Have you ever wondered what it takes to bring a new product to market?

A great product alone is not enough to succeed in today’s competitive market. And we most certainly will not have a great product when we start. So we’ll need to have a strong go-to-market (GTM) strategy that will help us reach our target audience and create awareness about our product.

After sketching the Knowlo wireframes on Day 9, today we’ll be coming back to our GTM strategy from Day 4 and we’ll go a little deeper into things that we could be doing to build some visibility for Knowlo with the help of CofounderGPT. we’ll also talk about how we’ll get our first pilot customers and I’ll update you on our move to WordPress.

Let’s get right into it.

Go-to-market

We touched briefly on the GTM strategy on Day 4 just to get a sense of who we could target and what some of our starting KPIs could be. Today, we’ll be expanding on this and figuring out how we’re gonna start getting everything ready pilot Knowlo in a handful of companies, and then open it up to beta users. We need to keep building our mailing list so that we’ll have more companies trying out the product and providing us with feedback on how to improve it.

Let’s ask CofounderGPT for some help:

We spoke a little ago about Knowlo’s go-to-market strategy. We’ve since refined what the product is going to be and Slobodan and you built a prototype to demonstrate how our tooltip will work. While Slobodan prepares a prototype for some pilot customers to try out, we need to figure out a go-to-market strategy for our MVP. We don’t want to waste time, we need to start building an audience for this product right away so that we have people who are ready to beta test the product once we release the MVP. So the main goal for our current GTM strategy is to build out mailing list and create awareness about the MVP we are going to be releasing in the next couple of weeks.

Slobodan and I don’t have a lot of time to invest into Knowlo at the moment, so this GTM strategy needs to be heavily focused on leveraging your skills and AI tools in general. We cannot invest more than 8 hours per week helping with marketing so most of it needs to be done by you with help from us for anything you cannot do.

As CofounderGPT, I need your help to prepare this strategy and then to work on it. Please assume the role of a marketing master who works with early stage companies like ours. We need to come up with a GTM strategy that to align with the goals and requirements I outlined above. What do you suggest?

After writing this very detailed prompt, CofounderGPT came back to the suggestions it had in Day 4 and added 1-2 new ones.

I don’t like #4, #5 and #6 from these suggestions because it requires that CofounderGPT interacts with the public. Slobodan or I would need to be there to supervise these interactions and we don’t have time to do that. The last thing we want is for Knowlo to start threatening people the way Microsoft’s Bing did. So that leaves #1, #2, #3 and #7.

What I would normally do when brainstorming with CofounderGPT is to try to extract more ideas before settling down onto the ones we want to work on. But I kind of like these ideas and I think they could work as a starting point. At the very least I think they’re worth trying before eliminating them so Let’s start with the first three for now, and we’ll also see if CofounderGPT has some ideas for #7 which we may be able to incorporate into what we’re already doing.

AI-Generated Content Series

My experience trying to get ChatGPT to write an article on its own has been quite disappointing. Without clear context and guidelines on what I want as an output, I have gotten mediocre results at best. This is why Slobodan and I write all the articles ourselves, and then CofounderGPT just provides feedback and editorial advice.

So writing a whole AI-generated content series does not sound like something which we can mostly automate. However, I do have access to the Browser plugin in ChatGPT. This means that I have an internet connected version of CofounderGPT available to do research on topics, aggregate that research and then maybe write a higher quality article? I’m not sure how this will work but I think It’s worth a shot. I’ll do a separate article on how we’re conducting this experiment.

There are so many AI subjects that I think we need to be writing about and I don’t have the time to cover all of them. So this may be a good opportunity to let CofounderGPT write some of the articles.

Let’s work with CofounderGPT to expand on this point:

I like #1, #2 and #3 on your list. #7 we are already doing so I like that one as well. The rest we can discard and let’s focus on these four, starting with #1.

Please expand on this point and let’s make a plan out of it. Starting next Monday and for the next 2 weeks, I’d like to produce 2 articles per week written by you, CofounderGPT. These articles need to be well written, well researched and relevant to our audience.

To start, what subjects do you think you should write about in these 4 articles?

With this prompt, CofounderGPT provided some ok suggestions for articles which might be relevant to our audience:

I’m not crazy about any of these suggestions, they’re pretty average so Let’s push CofounderGPT to come up with some new topics that might not necessarily be related to knowledge management, but that would be articles our potential customers might read.

After a few iterations and clarifications, here is what CofounderGPT came up with:

These are a little more original so Let’s go with these 4 for now. we’re gonna be starting our AI-powered content series next week, so the subject of one of the articles for next week will be how we’re writing these articles which will be mostly written by CofounderGPT with a little help from me.

Lead Magnet Creation

I gotta say I’m not really clear on how we’re gonna do this idea, but it sounds kind of interesting. I’m particularly interested to see what kind of templates we can come up with for ChatGPT or other AI tools.

Let’s get CofounderGPT to elaborate on this point:

Moving on to point #2 on your list. I like the idea of creating a Lead Magnet. But I don’t think we should write an e-book or whitepaper. I’m not sure how much value we can provide with those ideas and I’m not sure if you can research and write a high quality book on your own yet.

But I like the idea of creating some kind of templates for our target audience. Particularly templates related to AI or what we’re building. Let’s explore this idea.

What are some template ideas that our target audience needs? What are some AI related templates that they are searching for on Google?

Please don’t suggest obvious ideas. We need to be creative and innovative. Let’s come up with something very few people are doing.

The first batch of ideas that CofounderGPT came up with were average as usual. Then I explained that our target audience are small to medium size software and SaaS companies. The people inside these companies that we are targeting are probably the product manager and the CTO (this is a hypothesis that we’ll need to validate). What kind of templates might this profile of person be searching for that CofounderGPT can create for us?

We came up with this list that I think we can work with:

I particularly like the Risk Assessment template because we just did our SOC2 audit at Vacation Tracker and I think this risk assessment template might even be useful for us for our next audit. we’ll start with that and then decide on another template later.

AI-Powered Social Media Presence

This is a tricky one. It would be awesome if we could connect CofounderGPT to something like Twitter and have it talk to people about starting a company. But there are all sorts of risks associated with that, as Microsoft found out a few years ago. Maybe we can automate posting startup quotes and advice by CofounderGPT on Twitter? I have an idea on how we could automate that using AutoGPT. But it will require a developer and some time to set up, so we’ll skip this one for now and come back to it once we get going with #1 and #2 on the list.

Knowlo Case Study

The last suggestion on CofounderGPTs list was a case study of Knowlo and to share on social media how we’re building it. we’ve been doing that from the start so Let’s see if CofounderGPT can come up with some ideas that we have not thought of:

Moving on to recommendation #7, the Knowlo Case Study. We are actually already doing this and so far, we have written 9 articles about all the steps we have taken so far with building Knowlo. I am currently in the process of writing the 10th article about our GTM strategy which we are working on together right now. Besides documenting every step we have done with Knowlo so far, we are also writing educational articles about AI, we have written two so far and plan on writing more. We have been sharing our articles on Twitter and LinkedIn. We have also been more active on these social networks to draw more attention to what we are doing.

This is what we have done so far but we need help to improve it. We don’t have a lot of time to invest in this, so anything else that we do has to leverage the skills of CofounderGPT and other AI tools. Please assume the role of a marketing master whose only mission is to increase the visibility of what we’re doing within the requirements I explained above.

Do you have any other suggestions on what we could be doing as part of building Knowlo publicly? If you do, please come up with a list and provide a short explanation for each suggestion.

I had to push for some more creative ideas after the first result, but after a few iterations, we came up with a list that had some suggestions which made sense to me:

I like #1, #2 and #4 on this list. I really want to explore how CofounderGPT can do content syndication. I have a hard time seeing how this is going to work but if we can figure it out, I think it could really help us. I’m already doing some AI-generated visual content, most of the pictures on our website and in these articles are created using Midjourney. And the AI-generated newsletter is a not bad idea as well. Things are moving so fast with AI that having a curated newsletter with our articles peppered in might work for us. Especially if we can automate it, and I have an idea how we can do that with AutoGPT as well.

For now, I’ll start working with CofounderGPT on the content syndication and then we’ll work on the other two suggestions.

Pilot Customers

we’re very fortunate because we have Vacation Tracker as our first pilot customer. We understand the problem and we have the ability to test our solution immediately with customers. But we also want to find 2-3 other companies who are willing to try this out on their products. We need to create feedback loops with potential customers as quickly as possible and what they tell us will guide how we will continue evolving Knowlo.

How are we going to find these pilot customers? I always start with my network. I asked around and it didn’t take me long to find a company willing to try it out with a group of their users. This company prefers to stay anonymous for now. I’m still looking for another 2 companies who are willing to pilot this with us. If anyone reading this is willing to give this a shot in their companies, please let me know. Anyone who starts early with us will get 6 months free once we do a full launch of the product.

My next step is to find some Reddit and LinkedIn communities for early stage startups where I can ask if anyone will be interested in trying out Knowlo. There is also Indie Hackers and Microconf. I’m already a member of the Microconf Slack and they have a channel for this kind of thing. I think ChartMogul also has a nice entrepreneurial community where we might be able to find a good channel to ask. Anyway, these are just some ideas of where we are going to try outside of our networks. I’m sure there are plenty of other places besides these.

Update on WordPress

we’re just about done with the move to WordPress. I’m hoping we’re going to make it before the end of the current billing cycle. There are a few minor details to work out, mainly with the readability of the articles on the site. I bought the template thinking that it has a lot of the elements we’re going to need as we start expanding the website. But I didn’t try to read an article on the blog. It’s kind of a shitty reading experience and we need to fix it. This and the migration of all the content is What’s taking a little bit longer than expected. But hopefully by the time Slobodan publishes the Day 11 article, we’ll be moved to WordPress.

Scoreboard

We didn’t directly spend any money today, but we got charged $20 for another month of ChatGPT Plus. Most of the time for this day was spent on working with CofounderGPT on the GTM strategy, working on the WordPress website and speaking to a few people about piloting Knowlo:

Time spent today: 7h

Total time spent: 64h

Investment today: $20 (ChatGPT Plus payment)

Total investment: $308.54 USD

Users: 0

Revenue: $0

What’s next?

Coming up in the next article, Slobodan will describe how he and CofounderGPT are building the Knowlo prototype.