From Idea to Launching in Six Weeks | With Expert Mohit Mamoria

Before getting more into the growth, and we'll chat a little bit more on that marketing kind of case studies and what worked and what didn't.

Sure.

So Andrew, he had a pretty specific problem to solve, you know, and he said, I wanna build a specific solution for him. He's just one person. But it wasn't necessarily like defined the best business model around. Uh, so how did you, you know, you saw that tweet, you positioned it to him. What was the process of defining like the how and the why of this project when, when you, when you, when you showed him that video?

Okay. So, uh, okay. I would not have written him an email if I was not using the script myself. Again, the same thing. If I was unaware of this problem, I would have discounted his problem. So that problem is very precise. Only people who feel that— so this is a kind of a realization that one has to have, one has to have in their life. When they think inbox is not work, this is one realization. Everybody's talking about inbox zero, inbox zero, inbox zero, which means in our head we believe getting to inbox zero means getting something productive done, which is sometimes it is the case. Sometimes it is not the case, but when you realize, hey, this is not the case, I still have more things to do. There's some creative work that I have to do. There's some other things that I have to do, which is apart from this admin work, which is apart from this inbox management. This realization is very important. I had this realization because my inbox started flooding when I was investing before Mailman. And Andrew had this realization. And I'm sure a lot of people would not have written him an email just because most people did not have that realization. Only because I had that script, I sent him the video and he said, fantastic. He asked me for a link. I sent him the link. The link didn't work because I was— because this is a— this is, this is, this is an unverified script. So to work— so for any script to work with Gmail, either you have to be the author of the script. Or somebody has to be within the organization of the script. So we— so just— and Google does it for the security purposes. So he was not able to use the script. But then we were like, this is a potentially good solution. Why don't we invest some time and money into building this up? So he said, why don't you invest your time, I invest my money, and let's take it to 0 to 1. These are the agencies you can use for the design and everything. Use whatever you want, just take it from 0 to 1, and then we'll see how it works. We took it from 0 to 1. Our email list for the launch, for the pre-launch was phenomenal. He tweeted out a thread and from there about 7,000 people came in. And over the next few months, I onboarded them personally. Out of them about 1,000 people started using it. Uh, they became paying, paying customers. But after that, it was just these 11,000, about 1,000 people who started telling about Mailman to their friends and families. And these were, and remember, this is the time when COVID was just happening. So people were working from home and they were dealing with email overload, email and Slack overload.

Right.

Uh, so all the meetings moved to inbox. So this was a time when people are like, how do I manage my inbox? Now, again, this was the first instinct that they said, now my inbox is not my work because more things are happening besides my normal inbox just because of this lockdown and working from home. So these people started telling about Mailman to these other people and more people came in. But after that lockdown became the normal thing, uh, that kind of went down. That's when we said, okay, now we need to figure out something else because that word of mouth kind of have died out. Now word of mouth is still happening. People are still tweeting about us. But that— it is not at that scale now. It is not at that scale now. So now we have to— so if you look at that Paul Graham's trajectory of a startup, we are like the trough of sorrow, where we are figuring out what— how to do, what to do. We are also, to be very honest, we're also questioning, is this the only market? I mean, what if the market itself is very small? But then Whenever I talk to some new users, I get to know the market is not small because there are so many users of ours who are just independent Shopify, uh, uh, uh, e-commerce business owners. They just have a Shopify store, but one popular Shopify store is driving them nuts because one Shopify store sends you so many notifications and their inbox gets drowned. So I would just imagine, hey, they'll be Hundreds and thousands of popular Shopify stores. So market is definitely not small, we just have to reach to the right audience in the right manner. That is the right current challenge, yes.

Right, so just trying to figure out, I guess, product-market fit and seeing who's the right kind of user that you need to focus, the right ICP, and who you guys need to really scale.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

So just kind of understand, so you guys launched, you said, so you launched, you had the script, maybe you said about 6 weeks after, you know, you talked to To, to Andrew, and it's been a success so far, right? You know, 7,000+ users. Would you say, you know, that's still the right amount of time needed to launch effectively? Like, and, you know, or would you go back and do things anything any differently if you could redo it right now?

Just for the launch?

For the launch. And, you know, would you want to build more features into it? Would you, you know, done something differently? Would you, you know, done anything else to get it out?

Uh, I, I was very happy with the launch, honestly. Uh, one thing that I might do differently is launch on multiple platforms. So for example, we launched on Andrew's Twitter and Product Hunt, these 2 communities. But now if, if I have to build something, I would actually start building up, um, a profile, a community, say on IndieHackers, Hacker News, I would do something like this. Instead of, instead of saying, hey, we built something, I would say, hey, I'm building something and this is the process, follow along on this journey. I think this is the only thing that I would do differently. Instead of saying after 6 weeks, this is the thing, I would like to take a few people along with me on this 6-week journey with me, I think. But it's not something that I regret. It's some— I think it's a learning that I've learned, uh, for future, future launches. But one thing I would do differently is after the launch, after the launch, uh, when we had, uh, 7,000, 8,000+ uh, a long email list, I would handle that email list slightly differently instead of directly sending them an invite in a, in, in, in a, uh, Uh, like on a rolling basis, I would actually start building a conversation with them. I would send them an invite on email number 3. I would first ask them how they use their inbox so that I could tailor the invite and tailor the benefit that they can get out of Mailman, because we had some features, but we said the one same constant thing to everybody instead of even realizing what, what is the problem that they're trying to solve. So the only thing that I would do different is what I did after the launch.

So how you kind of positioned that, those conversations and the nurturing of, of, uh, you know, helping you define your model a little better. Yeah, no, it makes sense.

Yes. So, so I mean, the beta users, I mean, especially the beta users, would you consider all those beta users? I mean, beta users, I consider those be— uh, no, no, not all of them. I mean, um, beta users, I, I, uh, so beta users are the users who signed up for the, uh, pre-launch list. And then they got an invite and then they signed up. Those are like 1,000, 1,000 in the total user base. Everybody else came in after the launch, I mean, through Product Hunt and word of mouth.