The conversation revolved around entrepreneurship, with Aaron Lim sharing his experiences and insights on starting simple, focusing on early stages, and adapting to customer needs. Aaron Lim and Daryl Urbanski emphasized the importance of prioritizing customer problems and feedback in launching a successful startup, while Aaron Lim highlighted the value of starting with their existing network and leveraging referrals. Finally, Aaron Lim emphasized the importance of defining the ideal customer profile for self-serve onboarding, and provided examples of how to tailor the onboarding flow to specific problems faced by the target audience.

Resources

• You may connect Aaron Lim on LinkedIn
• For more Informative Interviews Click Here.

Episode Highlights

Entrepreneurship, innovation, and business solutions with Aaron Lim, co-founder and CEO of Proveer Aaron Lim

• Aaron Lim, co-founder and CEO of Proveer, shares his accidental journey into business and marketing.
• Aaron Lim built simple Facebook app in college, gained attention from startups
• Aaron Lim co-founded App Central to deploy apps across mobile devices, pivoted to enterprise app store for businesses

Entrepreneurship, startup challenges, and identifying market demand

• Aaron Lim faced early challenges in their startups, including lack of traction and focus on building without customer validation.
• Aaron Lim learned from their mistakes and shifted their mindset to prioritize customer needs and validation.
• The founder of the company identified a problem in the real estate industry and created a solution that personalized listings for agents and clients.
• The founder monetized the product by accepting payments from early users, even though the company was not yet registered or had a website.

Aligning buyer and user in CRM software development

• Daryl Urbanski shares his experience in the CRM space, including leading CRM efforts at Blackrock and GIC.
• Daryl discusses the challenge of balancing salesperson and management needs in CRM systems.
• Aaron Lim describes a shift in mentality towards aligning buyer and user needs, leading to a more B2C market approach.
• Daryl Urbanski sees an opportunity to become a secret weapon for small business owners, providing personal productivity tools their bosses don't know about.

Entrepreneurship, sales, and marketing strategies

• Aaron reached out to network contacts for referrals and found strong response, skipping some steps of the 7-step fast cash plan.
• Aaron Lim used landing page and emails to reach out to people, leveraging strong network response without needing to follow full 7-step plan.
• Aaron realized the importance of proving their idea wrong quickly, rather than trying to sell it.
• Aaron Lim prioritized understanding customer problems over selling, to avoid overcoming the challenge of second startup.

Creating a self-serve onboarding process for a real estate app, overcoming growth pains, and understanding customer needs

• We operate at a low price point, so self-serve is best for global expansion.
• Free trial with all features unlocked, proven value before payment.
• Aaron shares insights on onboarding and self-service, emphasizing the importance of tailoring the experience to the individual user.

Narrowing down target audience for self-serve product using specific criteria

• Narrow down ideal customer profile to maximize self-serve potential.
• Aaron aims to convert 10% of small business owners using WhatsApp, iMessage, and phone calls.
• Narrowing down target audience to those with specific problems unlocks self-serve potential.

Finding specific niche market for lead generation and management app

• Daryl Urbanski discusses his niche of working with blonde-haired, left-handed tennis players with one leg and specific foot size requirements.
• Daryl shares his process of narrowing down his ideal client through customer interviews and iterations, resulting in a specific and targeted ad campaign.
• Daryl Urbanski and Aaron discuss lead generation and management challenges faced by small businesses and salespeople.
• Aaron reveals that customers were unable to find a reliable source of leads, leading to difficulties in managing and generating leads.

Tech stacks, coding, and entrepreneurship

• Aaron rants for an hour about Facebook lead ads not providing alerts, leading to manual checking and downloading of CSVs.
• Pain points include lack of alerts, manual data entry, and syncing issues with WhatsApp.
• Non-technical founders often want to create technical products without understanding the complexity.
• Asking developers to show how they solve problems unlocks more insight than high-level questions.

Prototyping and iterating on minimum viable products for businesses

• Aaron emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs before building an app.
• Manual processes can be used to test and validate app ideas before investing in development.
• Iterate minimum viable product, keep iterating until good enough.
• Start with bare minimum requirements, avoid over-engineering.

Building a successful contact management app with a simple, user-friendly interface

• Aaron shares a story about cutting corners in the early stages of a mobile app, including not having edit functionality for contacts.
• Despite initial skepticism, only one person asked for edit functionality in the first six months of the app's launch.
• Aaron shared tips for growing a business quickly, including focusing on the early stages and going global.
• Aaron Lim encouraged listeners to check out the app and reach out to him through various channels.

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