A solo consultant from America
A lead from the US got further down the funnel than anyone before him — and stumbled over microphone access. Two and a half hours on one email, written by hand — and the first hint of a profile of my target audience.
By Georg Malahov
In the morning I checked my Telegram notification bot and saw a lead from America who had made it further than anyone in all this time. Watched the demo, signed up, got all the way to a call — and never made it, because he didn't grant microphone access. Another customer before him stumbled in exactly the same spot. So it's not a fluke: the path to granting microphone access is simply too convoluted. I knew about this spot but hadn't got round to simplifying it — and it cut off the most advanced user I'd ever had.
I went to look up who he was. A solo consultant from the US with his own personal site. Exactly the person I'm building all this for. Losing him like that would just be a shame, so I decided to reach out to him personally: gifted him an extra 60 minutes and sat down to write an email.
The email took me two and a half hours. Personal, carefully laid out, no heavy branding and no "Dear valued user": I apologized, explained that it's a bug, walked him step by step through granting microphone access, and included a link to my calendar so he could grab a slot right away and we'd get on a call like a demo. Put myself on BCC so the thread would stay alive and he could just hit reply. Two and a half hours for one person — by every playbook, that doesn't scale. There isn't much to scale yet, so it's fine.
And that's when the idea of a profile first came together for me. The most interesting people come at night, from America, and they're solo consultants with their own personal site. Same as my only paying customer. Two data points aren't statistics, but they're the first two points that line up at all. The awkward detail: I can't really verify it, because I only store a hash of the IP for anti-abuse and can't see the visit's country. So I need to learn to collect where a user comes from and attach it to the account.
The weekend went to the release, and it went badly. On Saturday, August 15, I tried to finish testing the changes — got nowhere at all. Sunday was a packed day, but in the evening I finally finished testing and published the new version. Monday morning I found another couple of bugs and shipped one more. The main fix: the demo now opens the sidebar from the very first click; I'd taken a run at this three or four times and backed off every time. This time I ran Claude in the heaviest mode there is, and it got solved on the first attempt. A vague feeling that tasks like this should go straight into heavy mode instead of burning money on failed cheap sessions.
And then the consultant came back. Made his first call — over twenty minutes — and left top marks. And immediately unsubscribed from the newsletter, and what he meant by that I don't understand. He's also one of the few who turned on the local model right in the browser, so in analytics he's nearly invisible — I have to piece him together from fragments.
Whether this is a real profile or a pretty story made of two cases, the next two or three people who make it to plan selection will show: they should turn out just the same — solo consultants with a personal site, from the US. If so, I'm launching a separate campaign aimed at them, possibly display rather than search. If it's a mixed bag — then I just bent a coincidence into what I wanted to see.
For now, off to write the next follow-up email. To one person. By hand.