What I learned from talking to 15 webinar organizers
Two months ago, I posted the following message on my Linkedin profile and in an online community of founders I belong to:
15 amazing people jump on a 25-mins call with me.
I wanted to share 4 insights that I learned from the conversations with webinar organizers:
(1) People are happy to help, even without getting anything in return
Webinar marketing is a pain I experienced personally when working on my previous startup. I felt it could be an opportunity for a new product.
When I just got started, I didn't know if I'll find anyone to talk to. I looked for online communities of webinar organizers and couldn't find any. Organizing webinars doesn't tend to be a career path, but part of a wider marketing or founder role. It was impossible to find communities who focus just on webinars.
I decided to offer a 25$ voucher for a 25-min call. I didn't think I would hear back, but I was surprised. On the same day, I already had more than 10 comments from people I never met in my life. They didn't even notice the voucher offer, they just wanted to help.
(2) Niching down makes life a whole lot easier
For the last 6 months, I have been trying to start a new SaaS product. Initially, I looked at starting a product for Early stage SaaS founders. Because the market is so wide, I didn't feel comfortable asking friends for connections to prospective customers. I didn't specialize in anything, so I didn't feel like I was providing any "value".
3 months ago I decided to change direction and target Webinar Organizers. I saw immediate results.
It can be my own psychology, but I immediately felt more comfortable to post a message on my Linkedin page, ask for help in communities I belong to, and ask my friends for connections. My target audience was much clearer, because usually in any given company, there is just one person who organizes webinars (if any).
(3) There are more types of webinars than I originally imagined
When I started looking at webinars, I thought mostly about people organizing webinars as part of the marketing efforts of their company. After the conversations, I realized there are many more types of webinars:
- Community managers that use webinars to meet with the community
- Content experts that organize paid webinars
- Marketing consultants that organize webinars for their clients
- Customer success managers that organize webinars as part of the onboarding process
- Founders or marketing teams that use webinars as part of their marketing strategy
I am always surprised by how much you can learn from a small number of conversations. Even though I knew a lot about the problem space, I learned many new and important details from these conversations.
(4) 15 conversations were enough for me to validate the need
The law of 5 says that you need 5 conversations hearing the same thing to understand there is a need.With such a wide range of webinar organizers, I wasn't sure how many calls would I need to pass the law of 5. My main focus was people who use webinars as part of their marketing strategy. Even within that group, there is a huge difference between a company of 10 people that organizes a webinar once every 2 months to a company of thousands that organizes webinars every week in 5 different languages.
Eventually, I talked to 4 marketing teams of larger companies and 2 founders of smaller companies. I learned that companies invest money and especially time into marketing webinars, and there is an opportunity for a product that will make their life easier. I also learned that webinars are an important part of the marketing strategy of B2B companies, and are here to stay.
How do I continue from here?
After the calls, I feel much better about understanding the need. But I still don't know how the buying process of webinar tools looks like. To get a better feeling for that, I will continue the conversations and also try to sell an initial version of the product.
For that purpose, I built a landing page (http://glow.build/) that is based on what I learned from the calls.
I am really grateful to everyone that jumped on a call with me 🙏 And I would love to hear what you think about the process.
Want to share how you validated the need for your product? Feel free to start a conversation with me on Twitter @nirshub