Product feedback: bin the idea or refine it?

This was a bit of a tough one. It felt that way at the time, but a few days later I'm realising some "negative" feedback is actually positive.

I spoke to one industry insider who coaches a group of small business owners. It was a great chat and felt quite validating for my idea.

For context, the idea is sending a monthly newsletter on behalf of small businesses to their email lists to keep customers engaged with the shop. This content would be tailored to this lifestyle industry (cycling), but not so much to the shop. A typical newsletter from a shop would be sales-y: "Latest deals in store", that type of thing. I'm looking at a more engaging newsletter format, highlighting the latest trends, new trails to ride, tips and tricks, content rather than direct marketing.

The chat

My insider connected me with a small business owner of 3 bikes shops in a decent sized city! I was off to the races, knowing I had a receptive audience. It ended up being very difficult to get a hold of him, playing phone and email tag for about a week. This was positive though, as my theory is these SMB owners are too busy to think about email marketing, and this person certainly seemed like it.

We finally got on the call and I stumbled through it, feeling I as trying to convince a person about bike shop marketing who knew a lot more about bike shop marketing than myself. After, I felt quite deflated. His feedback was that generic content [note to self: need a better word than 'generic', doesn't do great content much justice] would be very hard to sell into shops. If shop owners are going to spend money marketing they want to know it is going to drive immediate sales. He also wants to be able to talk about specific bikes he has in store, rather than content about biking. He referenced perhaps writing content on a new part that a supplier has created to improve an aspect of biking, something he has in store.

His advise was I should become an agency creating traditional direct sales EDMs for shops, or go the other direction and write a standalone newsletter from me to bikers. He wasn't a fan of this hybrid approach. This was tough feedback as the genesis of the idea was Dad doing agency style EDMs for a bike shop, but they couldn't afford to have someone tailoring emails specific to their shop. And for the pure newsletter case, I want to create a B2B business solving a problem (marketing to / engaging customers) rather than struggle to build up an audience of my own. And if I were to do that, I don't think it would be for biking, as I'm more into running and hiking. The entrepreneurial aspect of the business interests me more than the biking itself, although I do like biking. I love writing and I love business and marketing, and I believe this idea as a whole can have legs.

So what do I do with this feedback?

Initially I was feeling like this totally invalidated the idea. A shop owner directly told me it would be a tough sell. A potential customer is telling you it doesn't make sense - you've got to bin the idea , right?

But I think there is more beneath the surface. A clue in that chat was his existing knowledge of email marketing and his plans to do some. He hadn't needed to do emails throughout the pandemic - bikes were so popular as people were outside a lot. Things are getting back to normal and he is thinking of starting up EDMs again. This shop owner, with 3 big stores in a decent sized city, perhaps is not my target market. Although he is time poor, he is willing to spend on custom email marketing, whether that be through an agency or in house, perhaps doing it himself. This isn't the same scale of shop owner like my Dad was working with.

So this is a positive realisation - I need to be speaking to smaller shop owners who haven't even tried custom email marketing or only do the basic emails their e-commerce store sends out. I also would like to speak to other big city owners to get a feel if they see it the same way though. Now if it can't get any of them on board, that feels a lot more like true invalidation.

I also think the snippet about wanting more direct sales is good. Conceptually I think of this email newsletter as a series of highly engaging content you look forward to getting each month. Like a short magazine. It feels like sales focussed content will detract from that - I personally despise marketing emails ironically, but that puts me in a position to want to make them fun and engaging. However, I think I can take away from this conversation that there does need to be some sales type content. I'm thinking if I have a section "3 trends in mountain biking", at the bottom I can feature 3 products from that shop that match that trend. Simple text links to their shop. I always intended to have several links to their shop in the email, but these would be more direct about products or sales. I think I can work these in without ruining the enjoyment of the newsletter.

Finally, dealing emotionally

Another take away here is for my emotions. I felt myself riding the rollercoaster like you might with a text message exchange with a romantic interest. "Why aren't I hearing back?. This shop owner hasn't got back to me after sending him a test email tailored to his shop last week. This can hurt, but I need to desensitise myself to this. As my wife said, she's so busy at work and has several emails she is days behind on replying to. Don't take these things personally, have belief in myself and move onwards!

I will press on and look forward to sending out my weekly updates as I go along with this journey. I am currently 2.5 months into my goal of getting some online revenue by the end of June, and $100/mth profit by the end of the year.