In the first day of pitching ideas to folks, I took out a friend for coffee to elicit some ideas and to try a pitch out. The pitch that I came with today was my inspiration for the survey on the front page. (not much needed for this level of output)
The pitch was very simple and direct:
What problem would you be willing to pay $1 a month for? $5? $10?
I wanted to get right down to what she actually needed and then offer to solve it. Her answer was not one that I would have thought of naturally.
I would pay $1 for you to remind me to actually backup my computer.
I would assume that a calendar reminder would suffice or using something like my favorite/annoying reminder app, Due, would be the natural solution for her problem. It does not take much to remember to plug in your external harddrive and let your machine do its thing. Before we get into the 3-2-1 rule for backing up your computer and so on we are not preaching to these folks just yet.
Since the internal reminders are not good enough for her to take action I thought about how I could pull this off and have it still be worth it. The sell on this task would be that I would nag her until she could prove to me that the backup had finished via picture. (Whether she cheats on that picture is another story)
How many ways can we accomplish this?
- Email, text or call her every day until I get proof.
- Automate that using something like IFTTT.
- Setup a custom email campaign to remind her and turn it on for a set day each month.
The first one might be easy for this one situation but would require 1 minute a day until she complies not to mention I would have to set reminders for myself to actually get it done. The second idea would be nice since it is automated but it might be a little tricky trying to set up those items in her accounts or to set up multiple versions for multiple people in my accounts.
That last one got me a little excited because it is scalable and you could draft some boilerplate text for reminding people of tasks in general and tweak it slightly for each person. Separate campaigns in any EMS should be easy. Now if I do the work up front for the one client and make it as evergreen as possible, I only have to go into my EMS, duplicate the campaign for my new segmented list (one user), tweak and schedule.
This might not be a big business opportunity but getting a few of these set up and running would not be hard to do or manage long term. Interesting to say the least. We’ll see if the sale lands tomorrow.
Write in the comments below about how you would deal with this kind of task.