Offer HN: FREE: I'll make your first 10 cold calls
Are you a developer with a MVP / prototype that you're still refining to make it more perfect before you show it to your prospective customers?
5-6 months ago when I started testing my startup MVP, I've had to do something I've never done: make a lot of cold-emails and cold-calls. As a techie, I know that uneasy feeling when you're about to pick up the phone to dial someone. We all know if you wait until you're NOT embarrassed to show your target market for feedback, you've waited too long to get feedback.
So here's my no-strings-attached offer: If you have a barebones prototype / MVP, I'll use that to test your target market for you. I'll talk to at least 5 people, max 10, for free.
If you haven't yet made contact with a single person in your target market, simply testing it with as little as 5-10 people will at least uncover the top 3 major objections that you might want to think of addressing. All the things Customer Development & Lean Startup champions for early stage startups when you're still finding a business model.
That's it. I'll make the cold call, and you'll get valuable early feedback. With luck, we might get a small taste of what a repeatable sales process would look like - can't scale up getting customers without a repeatable process.
s/sales/user acquisition/; # where applicable
Another way to think of this offer, pretend you've got to a point where you've gotten funding and have money to hire a sales guy. Do you know what to do when you actually have a sales person reporting to you? What would the sales guy be doing on his first day? I'm that very early 1st sales guy (where I'm also helping you figure out the sales process).
This can be a very time consuming activity, if you've done any of these initial interviews, you know they can be as short as someone hanging up on you, or as long as a few hours.
Minimum criteria:
* At least an MVP that you're embarrassed of to test with. Could be a landing page.
* At least have a hypothesis of what the customer's problem/pain is
* Give me a list of 5-10 people's contact info to call up or email (usually sales people focus on converting leads into sales, but someone still has to send them the leads to hit up in the first place)
* Specific for this offer, I can't do B2B and/or long sales-cycle stuff where you have to navigate the corporate org chart (time constraint). Maybe in future. My goal is to help as many very very early stage startups as possible.
If you're pouring your blood and sweat by coding day and night ... you owe it to yourself to at least say "I know people are going to love what I'm building, but let me just check-in with real live customers real quick"
Hit me up and let's talk to see if I can help! I would love the opportunity to cust-dev for you.
jay liew at jay liew d()t c()m