Our guest today is software design, app developer and author Nathan Barry. Justin was inspired to launch LeadFuze in 24 hours based on a 24 hour product challenge put out by Nathan. On this episode Nathan talks about how he built ConvertKit, a email marketing tool for professional bloggers that helps them manage email lists and drip campaigns to increase both reader trust and sales. Nathan shares how he focused his efforts on ConvertKit full-time, invested $50,000 and hired his dream team. The result is that Nathan grew ConvertKit from $1,300 a month to $27,000 a month.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Nathan validates a product by going to people he thinks have a specific problem and why money is the only real form of validation
- What he did to focus his efforts on ConvertKit
- His direct sales strategy with ConvertKit
- Finding product market fit
- The things Nathan looks for in the developers he brings on his team
- His testing process for app functions including using automated tests for core functions
- How he settled on his niche market of professional bloggers
- How Nathan selected the name ConvertKit
- The biggest problems he faces in growing ConvertKit
- Nathan’s plans to focus on ConvertKit and continue to build it through bootstrapping
Nathan plans to continue to grow ConvertKit and estimates it will have a value of 50 million dollars. We believe today’s talk with Nathan has a ton of good value bombs in it and we think you’ll agree.
References Mentioned:
- www.podcastingpress.com
- ConvertKit
- The App Design Handbook
- Hiten Shah
- CircleCI
- ConvertKit demo by Pat Flynn
- Nathan’s post on naming your product
- Lean Domain Search
- Slack
- Trello
- System. ly
- LeadFuze
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