The Idea

Every good business starts by solving a problem.

Background - How the Idea Found Me

Some Background - About six months ago, I quit my high-paying job as an engineering manager to pursue building a Software Development Agency. Things went well for the first few months. I had enough business coming in to stay busy and was working on some fun projects.

About four months in, I ran into a big problem. I was out of work. The river of referrals that was feeding me had run dry, and I hadn’t put any real effort into marketing myself yet. Rookie mistake.

I needed to get more business fast. SEO and social media marketing are free, but take months to pay off. Advertising works in a pinch but is very expensive.

I was out of both money and time. I felt like I was out of options.

After doing some research, I decided to try out Cold Outbound Sales. I’ve seen it work well for many other businesses. If it doesn’t then why do I get so many spammy emails and LinkedIn messages?

Many companies use the Spray-and-Pray method, sending hundreds of templated emails and messages each day to random people on the internet who, most of the time, aren’t even a good fit for their offering. I didn’t want to be reduced to a mindless internet spammer.

I opted for a more invested approach to cold outbound sales. One that seems to work for many B2B SaaS companies. I was surgical in my approach. I defined an ICP, found a database of people to pull from, and spent lots of time and effort researching each lead and personalizing each message that was sent out.

Finding a Problem

When I say I spent a lot of time on it, I mean a LOT of time. Once I began doing outbound sales for my business, it was all I did.

Mornings were dedicated to filtering through databases for leads that aligned with me, while afternoons were spent researching these prospects and customizing 50+ emails and messages. This took up about 6 hours of my day each day. While I did get some leads, it was hardly worth the time invested. After a few weeks of this routine, I realized how unsustainable it was.

So, I did what any good entrepreneur would do: I started looking for tools to automate some of this work. I needed a tool that would reduce the time it took to find the right leads, research them, and tactfully personalize all the messages.

I found a few options. I did some product demos. I even paid a few hundred dollars to try a few tools. None of them did what I needed them to. They wrapped the process in a nice, easy-to-use UI, but the onus of the work was still on me.

It seemed dumb to me. “Shouldn’t an AI be able to do all this research and personalization?” I thought to myself. That’s when it hit me. There might be a hole in the market here, one that I have the skills to fill.

The idea was born.

Building a Solution

“Scratch your own itch” is common advice given to entrepreneurs looking for business ideas. Find a problem that you know intimately, and create a good solution for it. That’s the next step for me.

Typically, when you’re creating a new business you want to follow these steps, in this order:

1. Find an idea or problem you can solve.

2. Validate your idea by talking to people who experience this problem.

3. Build an MVP (minimum viable product): a slim, hacked-together solution.

4. Have your potential customers demo what you’ve built.

5. Collect feedback from them.

6. Use the feedback to make decisions on product direction.

7. Write some more code.

8. Iterate. (repeat steps 4-7)

You can simplify this as Learn → Build → Measure → Repeat.

Do this enough times, and if you’re lucky, you’ll build something valuable.

I’m taking some liberties and am skipping step 2 for now. This could prove to be a mistake, but I feel confident in this decision for two reasons:

1. I have experienced this problem firsthand. That’s some validation.

2. After some research, I’ve found a couple of other startups that have recently raised funds to solve the same problem. If they were able to convince investors to give them funds, I can assume they've validated this thoroughly.

My MVP

To be valuable for my use case, and hopefully others, my MVP needs to do at least one of these three things:

1. Reduce the time/effort needed to find high-quality prospects.

2. Reduce the time/effort needed to research said prospects.

3. Reduce the time/effort needed to create high-quality outbound messaging to send to those prospects.

Eventually, it would be ideal if I could do all 3, but MVPs are meant to be Minimal. Prospect research was what took the most time for me, so I’ll aim to solve that problem first.

Off to the Races

I officially have some competition.

From here, I’ll be working diligently to build out my MVP so I can outpace the competition. It’s going to be tough. One of these startups has $2.5M in the bank and a team of engineers and marketers assembled. I’m attempting to solve the same problem on my own, with no money to spend and a couple of months behind.

In order to be successful here, I need to move fast, launch quickly, gather feedback often, and iterate as quickly as possible so that I can beat the others to PMF (product-market fit).

Follow Along!

Thanks for reading! Hopefully, you learned a thing or two. From here on out, I’ll be publishing a progress update every Friday to share what I have learned for the week. You can also find me on LinkedIn and X, where I post often.