Five Mistakes To Avoid In a Nurturing E-Mail

5 mistakes to avoid in a nurturing E-Mail: make sure it’s nurturing, ask about bugs, be clear on website wording, don’t send same message twice, fix bugs.

Five Mistakes To Avoid In a Nurturing E-Mail

I signed up for a free trial of a lean project management tool ( LeanMonitor). A few days later I got the following nurturing E-Mail.

Subject: Are you afraid to manage your project in a lean way?

We’ve noticed that you haven’t been signing into LeanMonitor for a long time and this is a sign that you are not really committed to being lean. Remember that 96% of innovative projects fail, will your project be one of them? I hope not!

Remember that just having a gym membership is not going to help you get better, if you want to improve you have to do the work!

Log in to LeanMonitor today and start validating your project.

There are a three problems with this:

1. it’s not nurturing.
2. It assumes the tool is flawless and the problem is one of my motivation. In fact the tool does not work.
3. I signed up for a free trial but none of the three primary dashboards in LeanMonitor for hypotheses, experiments, and results actually worked.

So I replied:

I went to add a hypothesis and it said that I need to pay.
I tried to add an experiment and it said I need to pay.
I tried to record a result and it said I need to pay.

Can you please explain your model for free evaluation?

It’s like someone showing you free samples in the supermarket and asking “Would you like to try it?” When you say “Yes” they say, “that will be a $1.”

You advertise a free trial but it seems like it is more like a free product tour, you cannot actually do anything.

Anyway, if what you are doing is working for you don’t stop but it seems weirdly antagonistic and dysfunctional as an approach to letting me evaluate your software.

Do you have any fully worked out examples I can review?

I got the following reply:

Hi Sean, thanks for writing!

We have reviewed the website and realized that there is a mistake: previously, we offered a free trial, and we haven’t updated the text in the startups page.

Sorry for the inconvenience. We really appreciate your feedback and we’d like to offer you a 14-day free trial with all functionality available and a 10% off in our pricing plans.

It seemed a little flaky so I waited a few days and checked their website, it still advertised a free trial.

“Get 1 canvas + 1 user totally FREE (No credit card is required.)”

A day later I got another copy of the original “nurturing” E-Mail.

4. Sending the identical e-mail a week later is definitely not a good idea.
5. Not fixing the website announcement of a free trial tells me that they are in free fall.

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Context: Initial Email

3 reasons your project will fail or succeed with LeanMonitor?

I wanted to share more our mission at LeanMonitor.

As a serial entrepreneur, I have more than 12 years of experience building new ventures, and I really wish I had a tool such as LeanMonitor for my first startup! We built LeanMonitor to help other entrepreneurs and innovators on their journey so that we can accelerate the impact that entrepreneurship and innovation can have around the World. I truly believe that the future will be better because of the global entrepreneurial ecosystem that we’re all building now (including you!). We have created a tool by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. 

Every day thousands of startups are created more than 95% of them fail, and only 3 out of every 1000 entrepreneurs will ever achieve 20% annual growth rate! Why is this happening? I see 3 key reasons:

1. Ego – everyone believes their idea is gold, but not every idea can be gold. There is so much time and energy wasted building products that don’t solve big problems and that don’t survive contact with real customers. The best way to crush your ego, is to validate your idea with real customers and iterate so that you solve their real problems. LeanMonitor helps you do this.
2. Chaos – managing an innovative project or startup venture is crazy. There are so many moving parts and complexities, and knowing what aspects to focus on next and prioritizing top tasks becomes a critical skill, but it’s hard. LeanMonitor helps you prioritize and test your riskiest assumptions and make more data-based decisions. 
3. Alignment – collaborating with your team can already be a challenge, but aligning the team to the Lean Startup approach can be even more challenging. LeanMonitor helps teams stay focused on the process and share the most important data about your project.

Applying Lean Startup is like playing basketball because you can’t learn how to play basketball just by reading books. You need to practice! To practice effectively you need the right tools. LeanMonitor is like the basketball gym where you can find all of the tools you need to get good at Lean Startup. 

But just because you have a gym membership does not mean that you’ll automatically get better! Lean Startup is like anything that is worthwhile to pursue, it takes discipline!

How easy is it to accomplish any of the milestones below?

• Turn your project into a profitable business
• Scale your business faster
• Learn from your key activities and results
• Make data-based decisions
• Be aligned with your team
• Get personalized lean startup advice

In my experience, each of these things is really hard to achieve, and yet as an innovation manager or entrepreneur we must do all of them simultaneously! Well, this is why we created LeanMonitor, to help make this journey easier.

Are you still afraid to do the work, or are you ready to become a real Lean Startup?

[I am committed to being successful]

Francisco Palao
CEO @LeanMonitor