If you read my first post on how I productionized my newsletter automation scripts you'll have seen me talk a lot about coding and building a product. But what is the point of building something if you launch to crickets?

This doesn't get talked about enough in my opinion. Everyone here loves to share when they launch something, but I see very little about doing discovery on your idea. So in this post I'm going to share with you how I went about doing some discovery by speaking to real human beings over Zoom.

Decide who your users are

This is the first and most important question to answer before anything else: Who are my potential users? The correct term for this is "defining your ideal customer profile." Personally, I had a hard time with the term "ideal" because, honestly, I don't even think I'm the ideal customer, and I built this thing to solve my own problem! So, I went with "defining literally any person who might want to become a customer" and took it from there.

I narrowed this down slightly to "community builders" or "people who are trying to grow a community via a newsletter."

Great. So then I had to go find these people.

Cold outreach beats everything else

By far the best tool I’ve come across for this is Apollo. It’s easy to set up, easy to use, and the free plan lets you send 250 emails a day. That might not be much for folks running a cold outreach campaign, but here's the thing, I'm not doing cold outreach at scale. I’m meticulously researching each and every "lead" I find through the platform.

I set up filters, job title, company size, location, etc, until Apollo gave me about 1,000 results. These were my "ideal" customer profiles, or so I decided. From that thousand, I picked out 50 and really got to know these profiles through the information available in Apollo.

To pick the 50, I went on their websites, checked out their LinkedIn, and sent connection requests. I signed up for their existing newsletters if they had one. Once I felt confident that this person might actually be interested in what I was building, I sent them an email. It went something like this:

"Hi, my name is James. I'm validating an idea for a product that will help newsletter creators like you save a ton of time. Do you have 15 minutes to chat and help me out?"

That’s it. No salesy rubbish about value propositions or pain points. No "sense of urgency" or bombarding them with a calendar link right away. Just a friendly message. And guess what, of the 50 people I cold emailed, I set up 8 calls. A 16% conversion rate on my cold email campaign! Pretty wild, right? Even I was a little surprised.

Takeaways from the calls

These calls were incredibly valuable. I learned so much about the role of a community builder, picked up industry-specific terminology, and left these interviews feeling like I was speaking the language of community-driven marketing. I felt like an expert, after speaking to just 8 people.

And the best part? At the end of each call, I asked if they knew anyone else I might be able to speak to. This worked amazingly well. Through referrals, I turned my initial 8 responses from Apollo into the 15 calls I boldly declared in the title of this post!

Next steps

So that’s my journey with discovery calls. I now feel much more confident in both my marketing and product efforts, and I feel more secure in my ICP.

So far, about half the people I spoke to have tried out my MVP. None of them have paid for it yet, but I guess that's step 2. I’ll post back here when that happens. Wish me luck, and if you want to check out the product I'm building visit usetopical.com