CASE STUDY
TechWorld
with Nana
How we helped a training business scale with targeted customer insights
CHALLENGE
Nana Janashia built a 7-figure business – & hit a wall
Techworld with Nana is a successful 7-figure DevOps training business, founded & run by Nana Janashia.
Their courses – such as the DevOps Bootcamp – teach engineers the skills they need to master DevOps and get better jobs.
Nana knew that people were buying & loving her courses. But she didn’t know why. And that was making it hard to focus her marketing efforts to improve product-market fit & scale up.
So Nana enaged us to do a Customer Discovery Sprint to identify her ideal customers & understand their purchase triggers, desired outcomes & the impact of her courses.
I realized I had zero visibility into who our students were. Who are the people that we are helping so much? What are their stories?
HOW WE DID IT
We used JTBD interviews to understand customer motivation
The key to customer research is talking to the right people.
We sent screener surveys to a segment of Techworld customers and got 125 responses. Then we interviewed the 31 best respondents, & selected the top 15 candidates for in-depth JTBD interviews.
We found out what motivated our best customers to take the Bootcamp & exactly what they had gotten out of it.
We used these insights to create Before & After case studies of how customers got promotions, better roles or new jobs by using what they learned in the DevOps Bootcamp.
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
We found out which students loved Nana’s courses – & why
MOTIVATION
The best students already had technical jobs; they’re motivated to acquire new in-demand skills so they can get better jobs.
OUTCOMES
Once they finished the course, students could immediately apply what they learned, which led to promotions & better jobs.
STORYBOARD
We prototyped the 30-day customer journey with no-code storyboards
IMPEDIMENT
Some people found it hard to juggle their existing job with course requirements, & got stuck while trying to finish courses.
It was like shining a light in a dark room, showing me exactly how much value the students were getting.
BUILDING ON INSIGHTS
Nana used customer insights to focus & scale her business
ICP Personas for customization
Once we understood customer motivation, we created Personas for Nan’as key market segments. That let her craft specific offers for each segment, instead of treating everyone the same.
Videos to address Pain Points
For each market segment, Nana created videos targeting their specific pain points, and used success stories & testimonials to boost course completion & registration rates.
Customized messaging to scale
Nana set up automated emails to promote the videos, customized to individual market segments. Customers got targeted support & messaging, which boosted completion & registration rates.
RESULT
Customer discovery helped Nana find product/market fit 🎉
The key to finding product market fit is knowing what your customers want, & giving it to them.
Nana Janashia took a big risk when she launched her training business. She’d identified a hole in the market for a comprehensive deep-dive course in DevOps that would cover the full range of tools in depth – & believed that she could deliver on that.
Nana was right. But sometimes, even a successful business needs customer discovery to grow & scale.
Targeting specific market segments & pain points allowed Nana to take her already successful business to the next level.
It happened because Nana realized that to grow her business, she needed to understand her customers.
With this knowledge that I have now, I would have started doing customer discovery from day one, before we launched, to create even more value.
Nana Janashia
CEO, TechWorld with Nana
