We launched Reach in January, 2022. Our intention was to release the most minimally viable product (MVP) possible. Meaning we wanted to release something that was sufficiently stable, feature ready and valuable that someone would pay for it (hopefully many more than one) - but not more than that. Therefore we approached our v1 honestly, aware that it was very far from what we wanted the product to eventually become. The goal was to validate the opportunity and to learn what our users wanted and needed.
After roughly 4 months of selling Reach and onboarding new customers, we’ve learned a lot about our ICP, their needs and how we can update Reach to better fit into their daily routine.
Here are some of the main takeaways:
- AI is great, but it isn’t everything → we launched v1 with a heavy focus on AI generated icebreakers. And while we’re still extremely bullish on the role AI generated icebreakers will play in cold outreach, we’ve also come to understand that many users would prefer an easier way to personalize their outreach while maintaining control over the output. Meaning, people want help getting the data and knowing what’s best to use.
- Users want more control → v1 uses a static algorithm for ordering the priority of data sources that it feeds to the algorithm. These data sources are based on what is available. We chose the prioritization order that all users would use. Naturally, people have their own preferences of what data types they prefer to use for their outreach and therefore want more control in choosing them. A couple of months back we released an update to partially address this by giving users the ability to prioritize LinkedIn or Website data. Anything more nuanced however they weren’t able to control.
- Integrations, integrations, integrations → Reach has always been geared towards people doing high volume outreach. It’s always been our intention to allow users to personalize in bulk for greater efficiency. v1 required users to use CSV files for importing and exporting in bulk. We knew this wasn’t ideal but we liked how CSV plays well with almost every software and therefore Reach could work with any other software that a user has in their stack. The reality is that people don’t like CSV. It’s messy, intimidating and, more importantly, doesn’t fit the current workflow in which everything is directly connected. This proved to be a rather bigger friction than we expected.
- Better UX → the inevitable consequence of launching an MVP is that it’s far from the most polished, intuitive or optimized product. Needless to say, v1 does not possess the best UX. We wanted to wait to hear from users about their experiences and needs before working with our designer on v2.
The focus for v2 is clearly addressing the takeaways from v1. We’ll write more in depth about the changes in v2 in the coming weeks. Our next release will make leads the focus, bring data to the center, give the user greater control over prioritization and have loads of integrations.
