Pt 4: Bootstrapping a SaaS Tool with No Budget, Beginner Coding Skills & Less Than 15 Hours a Week.
For some reason, the responses from my emails dropped off almost entirely. After getting 6 calls from my first 40 emails, I’m now on email 226 and I’ve only had one new call booked.
What is going on?! (I don’t have the answer yet)...
I realized I didn’t have any data other than the number of emails sent, so I used https://mailtrack.io/ to track open-rate while still sending the emails manually through Gmail for the last 50 emails I’ve sent. I have about a 70% open rate so far so that isn’t the problem.
I also added “P.s If it’s a no, thanks anyway! I’d love to know why if at all possible — even a 1-word reply would help!” to the bottom of the message, but nothing yet.
My current thinking is that I just got incredibly lucky early on. My target customers are busy and therefore hard to get on the phone. That said, they also understand the need for market research and the ones who agree to a call empathize with my situation, so it’s tough but not impossible to find willing participants. I imagine another possible factor is the fact I have ‘junior’ in my job title on LinkedIn.
To address the lack of time my ICP has, I’ve made my email copy much more concise in the hope this will improve the response rate. I’m going to send 100 of these emails, assess the conversion rate, and reconsider my approach if I can’t get 9 calls.
I’ll post with the results!
As a side note, I got overly excited the other night and jumped the gun sketching an MVP onboarding SaaS solution based on the calls I had. I then wondered what a cool name would be and bought the URL for “oneboarder.com” — just in case!
I’ve since wound myself back in and gone back to research mode.
