Woodpecker Blog

We got seed funding

Woodpecker Meeting III – We Can Call it a TraditionWe are happy to announce that on the 7th of May (after 5 hours spent in a notarial office) we finalized the agreement on pre-seed funding with Xevin Lab, a part of Xevin Investments. We are thrilled to be supported by the well-respected Poland-based fund focusing on innovative, high-potential companies developing new technologies and media market solutions (we especially like the ‘innovative, high-potential’ part). We also feel honoured to be selected from numerous Central and Eastern Europe promising start-ups.

2 mins read

How I wrote a cold email that got a 50% reply rate

Not 50% open rate, mind you. 50% REPLY rate. That means half of the people I wrote to actually replied to me. And 100% of those were kind replies. Not “leave me alone” or “unsubscribe” kind of replies. I started some nice conversations and got a couple of people on Skype – which was the purpose of my email. Here’s my exact copy and some comments on how I constructed it.

10 mins read

Cold email intro: How to reel your prospects in

How do most cold emails you get usually start? And how many of them did you read from “Hi Joe” till “Best regards”? Yeah... so you should know by now how NOT to start an email. What should the cold email introduction include instead to make your addressees keep reading and respond?

12 mins read

What should be the “From” line of your cold email?

I saw numerous articles, posts and videos on how to write effective cold emails. Most of them mention the subject line, the introduction, the pitch, the CTA. Some of them mention the signature. But I couldn’t find an article enhancing the importance of the “From” line. And this is also one of the crucial elements of a cold email. In fact, it is almost as important as the subject line.

8 mins read

How can email interviews help you build a SaaS business? (part 3)

This is the final part of this article. I’m describing here the third email of the interview we carried out at 52Challenges that helped us learn a lot about our prospects’ job specifics and define the most crucial features in our SaaS. Read on if you want to see a real-life example of how email interviews can help to build a SaaS business.

10 mins read

How can email interviews help you build a SaaS business? (part 2)

In the first part of this article, I wrote about how we started the interviews with personal trainers at 52Challenges via email. I also mentioned that the interview included more than one email. Here's about the second one. Treat this blog post as a guide that'll show you how you can leverage email interviews to help to get your SaaS business up and running.

9 mins read

How can email interviews help you build a SaaS business? (part 1)

Wait, isn’t it that you first send a cold email to set up an interview on the phone..? Well, most probably yes, especially when you have a complete service or product that you want to sell. We didn’t have that then.

10 mins read

How to find your first prospects’ email addresses

Finally, your new SaaS business is about to kick off. You have the MVP ready. Your website is live. All you need now are… the customers. How to get your first clients? You could wait for them to find your website on Google, but that takes time, and time is money. You can try to attract them with ads, but that’s a pricy option when you’re a bootstrapped startup. You can also make use of one of the very few free things in business - emails - and directly reach out to the people who you’d like to be your clients.  That’s the option we went for when we were developing our first company that gave rise to Woodpecker. In this blog post, I’d like to tell you a story of how we found our first prospects’ email addresses. 

6 mins read

How customer interviews can help you build a SaaS business

It was another regular team meeting. Except it wasn’t regular, as we had just decided to pivot. From a widely available workout plan design service to SaaS exclusively for personal fitness trainers. And what is the first thing to do when you decide it’s time to pivot? Obviously, you need customer interviews -- you need to ask people if they would be interested in your new idea.

9 mins read