A couple calls in after I met Finn, we weren’t talking about a product. We were talking about a problem.
We’d crossed paths online. He was in Australia, I’m in Portugal, and I liked what he was doing with agencies around AI.
The issue we landed on wasn’t actually ours. It belonged to agencies. And it ended up deciding who we built and launched Heading for.
Clients to Courses:
This is the book behind $0 to $4M in 10 months.
Going from the product idea to launch took 10 weeks. Result: $598K in sales. (It took 10 weeks because we paused for a 2-week family vacation.)
Then, we paused selling it. Instead, we spent ~2 months to focus on delivering a quality experience and transformational outcomes for our 1st wave of students.
Once we had evidence of repeatable student success, then we started selling again. That’s when we ramped up to $4M in 10 months.
This book contains everything we did to make it happen.
Learn about the Clients to Courses method →
The problem we encountered was that agencies were struggling to adapt. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is getting a brand recommended in AI answers, the way SEO is about getting found on Google.
A lot of agencies don’t know how to sell it, how to position it, or how to explain that difference to their clients.
We thought we could build something pretty novel to fix that. So naturally, we launched to agencies first. Then we built alongside them, getting a deeper insight to their problems and aimed to solve them inside the product.
Longer term we want Heading to serve brands and enterprise businesses too. But that’s not where we started.
It’s easy to come up with an idea and think of all the different people the idea could help. But launching to as many people who could benefit as possible means you’re actually launching to no one.
Two weeks on Stan Launchpad took Heading from a pre-revenue idea to a launched product with consistent MRR. And I’m proud of that.
But launching didn’t accumulate into this big relief as all the hard work you put in before blossoms into a self-sustaining product. It’s the opposite.
It’s easy, especially when you’ve been working long hours for a product launch, to keep looking forward to this big moment where it all pays off. And the launch can feel like that. But the launch is actually just the launch of a whole suite of problems that didn’t exist before.
Launching didn’t release the pressure, if anything it did the opposite.
We came out of it with probably about 100 feature ideas. And it made one thing clear: we do need to go and raise capital.
The benefit of being narrow is, if you know exactly who it’s for, the list of 100 ideas is a list to choose from. Not 100 different directions you’ll feel like you’re being pulled in.
So this week, take some time to write down who your business is truly for. I don’t mean people who benefit from what you offer, I mean the one main archetype.
Think of one individual person, who they are, what they wear, what they do on their commute at 5:30pm on a Wednesday (napping doesn’t count).
It won’t give you the whole plan but it might give you some clarity on what you should be prioritising.
We are already branching out to brands and enterprise along side agencies.
Heading shows you where your brand turns up in AI answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, which sources are shaping those answers and how to manipulate them in your favour.
If you run an agency, you can run it across your clients under your own brand. If you’re a founder it works on your own brand too. One thing I’d say to anyone launching now: more and more of your buyers are asking AI who to go with. You need to make sure you’re in that answer.
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Find out how which businesses AI search is recommending in its answers today. And how to make yours in it.
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Wishing you the best,
- Luke
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