What do you mean? You use the 5lb tank via the Aarke instead of the CO2 cylinders? Or you refill somehow the CO2 cylinders? If it's the first one this sounds like the best of both worlds with the convenience of the countertop device and the cost-efficiency of the bulk CO2. It would be great if you elaborated some more!
I bought a hose from Amazon where one end screws onto the 5 kg CO2 tanks (I'm in Japan so metric) and the other end has the same male nozzle as a SodaStream cylinder so you screw it in where a cylinder would screw in, so the tank feeds straight into it. Just need a place on the floor near your countertop to put the big tank.
I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers.
I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps:
1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists
2 - does our prototype look 10X better
3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found
4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it
5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends
A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).
You can use a platform like Respondent to recruit extremely specific demographics. It's not cheap, but if you're strategic with your interview questions you can get really concrete directional signals with as few as five participants.
I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.
Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
Thanks a lot! You can upgrade to the Pro version in the app, it’s a one-time payment for lifetime access to some extra features. If you have something else in mind, feel free to email me!
Also Sonnet only, no Opus. That being said it lets you use the included stuff and easily switch to metered if you need to use a different model or you burn through your included allotment.
These are proprietary mailboxes. Yes, we’ve built an email server from scratch, so we could control and optimize every single layer of it, 100% focused on the inherent challenges of (legit) cold email at scale.
By being truly full-stack, we are able to automate a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I’m referring to things that are important, but very boring, technical, and time-consuming, so nobody actually do.
Example: instead of YOU manually monitoring blacklists and inbox placements in each mailbox, the system does that. If any issue is detected, it temporarily pauses sending from that mailbox and automatically increases warmup until it heals. Another example is rewriting each email to remove spam-trigger keywords and optimize other details (optional). That is done 100% automatically, so you can have way better results with zero maintenance work.
The system also has a dynamic sending queue for each ISP and takes into account the mailbox, domain reputation, and the most updated always-changing ISP rules.
These are only a few of the dozens of tiny optimizations we do, that compound into more sales.
The deliverability has been excellent, literally 100% based on daily inbox placement tests made over a week. We’re still optimizing some details before publish launch. Are you currently doing any cold email campaigns? If you want, it will be a pleasure to have a call and help with anything you need.
Been doing immunotherapy for allergies for 3 years and it is a complete game changer. Last year was the first year I could breathe through my nose for the entire year. No more stuffy months.
Sales is hard because it's less about building and more about listening. You need to figure out what customers actually need and that starts with talking to them directly. Here’s a framework I use, based on the Customer Development Ladder I wrote about in my upcoming book. It breaks down the process of learning about customers into four kinds of interviews. Each interview takes you one step closer to a sales call and the last step invites them into a sales process.
1. Exploratory Customer Development -
Start with broad conversations. Reach out to potential customers and ask them about their world: their challenges, goals, and frustrations. Don’t pitch your idea, just listen. The goal is to uncover problems worth solving.
2. Focused Customer Development -
Once you notice a pattern in the problems people describe, you want to make sure it's shared by a wide subset of customers.
3. Paper Feedback Demo -
Before building anything new, create a low-fidelity prototype (mock-ups, sketches, or slides) of how you might solve the problem. Share it with prospects and get their feedback.
4. Real Feedback Demo -
When you have a working version of your product, test it with those same prospects and ask for feedback. The goal is to see if the thing actually solves their pain. If it does, you can invite them into a sales process. “Looks like it might help, can we set up some time to explore what it would look like to implement at your company?”
This approach isn’t magic but it works. The best part is that it teaches you how to find customers and what messaging will resonate with them. Resources like The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick are great for learning how to have these conversations without bias.
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