What’s harder than making your product? Selling it
When I left my cushy tech job to start a business, I thought the hardest part would be building the product. I was wrong. The real challenge wasn’t the product—it was convincing people to buy it. I’ll never forget the day I launched our Google Ads campaign, expecting signups to roll in. Instead, we got crickets. That was the first time I realized marketing was a completely different beast. Let me tell you what we did, what we learned, and what I wish we had known.
Step 1: Early Market Testing
What We Did:
We started with a landing page, a waitlist, and some Google Ads to test early demand. We also reached out to friends—business owners, CPAs, and lawyers—to understand their needs, and did extensive competitor research to see what else was out there.
What We Learned (and Wish We Had Known):
At first, the signs looked promising. We saw lots of Google searches for solutions in our space, generated a decent waitlist at about $20 per signup, and confirmed that business owners were paying $200–$500 for lawyers to file BOI reports for them. Competitors in the software space seemed unprofessional and scammy, so we felt there was an opportunity to differentiate ourselves.
But those early tea leaves can be deceiving. We assumed that 50% of our waitlist would convert into paying customers once the product was ready, but apparently benchmarks are closer to 10%—and for us, it was even lower. That meant our customer acquisition cost (CAC) skyrocketed, making Google Ads alone an unsustainable strategy.
I also made the mistake of neglecting our waitlist. In hindsight, I should have been nurturing it by sending updates, sharing industry insights, and engaging early users in beta testing or user research. Instead, we let it grow moldy, which hurt our ability to convert those early signups into customers.
One of my biggest missteps was relying too heavily on feedback from my own network. For example, I spoke with one lawyer who had more than 10,000 reports to file and was completely uninterested in our software. I wrongly assumed this meant professionals wouldn’t need us at all, but it turned out this wasn’t representative of the broader market. Similarly, my friends in tech and other white-collar industries—coastal professionals like myself—weren’t reflective of the average small business owner. It sounds obvious now, but it wasn’t at the time!
Ultimately, while our market testing revealed demand, it also taught us a hard lesson: early interest doesn’t always translate into paying customers, and a waitlist isn’t enough without continuous relationship-building.
Step 2: Comprehensive “Who Could Use This” Exercise
What We Did:
We did a mind map of everyone who could feasibly use our product, trying to identify all the potential customer segments we could target.
What We Learned (and Wish We Had Known):
We quickly realized that really big companies didn’t need help filing their BOI reports—they had teams or existing processes in place. Instead, smaller businesses, especially those without professional support (like CPAs or lawyers), seemed like a promising segment for our simple software solution.
But targeting smaller businesses came with hidden challenges. Many business owners either didn’t know about the BOI report requirement or didn’t want to deal with it, which meant we’d need to invest heavily in customer education. Educating potential users is expensive and time-consuming—a big obstacle we didn’t fully grasp when we first started.
We also assumed that professionals, like CPAs and lawyers, wouldn’t need or want our software. This turned out to be a major misstep. Early conversations with a few CPAs and lawyers in my network—people who were cost-sensitive or willing to wrestle with the cumbersome government portal themselves—led me to dismiss an entire segment of potential customers. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how large and lucrative this “professional” segment could be. CPAs and lawyers handling multiple filings were exactly the type of users who could benefit from our software, and they offered significantly better ROI than targeting individual small business owners. Wow, that's obvious when I say it out loud :)
In hindsight, we should have spent more time talking to a wider range of customers early on. Our assumptions about who would use our product—and how they’d use it—cost us time, money, and missed opportunities.
Step 3: Ideal Customer Profile
What We Did:
We created a few “Ideal Customer Profiles” (ICPs) to represent the types of customers we thought would use our product. Our initial profile focused on solo or very small business owners who manage their own businesses, don’t want to deal with a government portal, and don’t want to pay a professional to file the report for them. We envisioned users like tech entrepreneurs, amateur real estate investors, S-corp owners (hairdressers, consultants, freelancers, etc.).
What We Learned (and Wish We Had Known):
Our assumptions about our ideal customer were way off. The small business owners we targeted either:
- Were self-sufficient and would figure out the government portal on their own, or
- Knew so little about the filing requirements that they needed much more hand-holding than we expected.
To address this, we reduced our price to make it more budget-friendly, created a lot of educational content to help users understand the requirements, and shifted our marketing focus to emphasize both what the report is and how to file it quickly using our software. But even with those adjustments, this group proved to be an expensive and difficult audience to convert. Why? The educational burden was enormous, and the ROI was terrible—most small business owners only had one report to file, so we couldn’t generate significant revenue from a single transaction.
What we completely overlooked in the beginning was the “professional” segment—CPAs and lawyers who handle many filings. When we finally started targeting them, the ROI shifted dramatically. One CPA could bring in 50–100x the revenue of a single small business owner, and they needed far less education upfront. It was a game-changer, but we lost a lot of time and money by not identifying this segment earlier.
Looking back, I wish we had broadened our outreach and customer research upfront. Our early assumptions about who would use the product were limiting, and we paid the price for it.
Step 4: Marketing Plan
What We Did:
We focused on our ideal customer profiles and brainstormed where they might go to find information about filing a BOI report. Our list included:
- Google searches
- Social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook groups, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube)
- Professional blogs
- Government official sources
We ran marketing experiments in places we thought our customers might be, tracked whether those efforts drove conversions, and adjusted or stopped campaigns that weren’t working.
What We Learned (and Wish We Had Known):
Google Ads drove some traffic and eventually had a decent click-through rate (~6%), but converting those clicks into product signups was much harder than we expected. Early tests had shown a promising conversion rate (~10% to the waitlist), but once we launched the product, those numbers dropped significantly. The intent behind the clicks mattered: some people wanted to learn about the BOI report, others wanted to file it immediately, and some just wanted the government portal link. Without refining our ads to match these different intents, our campaigns struggled to convert.
Social media was another disappointment. We tried everything—Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and more—but we didn’t see meaningful clicks or conversions on any platform. In hindsight, this made sense. Compliance software isn’t something people impulse-buy on social media, and without an existing audience or brand awareness, it was expensive to get in front of the right customers. Plus, this is a product people search for when they need it, not something they stumble across on Instagram.
Looking back, we should have focused more on organic content like SEO-optimized blogs or partnerships with organizations that small business owners and professionals already trusted. Building trust and educating customers takes time, but it would have been a better long-term strategy than trying to force social media to work for a niche, compliance-driven product. Also, it takes more than one visit to convert customers—especially for a product tied to government compliance, which many view as risky or complicated. We underestimated how many touchpoints and repeated exposures it would take to build trust and get someone to buy.
Step 5: Follow Your Marketing Plan, Iterate Over and Over
What We Did:
We created ads and content to test across platforms, monitored whether those ads led to conversions, and made adjustments if they didn’t perform. If a channel still didn’t work after multiple iterations, we stopped marketing there and moved on.
What We Learned (and Wish We Had Known):
Marketing performance across almost all channels was far worse than we expected. Early on, we made the rookie mistake of assuming things like waitlist signups were kind of the same as product purchases. Spoiler: they’re not. Waitlist signups turned out to be a weak indicator of actual customer conversion, and we overestimated how many people would buy once the product launched.
Google Ads was our best-performing digital ad platform, but even it performed terribly at first. We were targeting the wrong customer profiles and needed to refine our campaigns to improve click-through rates, get higher quality leads, and increase conversion rates. It took us a long time (and a lot of wasted ad spend) to figure out what worked. I’ll go into detail about this in a future post, but let’s just say that learning to configure Google Ads properly was an expensive lesson.
Traditional paid digital advertising (like Google and social media ads) just wasn’t a great fit for a niche, compliance-driven product like ours. It was hard to build trust, educate potential users, and convince them to act—all within a single ad click. We realized too late that we should have prioritized channels that aligned better with our product’s nature, like SEO content, partnerships, or channel partnerships.
The other big issue? We were marketing to the wrong audience at first. When we finally started targeting lawyers and CPAs who handled multiple filings, our customer acquisition improved. These professionals had a clear need for our product, required less education to convert, and brought in significantly higher revenue per customer than individual small business owners. Recognizing “pull” from a customer segment and pivoting toward it was one of the most important lessons we learned.
Conclusion
Building a product is one thing—getting people to buy it is an entirely different challenge. Looking back, I realize how much time, money, and energy we wasted because of early misconceptions about our audience, marketing channels, and customer behavior. I truly have a new appreciation for how hard marketing is!!
Here are the lessons I hope you take from our experience:
- Launch your product FAST, start getting feedback, begin marketing, and iterate quickly. We should have launched even faster and marketed even earlier to accelerate our learning.
- Test early, but don’t take initial interest at face value. Waitlists and signups aren’t the same as paying customers.
- Get to know your audience deeply—don’t rely on assumptions or feedback from a small, biased sample.
- Nurture the relationships you build. Whether it’s a waitlist or a prospective customer segment, consistent communication is key.
- Be prepared to pivot. The customers who truly need your product might not be the ones you imagined when you started.
Selling a product requires the same iterative mindset as building one. You have to test, learn, and adapt over and over until you figure out what works. Luckily, there’s a lot of data to leverage in the process. It’s humbling, frustrating, and exciting, and I have a new appreciation for how important it is in the work of entrepreneurship.
So many of my lessons are cliches I’d heard a million times or really obvious when I say them out loud. But somehow the lessons are so much more salient when you’re making the mistakes. This journey is full of missteps, but those are where I’ve really learned the most.
In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into some of the most challenging aspects we faced—like optimizing Google Ads, better leveraging organic channels, and shifting focus to higher ROI customers. Stay tuned for more!