How I’m Utilizing Lean Startup For Garious

So it’s been just over 2 months since I went to Lean Startup Machine San Francisco and I thought it would be a good idea to document how I’m putting what I learned into practice. (Un)fortunately I learned pretty quick after launching http://www.Garious.com that it is a great tool that small businesses aren’t willing to pay for. I had found a pain in need of aspirin rather than morphine. Additionally, most of the people I was talking to were requiring education about social media beforehand which would have increased support requests and made the business fail.

After a bit of soul searching and a lot of reading, I decided that I needed to pick a different target market and use Customer Development techniques to prove or disprove the new market. I immediately started documenting all of the assumptions and questions I had about social media marketers to get myself started. I was off to start booking meetings and learning. The only problem was that after looking at my LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts I realized that I was only connected to about 2 social media marketers. How in the world was I going to learn from social media marketers when I didn’t have any to talk to?

I decided to give LinkedIn a shot for trying to make some new connections. I started by posting some of my initial questions directly into the Answers system. This turned out to be a GREAT way to get started. Within a few short hours I had a BUNCH of answers from social media marketers and was making some new connections. I replied back to the folks that fit my target market with more follow-up questions and in some cases was even able to get them on the phone. I was amazed at how helpful everyone was and how quickly I was able to start learning about my new target market.

I’m about 2 weeks in to the process and I’ve talked to about 30 social media marketers.  I thought it might be useful to others to share the answers to some of the questions I had.

1. What benefits to social media marketers receive from scheduling posts today?
   Time savings, expanded reach, increased visibility.
2. How much time do they spend scheduling messages today?
   Most tend to spend less than an hour per week scheduling messages.
3. What would they do if they had more time available?
   Handle / grow their own personal accounts (business getting in the way of business).
4. How do they measure success of their social media campaigns?
   This varies from campaign to campaign. Best is for the client to track this and share it with the marketer, but it typically does not happen. By putting a good social CRM system in place you can track leads just like any other marketing campaign.
5. What tools are they utilizing for scheduling today?
   Hootsuite & TweetDeck primarily.  A few using other more advanced tools, but most are happy with manual tools.

I have a few more interviews to do in the coming week where I plan to learn more about what tools they recommend to clients, affiliate network relationships and client acquisition.  In the meantime I have made some adjustments to the Garious home page to better reflect the benefits for social media marketers.  I’m considering launching a Google Adwords campaign to test it out a bit.

What do you think?