Recently, I shared the story of securing Aprao's first customer. That post brought back the excitement of seeing someone value the product that we poured so much time and effort into building.
Fast forward, and our customer base now numbers in the hundreds. This milestone prompted me to reflect on the next stage of our journey: creating a scalable sales process.
Landing our first customer, alongside positive early conversations, helped refine our ICP. Analysing the 900 email sign-ups collected during development phase began to reveal a key customer profile – a specific type of company that responded positively to our outreach.
I'd categorise this ICP as a small and medium-sized (SME) property developer frustrated with spreadsheets. This could be due to a non-financial background or an awareness of spreadsheet risks when assessing development projects.
Thankfully, with this ICP, we often dealt directly with the main decision-maker, who usually felt the pain of their existing spreadsheets.
To better refine how we approached this ICP, we asked ourselves these key questions:
Armed with the answers, we started building a website and marketing plan specifically targeted at our ICP.
We wanted our solution to resonate deeply with our ICP, so we decided to speak directly to their pain points.
Here's an example:
This language shift emphasises the positive outcome and benefit of the feature, not just the technical details. We realised that listing features often goes over people's heads. Feature descriptions pale in comparison to clearly communicating how Aprao solves a specific pain point they're experiencing.
Our focus wasn't on enterprise sales, so we avoided building a large outbound sales team. Instead, we prioritised high-quality content to generate inbound leads.
Our strategy, which remains in place today, is:
With these goals in mind, we refined the customer journey to make it as smooth as possible for people to discover Aprao, learn about its value, build trust, and ultimately sign up.
A focused ICP allowed us to produce content and a customer journey with direct relevance. The content acts as a filter – if it's not relevant to the reader, they're likely not our ideal customer.
This strategy proved so successful that we continue to use it today. While we explored larger outbound sales teams, we realised that if people have the problem we solve and we provide a path for them to find us, they will.
Doing something well consistently yields results. I'm proud to say that to this day, our content-driven inbound strategy remains our top performer, enabling Aprao to scale effectively.