Dear Ideaspace,

I’ve been thinking of ways to effectively communicate the updates of our startup, Lapit Parcel . We have been working and hustling in reaching our milestones. My first idea was to use a powerpoint where I put all the metrics of our performance, but just like what you read in this essay, First Idea does not necessarily mean the best idea. Using a powerpoint does not tell the entire story. What i want to discuss is how we faced the challenges along the way and how we made our decision. So I’ve decided that the best way on reaching this is through writing.

Submitting our updates this way helps both the writer and reader because it organizes my thoughts and ideas, while you as the reader, will get the benefit of understanding the discussion more clearly.

For this past week, here is the first milestone that we reached:

We were able to get 20 experienced online sellers to be part of the Partner program that offers reselling.

Why did we chose this as a milestone? In a simple answer, it is our top go to market strategy. But to further explain our thought process on why we made this as our go to market strategy, and what we initially learned from this decision, we have our explanation here:

ONLINE SELLER WORLD

First, let’s begin by understanding that space we are in. Lapit Parcel’s customers are online sellers in the Philippines. In the online seller world, there are two types of online sellers — the experienced online sellers and the new online sellers. Although Lapit Parcel can cater to both of these categories, we wanted to focus on experienced online sellers since they are more open in optimizing the management of their stores.

Experienced Online Sellers can range from those who already have their own inventory management and employees working full time in their online store. These sellers typically earn around reaching at least Php 3 Million of annual revenue. On the other hand, there are also Experienced Online Sellers that are managing their own inventory in their household and working with their family members to fulfill these orders. They earn an average of Php 1 million of annual revenue.

The difficulty of turning these experience online sellers to become customers is our lack of brand awareness and testimonials of other sellers. When we started to reach out to these experienced online sellers even before we joined Ideaspace, their concern has always been changing the process that they’ve built in their business.

DEVISING THE FIRST SALES FUNNEL STRATEGY

Initially, we crafted our sales funnel to lead them to test out our service by having some of their inventories in our warehouse ( our house ). In this way, we can slowly show them our capability and make them observe the effect in their business. However, when we validated this experiment to our customers, they did not bought the idea.

What’s worse is that we weren’t able to reach out for feedback because they stopped messaging us when we were asking them questions. So we reviewed this model by making random surveys to experienced online sellers and ask if it works for them. And that’s where we realized the thought process of our customers when they’re thinking of trying to avail our service.

The first thing we realized about our result was that experienced online sellers see our service as a Big decision in their business. While we were pitching them about trying the product, we realized that they are trying to see all the angles first before they make a decision. We did not realize this in our initial assumptions because WE THOUGH THAT OUR SERVICE IS A QUICK SELL.

We were wrong.

OUR SECOND ATTEMPT ON SALES FUNNEL STRATEGY

After our first attempt, we realized that we are facing a dilemma. It is taking time for our Customers to try the service, but the longer they wait, the less likely they will use the service. From our point of view, we wanted our customers to try it now. Because we were confident that once we get them to use our service, we can get them to stay.

So we decided to revise our sales funnel strategy. We first asked ourselves, what were the normal decisions Online Sellers make that needed to be quick. And after much thinking, we realized that their reseller program requires quick decision making.

Reseller program is one sales funnel that provide additional income for them since other people will post online and sell their item.

In the Online Seller World, reseller is one of the most strategic move because it floods the market with their product. Although it is technically competing with the same category, all of those sales leads to you.

So, we asked ourselves if we can utilize the need of Customers that are looking for resellers by helping them find resellers, but in return, the resellers will order their items via Lapit Parcel.

I gave this strategy an approval because at the minimum it will build brand awareness among the Online Seller world. And we wanted our customers to know Lapit Parcel as a business that GIVES BEFORE WE GET.

Finally, we finished the second attempt. The way our Lapit Parcel reseller package works is that we message them via social media or their online store and ask them if they are offering a reseller program. Their answer either Yes or No will have the same response which is we will ask them if they would be interested if we help them find resellers for their products. In this way, since the question is basically if they want more money, we were hoping that we can make them say Yes after the second question.

So after they agreed on this, we will include them in store directory which we will be posting in our social media.

SO HOW DID IT GO?

When we used the Reseller strategy, we were get an immediate yes from the Experienced Online Sellers that we message. The second strategy gave us a “Hook” — a statement that gets them curious. The Hook increased our response rate and made it easier to start a conversation because it was about THEM. Not Lapit Parcel. It was natural for them to open up not only about their interest to have resellers, they got comfortable enough to express their other pain points being an online seller. We did not expect the latter to happen, but it was a surprising result.

But of course it was not 100% effective, there are still online sellers that did not respond to our messages. Also, as pointed out by our mentor, one of the down side of this approach is that Online Sellers might have a different message in terms of Lapit Parcel offers. Since we are approaching them as helping them in Reselling, they might be surprised that our real business was Fulfillment service. It was definitely a legitimate point.

However, we still decided to continue with this strategy because it is helping us in reaching a bigger goal of our company which is to create a community of our early users. A community where online sellers help each other out and can be our “Champions” down the line. Since we still don’t have a brand in the online seller world, it was a risk we were willing to take. We already started a conversation with them, and we can even show how we are serious in helping their business.

Paul Graham once stated that for early Startups, Do things that don’t scale. Do it in order to find out the customers and determine what’s inside their head. This strategy definitely hit that part. Not only did we hit what’s in their head, we can ride with their journey and understand the challenges that they will face along the way.

So the strategy was not just sales strategy, it was also a brand strategy.

Only time will tell if this “First” Go to market strategy will work. But since things will definitely change and our Brand awareness problem will decrease, at least we started it off by helping our customer’s problem first.

Because what’s a startup if you’re not solving a problem.