1/ I recently read about Adjacent User Theory and, despite it being focused on expanding existing users. thought there were some great takeaways about prospecting.

2/ General concept is that just beyond your existing users are groups of potential users who would better adopt your product if it were positioned differently. As you expand your positioning, you convert under-engaged users.

In outbound sales it's the same.
3/ Too many startups try too hard to guess their exact prospect profile. This is necessary to find their first successful customer profile, but beyond that, identifying new types of prospects should be more formulaic.
4/ Here's how I've done it to identify 12 different successful prospect profiles in a few months:

- Use the 80/20 rule: 20% of the leads you reach out to should fall outside of your current core prospect profile.
5/ Priority should be on profiles with only 1-2 differences from the current core. Perhaps a slightly different pain point, but not dramatically different.
6/ You want someone who, if you could successfully attract them, would open up an untapped market for you but who could still see value (even if not fully optimized) in the current messaging.
7/ As you include the 20% fringe prospects in your outreach, you'll start to see which ones are picking up on the value props you present.
8/ When you start to see decent response rates from a specific fringe prospect profile, it's time to create a separate campaign with messaging focused specifically on their pain points.
9/ You can do this dozens of times per month, and likely find a handful of new potential markets with each test batch, and you can now scale your pipeline up without exhausting any specific profile too quickly.
10/ For example:

I was running outbound for a last-mile logistics platform focused on grocery retail. I (in this case accidentally) included a batch of non-grocery retailers in the lead list. Turns out the response rate for non-grocery was 10x that of grocery.
11/ This story doesn't end as well because the client wasn't interested in non-grocery retail for a number of reasons. But the process still works.
12/ If you're purposeful about who you include as a fringe profile, you'll be able to gradually expand from your core into new markets that you are ready for and that are ready for you.

More from Startups

.@zapier built a $140M ARR business on $1.4M in VC that has become the logic layer of the no-code industry.

But it has the potential to be something even bigger: the Netflix of productivity.

Our report and a thread 👉

We believe @seqouia and @steadfast got a good deal buying into Zapier at $5B.

We value Zapier at $7B based on:

- 30-50% YoY growth over the next five years
- Zapier’s monopoly status in the solopreneur/SMB market
- 30-40% YoY growth of no-code TAM

No-code is huge and growing, but as @edavidpeterson has written, no-code is about more than tools: it’s about a philosophy that emphasizes interoperability and customizing your software to your needs.

https://t.co/UJY6BRtXwl


.@zapier enabled interoperability by building a solution to one of the intractable problems in SaaS: APIs that don’t talk to each other.

The product took off and hit $100M ARR in just 9 years, comparable to companies that have raised 100x as much money.

https://t.co/0Thk42eRpJ


Zapier was riding an explosion in APIs that started the same year they were founded—2011.

Suddenly, every SaaS business wanted to offer its users extensibility, but not spend time figuring out what integrations to build or building them.

That’s where Zapier came in handy.
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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