NinjaPear's Pursuit of Product Market Fit, Part 1.

Steven Goh

It sucks to write this, but it has been almost a month since I launched NinjaPear, and yet I don’t think any single customer has integrated NinjaPear yet. Obviously, NinjaPear does not have any product market fit (PMF). This is, therefore, an introspective piece to tear down why NinjaPear sucks, and what I need to do next to inch towards PMF. This is the first of a series of PMF blog posts for NinjaPear, as there will be multiple iterations before we finally make a PMF breakthrough.

But before I begin tearing down NinjaPear at its current state, I think it is better that I set up a PMF framework.

Solving For PMF Framework

The way to construct the framework is to answer the following questions:

  • Who is the target audience?
  • Where can I find a community of this audience for which I’m able to reach out to them individually, at scale, to convert them to the product?
  • What problem is my product solving?
  • How will I make my first $100/mo?
  • What is the one secret that I have that allows me to radically differentiate my product from the others?
  • What is the one-line pitch that I can send to my audience/mailing list that will immediately intrigue them to try out the product?
  • Who would be the competitor that I want to beat?

I should also add that this PMF framework is intended for bootstrappers, like I have always been. So caveats apply if you’re trying to apply this as a VC-funded company.

Prior Hypothesis

The current iteration of NinjaPear is based entirely on the hypotheses that:

  1. There should be a better free version of a live chat service compared to Tawk.to. Better in the sense that it is AI-first. And more free.
  2. That a free version of Intercom would be enticing.
  3. That a single subscription for multiple customer-communication products would be enticing enough.

These hypotheses were made due to the following false assumptions:

  • That free is a strong magnet. – I don’t think it is. I think it cheapened the product and makes people doubt it.
  • That a single subscription is a killer proposition – I think it’s a bonus for Enterprise sales, but it is not a groundbreaking pitch.

With Proxycurl, I was able to say something along the lines of:

Hey, I have an API that would allow you to scrape and enrich 1M LinkedIn profiles, want to try?

But with NinjaPear, I realised I just wasn’t able to craft an email with a persuasive top-line pitch. That is when I realised I got the pitch and angle for NinjaPear wrong.

Constructing the PMF Framework

I have to work backwards. Let’s start with my personal constants:

  1. I do not need to build a billion-dollar business, nor do I intend to publicly list the company.
  2. I can keep going for 10 years without making money, as long as I do not lose money.
  3. I have a domain that has good domain reputation.
  4. I have an email list of my past customers, with whom I hold a good reputation.
  5. I can code; I can perform marketing; I can do sales.
  6. I am rather creative when it comes to product design.
  7. I have taste.

Then, let’s consider the constants of the customer support and communication industry. What will not change about the customer support industry in 10 years’ time:

  • Human customers will still want to talk to humans for support.
  • Human customers will still want quick support.
  • Companies will always consider customer support as a cost centre.
  • Companies like Amazon which invest in excellent customer support are rare and will continue to be rare.

There are also different categories of customer support needs:

  • Urgent recovery – Eg, when a company’s bank account gets closed, and the CEO wants to reach out to someone in the bank with decision-making abilities as soon as possible.
  • Payment matters – Eg, when I need to return an item I purchased and have it refunded.
  • Technical support – Eg, I want to ask questions about the API, but I’m not able to find the relevant information.

I came up with these follow-up thoughts and questions during brainstorming:

  1. Customers usually don’t like to pay for support. Businesses consider support a cost centre and will do what they can to minimize the cost.
  2. I was very focused on the platform of support and constrained myself to considering customer support solutions for the website only. Maybe I should consider where the users are (social media? on the software itself? offline?)
  3. What can I offer that will wow a business and make it give NinjaPear a try immediately? I guess it has to be an offer with a time constraint.
  4. Businesses want to invest first in growth, then in retention. Everything else is not that important. So ideally, the product should try to solve the problems of growth or retention for a business, since it makes for a far easier sell.
  5. I also realised historically, the products that I launch and that take off have a developer-oriented angle to them.
  6. I also started thinking deeper into problems that the customer support niche tries to solve:
    • Would it be channels? For which a company has to support multiple channels of communication with the customer?
    • Would it be ease of support, for which a company tries to optimize how fast a human agent can respond to a ticket.
    • Would it be accuracy and outcome of support, for which a company tries to solve a ticket as fast as possible?
    • Would it be in scaling human agents, for which a company tries to spend as little as possible to support as many customers as possible? (Rare, because there are only so few big tech companies. Most companies rarely have that many tickets a day. For example, Proxycurl, a 10M ARR company, had maybe 20-50 a day, which is not that many.)
    • Would it be in ease of deployment? For which we try to help a customer deploy customer support solutions as quickly as possible?
    • Would it be in sorting out tickets so that human agents don’t waste that much time on spam, and/or getting tickets to the correct person as fast as possible?
    • Would it be in tracking tickets, for which technical tasks are associated with customer support tickets and having them replied to as soon as the technical tasks are completed?
  7. As for the target market, I’d be inclined to focus on SMBs and startups.
  8. As for the solution, I’d like it to be something that can grow into the Enterprise category with reputation and refinement, even if I were to focus on SMBs at the beginning of the journey.
  9. I also want to ideally solve boring, age-old customer-support/communication problems, instead of AI/greenfield products.
  10. I want a competitor to fight/role model against.
  11. Don’t do AI please. Too many competitors and it’s not a boring problem.

Honing The Pitch

To hone and sharpen the pitch, I wanted to answer two questions.

What is the 1 secret that I have?

What is the single-line pitch that I can send to my mailing list, that will intrigue people to join NinjaPear?

It took almost two weeks to get to this section, so I will caveat to say that while these questions pointed me towards the direction that I am currently in, I am answering these questions in retrospect, after already coming up with a direction.

That said, my responses to the two questions are:

Q: What is the 1 secret that I have?

A: I was the CEO of Proxycurl. And the chief data procurement person then. I lived and breathed data. I know all about B2B data, how to get it at scale. So, my secret would be my know-how with B2B data. And I am not even referring to LinkedIn data.

Q: What is the single-line pitch that I can send to my mailing list, that will intrigue people to join NinjaPear?

A: “Hi Alex, would you be interested in a live chat widget that gives you 50 new lookalike B2B prospects for every new chat? Essentially you get 50 new leads for every live chat conversation you handle.”

NinjaPear v0.2

This article took almost two weeks to complete because I really needed time to come up with a sharp-enough edge to market NinjaPear with, while remaining within the customer support/communication niche. One of the lessons I have also learnt is to not easily give up and to iterate persistently and keep shipping.

With that said, the next version of NinjaPear will remain a CX (customer experience) product, with a B2B data slant to it. The idea is NinjaPear will be a CX product that produces lookalike audiences from page visitors who initiate a live chat session; which in turn flips the script of customer support being a cost centre to that of it being a growth channel.

On top of that, we will begin building up a data moat, building a profile dataset of B2B professionals, their browsing habits, etc., which will only grow bigger as the product gets more entrenched with more companies using NinjaPear. In other words, the more people use NinjaPear, the more data we have about who is using what services, who they are (and how we can identify them). Then, businesses can choose how to prioritize each page visitor, and who else they can reach out to.

On top of that, I will bring a focus on revenue instead of market share. That means to say, no more free plans. There will be free tools such as a hosted Umami analytics, as well as various free APIs. But the core product will be gated by a subscription moving forward.

The product will also be dev-oriented.

Having this new iteration objective, I shall answer the PMF framework:

Who is the target audience?

B2B SMBs (SaaS) with a website, with developers.

CTOs/Product Leads in B2B SMBs.

Where can I find a community of such audience for which I’m able to reach out to them individually, at scale, to convert them to the product?

My mailing list that is 20K big. Although, it’ll be good if I can have a bigger list. I suspect that builtwith.com would provide a good amount of leads of customers already on a live chat service whom I might be able to convert. As well as the list of YC companies.

What problem is my product solving?

Companies don’t want to pay much for customer support. Instead, I will help companies make more money with customer support. The more support conversations, the more growth opportunities they will get.

How will I make my first $100/mo?

Firstly, I will stop offering any freebies. NinjaPear will be for paying users only, albeit with a very limited trial.

Then of course, I will send emails to my past customers asking them to give it a try.

What is the one secret that I have that allows me to radically differentiate my product from the others?

B2B Customer Data! I will generate lookalike audiences both on a company and personal level for any B2B businesses.

What is the one-line pitch that I can send to my audience/mailing list that will immediately intrigue them to try out the product?

“Hi Alex, would you be interested in a live chat widget that gives you 50 new lookalike B2B prospects for every new chat? Essentially you get 50 new leads for every live chat conversation you handle.”

Who would be the competitor that I want to beat?

Intercom.

Not the last iteration

This will not be the last NinjaPear iteration. The thing about PMF is that it is entirely based on hypotheses. What I have learnt in my life with regards to startup success so far is that:

  1. Overnight successes take 10 years to happen.
  2. Success follows dogged persistence in iteration.
  3. My hypotheses might be wrong. I’m ready for it to be wrong for 10 years because I will continually iterate. I have time, experience, and some capital. Other companies do not.

The next step will be product planning and design.

Oh one more thing, I will not be building first this time. All I will be doing is to:

  1. release a blog post.
  2. update the landing page to reflect the new product direction.
  3. send an email to my past customers and shill this new product.

And we’ll see how it goes.

I’m prepared for this to go wrong, so look out for my v0.3 PMF blog post.