11 Building in Public: Stretch Goals

“In terms of goals… We’re trying to keep it simple. At this point there’s not a lot of value in looking too far out. But it’s hard not to. The immediate goal is to get our first paying customer. That’s it. Ideally before July 1. We’d consider that a massive success.”

That was from our newsletter on May 26th. And a few days later we hit our goal (still shocked).

So, we got the first paying customer, which changes a lot.

Our strategy now becomes two-fold. First, we want quality applicants (ASAP). Filling this role quickly is the best marketing we could ever imagine. We’d be batting 1.000, have our first testimonial, and most importantly gain momentum.

However, this is proving challenging, which we will touch on later.

Second, instead of one paying customer by July 1, our goal now shifts to 10 paying customers by July 1. This is doable, however it’s gonna take a lot of hustle. As we touched on last week, this will mainly involve unscalable activities. One place I’ve found success is posting on Reddit (specifically the subreddit r/accounting and r/Big4). Basically it’s just me posing as an eager job seeker… “Look at this amazing job site I just found!!!”. I feel absolutely crazy doing this... But hey, what the hell.

Anywho, enough of that.  

Here’s the (rough) plan moving forward:

1/ Quality Applications: So, we obviously have limited site traffic, which makes filling a role challenging to say the least… but we’re gonna do our best. We hit the ground running Monday by promoting the position on LinkedIn, and sharing it across our personal accounts as well. This is step 1, and will occur on a weekly basis for at least 4 weeks. The goal here is to increase traffic to the posting, not necessarily get applications.

Second, we offered our first paying customer our ‘Featured Posting’ for the price of a 'Standard Posting' ($299 vs $400 - savings of $100). So, with this we will write a blog post about why their company is awesome and also promote this across our profiles (and get friends/colleagues to do the same). This personalizes the posting and humanizes the company all at once. Sure, we may be a little biassed, but I do truly believe it’s a hell of a role, so I have no issues writing about it.

Third, (and this was timely) I was invited on a YouTube channel June 7th, which is geared toward CPAs. This was an awesome opportunity to plug the business and the role to gain traction. Plus, a different cohort, as her audience differs slightly from mine. Win, win.

2/ 10 Customers, 22 days. Writing this down and I now wonder how the f*ck we’re gonna swing this. But what the hell, shoot for the stars or something like that.

Again, the Youtube appearance will be beneficial for this too. The interview is about my experience and HeyCPA, so it will provide ample opportunity to promote various roles and the business.

Further, I’m going to start cold emailing companies I’ve worked with in the past. Luckily at PwC I was able to build some great connections at a variety of companies across Vancouver. It’s now time to leverage those relationships. Worst case scenario? They say no, or want it for free. We’re going to try hard to avoid the ‘free’ scenario as this is a slippery slope. We want to position ourselves as a premier/niche service, not a ‘freemium’ service.

We’ll also leverage video. Short-form video (whether we like it or not) is one of the best ways to gain traction on social media. So, we’re going to rip the bandaid off and start the TikTok and Instagram train. This is painfully far out of my comfort zone… But again, everyone croaks so who cares.

It’s going to be an interesting few weeks. We’re still learning so much and a lot of it can’t be learned until we do… This is the formula:

Do → Learn → Do. Rinse and repeat.

PS if anyone knows of an accountant looking for a new gig then check it out!!

They can apply here.