Pickling Compute

> tl;dr – If you are a technical founder doing b2b sales, please reach out to me > at steve@val.town. My focus this month is working closely with you to solve > your sales problems with code on Val Town. Val Town sells compute. Selling a commodity can be hard. Imagine if you wanted to sell cucumbers. Not many people want to buy cucumbers from a new vendor – they already get their cucumbers from their grocery store. However, people might be open to a new bespoke pickle vendor. So we're pickling some compute and selling that. Our pickle flavor this month is inbound lead qualification and our target customer is seed-stage b2b founders who code in typescript. Imagine you're a seed-stage founder who is trying to sell to other businesses. You have some inbound traffic to your website, folks submitting forms, or signing up for your product. You have a problem: the vast majority of these inbound folks are not in your target market. They're just random fly-bys from the internet. How do you figure out who these people are and if you should contact them? This is inbound lead qualification. For example, one of our users is a devtools startup. They're using a tool called rb2b, which helps you de-anonymize website traffic into enriched leads, including visitors' LinkedIn profiles. However, 95% of their visitors are not in their ideal customer profile. So we created a val template for them that receives webhooks from rb2b, spins up an OpenAI agent with search capabilities, armed with a prompt about their ideal customer profile, to deep research that person for fit. For another user, we built a similar template for new-user sign-ups. For yet another user we built a val that does the same idea, but for GitHub stars. (This last one isn't an official template yet. Email me if you'd like to use it.) What's particularly neat about this focus is that it's recursive: we can build better go-to-market automations for our customers, which we can also use ourselves to sell better. We're now using this rb2b val at Val Town. To be clear, we are not pivoting to this niche forever. Our mission is to spread the joy of programming, both in people's personal lives and at work. We spent the first couple years of the Val Town spread thin across all of those myriad use-cases. We're now choosing to focus on these extreme niche because these target users – technical startup founders – have the good taste to point us in the right product directions, as well as the ability to pay well for useful software. Within this target demographic we've chosen the further focus of inbound lead qualification to make it easier for us to delight folks with well-built templates, patterns, and libraries. Our medium-term plan is to land-and-expand into other areas that early technical founders want to automate, such as social listening (alerts when your product is mentioned on socials), GitHub automation (proper tagging of issues, automatic change-log generation, etc), and more. As an aside, this path has been partly walked before us. Clay is a successful no-code tool in the go-to-market, enrichment, and lead qualification space. You may be surprised to learn that their original product was incredibly similar to Val Town: hosted in-browser JavaScript functions. I was a passionate early customer of that product. When they shifted their focus to go-to-market, they also changed their target user to go-to-market folks, who historically have been less technical, and thus unable to write JavaScript. Thus Clay went from a code tool to a no-code tool. We think there's a small but interesting gap in the market: technical founders doing founding sales who want go-to-market tools, but feel more at home in TypeScript than a no-code tool. I wrote this blog post for two audiences. Firstly, to our existing customers, users, and community members who use Val Town for a diversity of things: please do not feel like we are abandoning you to chase after startups. We intend for Val Town to remain general purpose computing platform. We want to sell the world's best cucumbers. We're currently selling pickles to build a sustainable business, which will hopefully allow us to invest more into our core cucumber production. Secondly, to our prospective customers, if you are a technical founder doing b2b sales, please reach out. I'm steve@val.town. My focus this month is working closely for you, doing things that don't scale, including white-glove customer support, writing code for you, to solve your sales problems.