Restarting with a pivot
Tags: startup, marketing, tutorial
Published: 2024-01-08 14:38:30

Back in the beginning of November, we pivoted into being a product marketing platform. It was a tough and painful pivot as we were operating focused on crypto niche in marketing. 

After talking to prospective customers - to whom I am forever grateful to - we noticed that the problem we are solving was real. 

However as one customer put eloquently: 

The solution is not accurate. 

Shortly put: Our solution was covering only the social posting aspect of go-to-market and marketing but not the whole thing. 

Hence we decided to drill down to understand the workflows much better. 

##  Looking inside

At Troy Labs, I am the only full-focused person who deals with go-to-market and marketing. The rest of the team is coding 24/7. 

Therefore, before I leapt into my user interviews, I started thinking about how I am trying to grow Godmode.

## 1. Outbound relationships

I get 3-4 outbound cold emails almost every day. They are relatively well-crafted and formulated. In a different universe, I would have responded. I don't now - because I know they are written with AI. No personal touch, no context, almost the same as injecting merge tags. 

Considering this negative effect, I decided to write all my outbound over at Linkedin and one by one. It takes a lot of time but gets more results. After working on it for months, I noticed that I turned into what I was trying to avoid. 

I was using ready-made templates to send out to people I just connected with. 

I did not follow up with any of them

I did not track their activities or posts to understand the context. 

I hated managing Linkedin inbox, Twitter inbox, Telegram + Whatsapp inbox, let alone my dirty email inbox. 

Had to be a better way. 

## 2. Social posting

Leading up to our Product Hunt launch before the pivot, I started sharing our product and changelog improvements every 2 days. Link here 👇.  More on learnings on launching on Product Hunt later on. 

We believe in experimentation and intent. This is not a personal development quote but a scientific method. Anything you do in startups is either a 0 or a 1. 

This means that when we were posting on social, we did not want to post same things over and over again. Let alone what everyone else has been posting. 

Yet after some time, it turned pretty ordinary. Looking back, I can see why: It just got boring. 

## 3. Be where others are not 

Early on, I noticed that everyone in B2B was marketing in Linkedin and Twitter. Yet there were many more places to do marketing: 

- Reddit
- HackerNew
- Farcaster
- Lens
- Dev.to
- and more

I started connecting with people over at these platforms. Now beware: 

Reddit, HackerNews etc people are much much more brutal than Linkedin and Twitter people. It is not for the faint-hearted. 

However, it was working. One by one, we were getting decent feedback, doing user research and getting some sign ups. 

Had to be a better way to do all this. I was managing: 

- social media

- sales and prospects

- email marketing

- community

All of these were meant to do a single thing: Get us new customers and learn from them. 

Why was I dealing with 4-5 different software products while managing 10 different channels? More importantly, I had no idea what was working or not. 

Enter => [GodmodeHQ](godmodehq.com)