323: The Power of the Dream Customer List

This episode explores the strategic concept of creating a Dream Customer List to enhance marketing efforts and optimize product design for SaaS businesses.

1. Dream Customer List: A strategic tool for identifying and preparing to serve ideal customers, even before they engage with your product.
2. Importance of Targeted Preparation: Enables businesses to tailor products and services to the needs of potential high-value customers.
3. Engagement and Feedback: Utilizing feedback from influential existing customers to refine product features and usability.
4. Networking and Outreach: Leveraging personal networks and direct interactions to cultivate potential customer relationships.
5. Strategic Patience and Long-term Planning: The dream customer list serves as a foundation for long-term engagement and sales strategies.

1. Introduction to the Dream Customer List

Arvid Kahl introduces the concept of the Dream Customer List, explaining its relevance and strategic advantages for businesses. Arvid Kahl: "The idea behind this is extremely simple. You think about who your best possible customer is."

2. Case Study: Podscan

Detailed discussion on how Podscan leverages the Dream Customer List to enhance its service delivery and customer acquisition. Arvid Kahl: "If I ever wanted to attract my dream customers, I needed to start tracking their mentions long before they signed up."

3. Implementing the List

Practical steps on setting up and utilizing the Dream Customer List effectively within a business. Arvid Kahl: "I immediately went into my Podscan account and set up individual alerts for each of them."

1. Define Your Dream Customer: Clearly identify who your ideal customers are and understand their needs and preferences.
2. Engage Early and Often: Start engaging potential customers well before they make a purchase.
3. Use Feedback for Product Development: Incorporate customer feedback to continuously improve your product.
4. Leverage Your Network: Use your personal and professional networks to reach potential customers.
5. Be Patient and Persistent: Building relationships with dream customers can take time, but it's crucial for long-term success.

Today, you get a glimpse into an ongoing marketing experiment for Podscan.fm. What if I can frontload value for my future customers even before they sign up?
Here's why I chose to create a Dream Customer List and how it will help me jumpstart customer acquisition.

People

Arvid Kahl, Jack Ellis, Rob Walling, Noah Kagan

Companies

Potscan, Fathom Analytics

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Arvid Kahl
Hello and welcome to the Bootstrap founder. I recently learned of the Dream customer list approach to sales and marketing, and I love it. I want to share it with you today. The idea behind this is extremely simple. You think about who your best possible customer is and you add a hundred or so real world examples of them.

Just do a list. And by best customer, I really mean dream big. Like if you run a SaaS that I guess renders movie and titles like End Crawl I think is the name of the business that does this, and that's kind of the example I'm using here. You probably want to sell to Pixar or the legendary picture studio at some point in the future, right? So that is a dream customer.

And maybe if you run a video effect software business, you would put in people or creators like MRBeast and his team on that list, just as the ultimate dream customer. What this exercise allows you to do is to contextualize the product as if you already had these customers. I'm going to explain all of this to you today, and it has massive benefits. I will share them with you, including who's on my list and why. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com dot.

More on that later. Let's talk Dream customer list. I'll start with mine. I recently realized something about Potscan, my media monitoring business. The time to value in that business, getting a new trial customer to their aha moment depends entirely on how quickly they can find their first mention on a podcast.

It's kind of the idea of Podscan, right? We scan the podcasts and we tell you when you're mentioned. If it takes a few days for the first mention to trickle in, well, that's quite some time for them to have to wait. And I can't assume everyone to be this patient. But Pod scan is not just alerting.

I just recently transcribed my fifth million podcast episode and the full text of those conversations that I've been transcribing over the last couple months. Well, that lives in several databases ready to be searched and analyzed. And that's when it clicked. That's what made it obvious to me what I should be doing. If I ever wanted to attract my dream customers.

I needed to start tracking their mentions long before they signed up. And for that, I needed to understand who they are, not just as a kind of nebulous audience like, oh yeah, people who will use my product. That could have been, well, the description of my audience up to a certain point in the past, or even just an ICP, this ideal customer profile. But the actual real people that I wanted to actually have end up using my services. That's what I needed to know.

And I also noticed something else over the last two weeks that actually combined this, that made this a fully fledged idea. My existing big profile customers love talking about the product from Jack Ellis of Fathom analytics, who unwaveringly tells his Twitter followers and founder peers about Potscan to Rob Walling, who mentioned being a customer on the latest episodes of startups. For the rest of us, where we talked about Microconf 2024 in Atlanta, that was a couple of weeks ago, and we did a little episode going through our favorites and all that. And now Noah Kagan as well, who brought it up again and again in our conversation on my podcast earlier this week. These amazing and quite outstanding in the literal sense, founders are extremely happy with a tool that I've built that gives them insights into where they, their business or their friends are being talked about, and they talk about it to their business collaborators, to their friends, their audiences and all that.

In case it's not abundantly clear just yet, this actually is my ideal customer at this stage. Someone who already is mentioned on podcasts, wants to know when it happens, where it happens, and has a sizable audience of other successful founders and creators and people with a budget to share the joys of Podscan with. And that is the list that I created. I went through my Twitter feed and wrote down every single active, amazing founder, creator, and influential person that I followed, I knew and I liked. It's pretty much a list of all my heroes.

It goes from like Sam Parr to Rosie Sherry, from Amanda Gutz to Amanda Natividad, from Nathan Ethan Barry, April Dunford, J. Klaus Brennan Dunn. These are just a few of my Twitter friends who I admire and know that they are already being mentioned on podcasts all the time. Several of these people have been on this podcast, which is really cool, and others I hope to eventually talk to on the show. This kind of this.

You will find that this is kind of on purpose, even though it's not intentional. I'll explain what I mean with that in a second. With that list, when I had it, I had like 100 or so names on it. I immediately went into my Podscan account, my own admin account, I guess, and set up individual alerts for each of them. And that's the trick.

Now, whenever they're mentioned anywhere on a show, any podcast anywhere, Podscan will quietly note that down and add a record to my account, which can be theirs in the future. Because over the next weeks and months these mentions will accumulate and very soon I'll have thousands of mentions gathered up neatly in my database. And that will be my time to first value advantage. For when I ultimately reach out to every single one of these people on my dream customer list, I will allow them to sign up and immediately claim or import their mentions from the database from my account into theirs. I'll be building some kind of semi public page with a random name that I can send to them with all the mentions on it.

And on that page will be a link where they'll see all the things, or the page itself will be the place where they see all the things that they've missed in the past. And the link will allow them to register a new account that then, immediately after being created, pulls the data from my account into theirs. They'll hit the ground running with already super actionable data that was custom collected just for them. And that is the power of a dream customer list. You can do targeted preparation, but at scale.

I think its biggest benefit is that you actually have a list of prospects that you can start reaching out to long before their customers. And reaching out to doesnt necessarily mean you can write an email or a DM. You can already work in their favor because its quite unlikely that your two month old SaaS business will land a client immediately, like a movie studio that created the most recent dune movie or something like that. Thats not going to happen. But the old adage of marketing, the rule of seven is also true about getting on someone's radar long term.

It takes seven or many more touch points before someone considers working with you or even thinks of you as a viable thing to maybe look into. And having a list of future customers makes this a much more achievable goal. You can leave these little things along the way. You can leave traces of your ambition, leave evidence of you trying to work for somebody already, even though they are not paying you for a service that you want them to ultimately pay you for. And if you know who you're going to sell this product to, you also know what the product needs to look like for them.

Let's get back to Jack and Rob and Noah, the people I mentioned that are already talking about Potscan and are using it themselves with every single one of these amazing people. I had extensive Twitter DM exchanges about the usability of the product, maybe missing features that was talked about and things that it didn't do too well just yet and could improve on. They have formed the product to suit them better themselves as they're using it by just talking to me. And I have zeroed in on customer product fit because I listened to them and I knew that they were people that I should be listening to because they were well connected, already successful. They had a budget for these kind of tools and all of that.

It's effectively validation that I've been doing here. Right. But it's important to understand that this is about people, like actual human beings. And even if you're selling two businesses, you're selling two people at businesses. And those people exist outside of their role and inside their role, of course, because that's part of their identity.

And you can already build these connections even though they're not paying you for anything just yet. And, you know, it's a pretty sizable group of people. Like even popular celebrities in the indie hacker community is quite a sizable group. So I was initially thinking, well, is that all? Like, should I also look for other people that in my dream group?

Like, where should I go? Why not stick to this group? I know who they are. I know where they hang out. And as I'm deeply embedded in their communities, I have the means to reach them through pre warmed connections.

Sometimes I already know them like the people that I had on my podcast. Clearly, this is a customer segment that is worth putting in extra effort for. And yet, and this is the important bit, I needed to be careful not to dream too big, because my dream list pretty much tops out at the celebrity level of somebody like Tim Ferriss, who is the biggest name on this list. Now, Tim's a celebrity who might still be able to go shopping without being hounded by the press, but people will recognize him if you put him in front of a couple of nerds like us. And from my data, I know he's being mentioned a few dozen times each day.

And that is okay still. It's still manageable, it's still meaningful for a couple dozen mentions. That's still something somebody could engage with, but I'm intentionally not aiming higher. No, people like Taylor Swift or Arnold Schwarzenegger or definitely not Elon Musk. Some people are mentioned so often, way too often, and they frankly don't care about that anymore.

They don't need to engage with these things. They are in the public eye and they're not looking. So I am looking for popular in a niche, maybe even a little celebrity in a niche, but just popular, not famous. That's the big distinction. So deciding who's not going to be on my list was just as important as who would make the cut.

And I think that goes for the lower bound, too. Potscan can definitely serve yet to be popular founders and creators who want to explore the wide landscape of podcasts and book placements and all that, learn about who appears where and all that. But the culminating use case, the overlapping Venn diagrams, if you will, lies with already somewhat popular people who I have direct access to. I learned this very recently from a the workshop that I was part of from the CMO of paddle. He said that over 30% of successful startups jumpstart their customer base through the personal network of the founders.

30%. One in three of all these businesses that often like hit hyperscale at some point and you know, hockey stick and whatnot, vc stuff. But these businesses all start with a tiny, tiny network of connections, and that then cascades into like a bigger market domination strategy. That's not necessarily what I need with Podscan, but it's a good start either way to get some customers, and that's what's happening here. And the dream customer list is the guidebook for it.

Of course you can change it over time. You can add new customers if you want. You can remove some that you now feel are not a good fit or something like this. But hey, it's a really, really good document to have because the benefit is something that I just realized a couple days ago. Like this document is going to be around in two months, it's going to be around in six months.

It's going to be around in two years. And if I just were to add all of these people to a CRM and started engaging with them like regularly on social media, through email or whatever, like the chance that some of them would buy it over the next two years is so much higher than if I were to only do it two years from now. And if I were to start two years from now and had done nothing along the way. So clearly this is a way for you to invest into relationships as you are building the product that eventually will sell to them. So here's a rundown of how I created my list and how I think you can create yours.

You start with defining your overripe customers, the customers that are too big so you know who to exclude from the top. And you then define your not ripe yet customers for lower bound exclusion, the people who are not there just yet in your perfect group. And then you go into this middle, middle ground, middle part, and you start listing the people who you want to talk about your products. And for each item, you add a link to their best social media profile that you have. Maybe Twitter might be LinkedIn, but I mean, depends on where you are present.

That's the one usually that's the best. And you name their brands, their personal brands, their businesses that they're working in or on or for, and their names and things that you think they might want to listen for as mentioned. And if you know them already from your community, you kind of know what terms they might be interested in as well. So that might be something to also put in. Like for me, for example, in the alerts, right, that I put up.

Like, I look at these terms and they might also find things interesting around them. So I put them in an alert so they see, okay, yeah, this person gets me. That's the idea of this, right? It's not that you necessarily have to do the exact same thing that I'm doing because it's very specific to pot scan, but showing these people that over time, you have thought a lot about them as a pretty clear indication of trustworthiness. And then if you have a couple of them, a couple dozen, and you can't really come up with anymore, feel free to paste the whole list into chat GPT and ask it to fill it up with a couple more items, up to 100 or whatever.

When you run out of ideas, chatgpt is pretty good at determining similar things to the things you mentioned, particularly if the people or the businesses that you mentioned have been around for a bit, right? If they have some kind of notoriety or popularity in the communities that you're in, chat GPT will be pretty good at filling in more. You can always sort them out later. What you'll end up with is a battle plan for the next months or years, and you will get to these customers eventually. So just take time to often reflect on what you can do today to leverage a positive interaction in the future.

And then you start working on making this dream list a reality list. And that's it for today. I want to briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com dot. Imagine you've built this amazing business with your dream list. You had 100 people in your dream list, and you kept working on this for months and maybe years and two years after you have this really, really good business, 50 of these people have tried the business or tried your product, and 30 of them have actually subscribed.

And you've repeated this over and over. You have a really solid SaaS. It's making money, has good MRR, but it's kind of not growing. You're kind of stuck and you don't know what it is, right? Focus problem, skill problem.

You don't know. You just want to do something else. Well, lots of people will tell you to just battle it out and keep slogging away and growing it and, you know, get better and whatever, and you triple your revenue and you're super depressed. I think that whole situation is not optimal. And the reality for a lot of founders is the situations all look slightly different.

But in the end, what they don't do is act. They just become complacent and they stagnate. They are inactive, and the business itself becomes less and less valuable over time, or worse, completely worthless. So if you find yourself in a situation like this where you have something valuable but you don't want to keep doing it, just consider the third option here, which is selling your business on acquire.com because you would capitalize on the value of your time today as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as somebody who wants to burn for something. And I think that's a pretty smart move, you can always convert your business into money.

Acquire.com will do this for you. They're free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try dot acquire.com arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. It's always good to keep an eye out on these things.

So just to look at it and see, is it good for me today? Is it good for me next month, maybe a year from now? If you don't know, well, then you're never going to do it. And if you know what to do, you can still wait, you can still see it through, or you can sell having options, that's usually a good idea. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap founder today.

You can find me on Twitter at abit kahl arvidkahl, and you find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me in this show, feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Get this wonderful podcast in your probably equally wonderful podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com founder. It makes a massive difference if you show up there, because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds, and that's where I would love for it to be. Any of this will help the show.

So thank you so much for helping. Thanks for listening and have a wonderful day, and bye.