Our latest problem (and how we're solving it)
Happy Sunday!
This week was fun. My favorite part was the brainstorming session we had on our all-hands call about how to grow Bullpen’s revenue in the midst of the current economic climate.
There were several good ideas. A few that stood out …
Purchase another business that has a different cyclicality
Launch a product where users can access our database to hire directly
Begin to monetize our research newsletter, the Weekly Warmup
Mirror Bullpen’s business model in an adjacent sector (outside of real estate)
Why the brainstorming session? … I’ll get there.
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This week at Bullpen …
On Tuesday, I took a day of rest at Heavenly in Lake Tahoe. The conditions were amazing, and I was able to clear my head after a difficult Monday.
We had more partnership conversations and will (hopefully) be launching a “deals” section of our web app with exclusive discounts to key proptech providers soon.
We tightened up our past-due invoice collection process - following the terms of our contract very closely. So far, customers are responding well to the changes.
We started to get to the bottom of why closing our 2022 books has been difficult this year.
Why was Monday difficult?
Since the start of 2022, we’ve had a difficult time converting our leads into customers. Compared to December 2022, we’ve dramatically grown our marketing qualified leads (MQLs) - see below.
How do we define an MQL? We consider folks who complete our “Hire Now” workflow on our website an MQL. In other words - people who indicate they want to hire.
While our leads have grown, we’ve struggled to convert them to paying customers. As such, the number of new customers we had in December equated to the number of new customers in January.
After speaking with some mentors, I realized there were three potential causes:
We have a product problem
We have a go-to-market problem
We have a team/process problem
While all three could be true, we landed on our go-to-market as the most probable issue.
In the coming weeks, we’re going to be iterating on our go-to-market strategy, with a renewed focus on what our best customers see in us. As such …
We’re going to explore moving away from “freelancer” as a noun in our marketing and sales process.
We’re going to double down on why our best customers use us … we have a really solid PROCESS that yields stellar QUALITY talent.
We’re going to be transparent about who can most benefit from working with us … Bullpen is more expensive than “Doing it Yourself” on Upwork or LinkedIn. However, we’re way cheaper than hiring an HR team to build a similar process, and our network would be near impossible to replicate for an individual business. Thus, it makes a ton of sense to use Bullpen when you don’t have the time or interest in hiring contract team members yourself, and you value having a top-quality hire.
That’s all for this week! Let me know if you enjoyed this update.
✌️📤
Tyler
Founder @ Bullpen