't swap your invoicing system just for fun on a tuesday morning, it takes time and consideration. On the flipside this also means retention rate might be a lot lower due to the friction of changing systems if the new solution rocks
• Interestingly, people that don't want to buy it for themselves still speak highly of it and recommend it
• Lots of people that would benefit from it don't immediately understand the value. I've talked to a good chunk of designers that rather spend hours manually chucking out PDFs from Adobe InDesign than paying 20$/m (that's probably a communication task, still dropping it for context)
• In terms of target audience the obvious denominator is "freelancing", but I would narrow it slightly to "freelance professional" in the sense that people that have experience in freelancing know the pain points. If you juggle 5 projects at the same time you REALLY feel the value of Fugoya. What's a little bit tricky is that just "freelance" basically means any industry, although obviously for example agriculture doesn't really make sense, yet the creative industries are the perfect fit.

3) My thoughts towards general growth strategies:​

• Sales-led: Since it's technically SaaS and B2B it's the first thing that comes to mind. Since it's targeted at single-users, the value per sale is fairly low, so my stomach tells me it's quite a waste of resources for my case. Sales imho work a lot better if you get 15 users in one sale. Is this true?
• Community-led: Since the quality is high and people that like it so far are super into it, this might be something long term. Unless a certain threshold of users are met I don't think it makes sense to invest too much resources I suppose?
• Product-led: I think for my scenario this seems spot-on. I understand the organic growth effects a constantly, highly iterated and loved product can have. Something I would do anyway as it's the only way I want to do it.

4) My assumptions:​

A) I think it has the potential to develop organic growth once a certain threshold is reached.
B) I think that all efforts should be spend to reach this threshold and once there, there needs to be a shift towards community building.

5) What are my options for this initial phase?​

(here I'd really love to hear your feedback)

• Cold Emails: It's not sustainable, but I think a great fit for my kickstarting-issue. Definitely something I will do to get things rolling.
• Social Media Ads: Really torn on this one. On one hand also the downside of not-being-sustainable doesn't matter if all I need is the threshold, on the other hand as I'm not super experienced with ads I feel like it can burn money pretty quickly with unsatisfying results. What are your thoughts?
• Niche Sponsorships / niche direct ads: From what I know if the correct sources are found it's very on-target but in lots of cases quite costly. What's your experience?
• Content Marketing: I see the value, but since it's a long running thing and you reap the results far in the future it doesn't seem such a good fit, or am I wrong?
• Influencers: I don't think this works well with non-lifestyle-software, does it?

Sorry for the lengthy text, I just wanted to make sure there's enough context for educated feedback.
Would appreciate any insights and most importantly where I'm wrong!

 

[ms4runr2]

@dr_tan FEEDBACK: No External Surveys/Feedback Requests

 

[arkady]

@dr_tan First of all, great website (and tool from the looks of it too!)

For your question, I think that the first issue you might have is value communication/messaging.

It appears to me as a niched problem, which limits your market, but then it's also good that the solution stems from your own experiences.

You'll need to implement two things:

1. A way to get the attention of your target market, and keep it. So content marketing is necessary. I've found Instagram to be great for this kind of distribution over time, if you know what you're doing (especially when you use reels).

Although, it does take some time, but you can help your case with Ads from time to time (talk to a professional copywriter)

1. You'll also need a problem-led messaging strategy.

For now, until you hit a critical mass of users, at least, you'll need to lead with the problem, before talking about your product.

That way, you strike the heart of your audience, and lead them to see why they need your product. You'll be surprised at how effective it is.

(I haven't done the SEO research but), I doubt that we have a huge number of people consciously searching for this solution (which is why I called it a niched problem).

This does not mean that you won't find the users. You just may not find them searching for those terms /keywords. Hence, problem-led messaging.

As for Go-to-Market, I'll advice:

Strategy - Product based (not salesy or community) for now. Instead, tap into an existing community.

Growth Channels:
-Social media ads

• Content marketing (blog + social combo for distribution)
• Email marketing (warm, not cold)
• Niche Ads/sponsorships, but make it micro-communities instead of large communities. I'm talking email lists, and YouTube creators that serve freelancers, but aren't as big enough to charge crazy fees yet.

I hope you find this helpful.

If you're willing, I can also help you with straightening your strategy and messaging. My DM is open if you want to talk.

 

[dr_tan]

@arkady That‘s really super valuable feedback, appreciate it a lot!

 

[arkady]

@dr_tan You're welcome, Tom.

Your product looks exciting, so if you need actual copywriting/marketing strategy service, you can hit me up too!

I'll b glad to work on it with you.

 

[malachy]

@dr_tan Did you do market research on this? TAM, SAM, SOM? My hunch is, it's not huge, and at $23/month, not huge, means not a lot of money.

Either way, that SAM/SOM would definitely help you in understanding who your customers are, and where to find them.

 

[kyssi]

@dr_tan I think you have a great product and not-so-great marketing.

I would bump up the pricing (as the product is niche, and don't worry, you will find people that will pay for it)

As the product is for freelancers, go and reach out to top freelancers on Upwork, Fiverr, etc. and offer them this product. If they get interested and actually start to use it, word-of-mouth will be your main acquisition channel.