UI User Story Example

Miya is part of the awesome group called The Foundation. She is a developer by trade and she wants to send cold email to do market research in her area of interest, IP law. She tries quickemail.io and finds it's interface very confusing. She is new to cold email marketing. She signsup for toutapp and finds that it is very bloated. She posts on TF forum to get some recommendation for cold email marketing automation tools. They recommend vocus which is also not beginner friendly. She has questions like: Will this allow me to upload a CSV file and schedule the emails to send out based on template. Vocus website does not provide any answers to these questions.

Miya found the quickmail.io interface very confusing to use. Instead of days, you had to convert the days to hours for the followup sequence. It had variation and A/B testing as part of the setup which was not required for her initial set of emails to be sent. It was difficult to find the merge fields and had to contact support several times over the period of 5 days. She did not know whether it was a bug due to the browser she was using or which icon would display the merge fields. She had a specific task to complete but found it extremely difficult to use the product. The training video she found on youtube channel of quickmail.io was irrelevant and she wasted few hours of her time watching the unrelated video to her task. She was very frustrated.

As a developer she started to do research on open tracking and threading features found in other products. She figured out threading is not really required. She found out that only the first email open must be tracked and ignore the email open when they are replying to her email. Scheduling the emails to trigger would require a fair amount of work. She found some good resources on how to authenticate to use the Gmail API for sending emails.

Goal: Cold email and followup for contacting prospects

Business Model Canvas for SaaS Business

Key Partners
What can you outsource to whom?

Web Hosting Providers
IaaS Providers
Open Source Projects

Key Activities
What will you need to master?

Customer interviews
Product Development (Product design, Software Development)
Deployment and Maintenance

Key Resources
What do you ned to build up?

Code base
Developers

Value Propositions
What is your unique value proposition?

Business Productivity and Collaboration

Customer Relationships

Customer Conference
Associations
Events
Acquire and Lockin

Channels
How to communicate and deliver?

Self service
Web
Phone
Email

Customer Segments
Who are your customers?

IP Attorneys

Cost Structure
What are my costs?

Product development
Partner costs (IaaS)
Marketing and Sales
Hosting Fees
Customer Acquisition Costs
Salaries

Revenue Streams
How will you make money?

Usage based, by user or by transaction

The Four Pillars of Wealth

Clay Collins and Perry Marshal recommend:

1. Automated Sale
2. Recurring Revenue
3. Sell a reproducible product or a tool (break time for money dependency and scale)
4. No accounts receivable (Get paid in advance)

1. Find pains
2. Presell
3. Outsource product development

1. Find the problem
2. Sell the solution
3. Hire a developer

1. Idea discovery
2. Sketch the solution (create a paper prototype to solve the problem)
3. Presell the sketch
4. Outsource product development
5. Launch the product

Find booming industries and sell them software tools.

References

Notes from Dane Maxwell's video transcript 
Read The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow