Ryan Shank documents a Saturday during Techstars Summer '17, launching a Facebook ad campaign with pixel implementation and custom audiences, then arguing founders should sell before building. He emphasizes pre-sales and demo pipelines over emotional attachment to your product.
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So we went out in this awesome boat. We are at Battery Park right now. We went out to sea. We went all the way up to the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Hi guys, what's up? It is Saturday. We are back in the apartment finally. We had a quick 2 weeks off where we accidentally rented my entire apartment out on Airbnb, but we're back now. What I'm about to do now is go out to my friends in town. We're gonna hit up this place in SoHo called Hotel Chantelle, and then I have— and I'm gonna meet up with Kane around 4, and then we have a boat cruise at 6 o'clock. Or like a sunset boat cruise at 6:15 tonight with all the Techstars people. So anyway, that's what we're gonna go do. I hope you guys are having a good Saturday. I'm working right now also in Slack with Michael, with Will. We're trying to update a lot of the creatives 'cause we just started our Facebook ads campaign. Without further ado, let's start the day. [MUSIC] But we have to do a little bit of stuff in the office today. We just got the Facebook campaign live, so we're gonna kinda test that and make sure Mike, he's been working all night night on getting new ads created. We finally got a pretty sophisticated Facebook advertising campaign up. What we did is we created a bunch of different custom audiences inside of Facebook. We have the pixel on the site. What happens is when you do Facebook advertising, you have this pixel that's on the site that learns over time, you know, the type of audience that you're targeting and then whether they're converting or they're not converting. So then it smartly displays your ads to the right people and starts to adjust the audiences accordingly. So we finally got the pixel up on the site, right? We basically guessed at all of these different custom audiences and we created created a bunch of like criteria, you know, if they like conversion-based marketing, performance-based marketing, and they like, you know, online lead generation. So we're targeting things like that. We got all of that loaded. Finally, we have a landing page that we're pretty comfortable and satisfied with. Again, it doesn't really matter what we think. It's all about testing it, testing, testing, testing, and then letting the data drive the actual decisions and not being emotionally attached to any of it. Today is Saturday. We're going on a boat cruise later today with a bunch of the Techstars people. So thank you, Techstars. I'm really looking forward to it. Of like actual shit. Yeah, we can document everything. Document, document, document. And then when we need to pull content, we like just have a bunch of good stuff. Yeah, I think people are doing that where they're trying to just like— like pop-ups? Yeah, pop-ups and coworking spaces in commercial real estate that's like in between tenants. But I think the downside would be like, alright, the amount of money that we're gonna get while it's between tenants isn't that much. Like it's not material relative to like renting the whole thing out. And it actually prohibits you from being able to show it like you want to show it. Right. You know, like you can't like show it or stage it or anything if there's like random coworkers in there or like a huge pop-up because then people can't really see the vision. Guys, so one of the things I want to talk about today is doing sales and marketing first before you actually build the product. I've been talking to a lot of founders recently and they all are like, oh, you know, they've spent all this time, money, and energy building a product and figuring it out and then they're like, yeah, and then I'm going to like start doing sales later. Like, that is the horrible and most wrong way of looking at things, right? You should at least sell your— presell your product and make sure that it's validated, that you know how to sell it, different channels and stuff, before you've actually spent all this time and energy building the actual product. Because if you are not able to get that product into the hands of someone, or you can't have it even validated that those people even want your product with your value prop and the messaging and things like that, then you just wasted a ton of time. If we feed, you know, get people to sign up sign up for a demo request, or we just go outbound, that the demos will happen, that they'll close at a predictable rate. And that's the thing is like training them with all the documentation, all that stuff to be able to close the demos, close people who do a demo at like 30%, 40%.
All right, guys, we just got off the boat.
That was so sick. Thank you so much, Techstars. So we went out in this awesome boat. We are at Battery Park right now. We went out to sea, we went all the way up to the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, came around, went back by the Statue of Liberty. It was an awesome time. The sunset is beautiful. The weather tonight is so nice. Saturday night in New York City hanging out with the class, the Summer '17 class. So that was so awesome. Super appreciative to be a part of this. This is it for the vlog. Again, if you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building the company from the ground up. We're going through Techstars in New York City. Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers, and just doing really awesome stuff, okay? So I'm out. This is the vlog for today. It is Saturday. Tomorrow is Sunday. We do this every single day, so come back and join us tomorrow.
