From Data Engineer to Entrepreneur: How Akash Found His Market

“The first version of every great product is a paragraph, not a prototype.”

Akash is a data engineer at a logistics company who always wanted to become an entrepreneur. He knew he wanted to work in the higher education space, but that was about all he knew. He had no market access, no audience, no product, and no idea where to begin.

He came to one of my webinars on validating business ideas, and we started working together.

The First Attempt (And Why It Didn't Work)

Akash's first idea was helping students study for med school. We didn't jump into building — we started by researching the market. I have a process for getting to know a market quickly: find other marketers in the space and study their sales funnels. What are they selling? How are they reaching people? What are they charging?

The research was actually encouraging. Competitors were charging hundreds of dollars per hour for tutoring. The money was there. People marketed heavily on Instagram. We had a strategy ready to go.

But when Akash sat down to actually create content for this niche, something became obvious — it wasn't a fit for him. The topic didn't light him up. And if you can't get excited about making the content, you'll never sustain the work required to build a business.

So we pivoted. No shame, no sunk cost anxiety. That's the whole point of testing before you build — you find out fast and move on.

“Often times you don’t know if you’re really passionate about an idea until you start trying to market it.”

Finding the Real Market

After some soul-searching, Akash realized he wanted to reach employees within universities — specifically career counselors. This was a major shift, and it meant starting the research process over.

We studied how people in the career counseling space marketed. We discovered that most of them used conferences, professional organizations like Educause, and online webinars. We attended a few competitor webinars to see how they sold and what topics resonated.

Then we decided to run our own.

Writing the Offer

This is where the real work began. Before we could run a webinar, we needed to write a compelling offer — an invitation that would make career counselors want to show up.

Akash struggled with this. He wasn't sure what he could deliver to this audience. And he kept framing the offer around students' needs instead of the counselors' needs. It's a common mistake — you focus on the end beneficiary instead of the person you're actually selling to.

We iterated until we landed on something strong: a panel helping career counselors understand how the tech hiring process really works. This was a topic we both genuinely knew inside out. I was a founding engineer and former head of data science at Hired.com. Akash had been a hiring manager at multiple companies. We'd both navigated the tech job market extensively. We weren't guessing — we were sharing real, hard-won expertise.

"A company actually is made up of many products. There’s the thing you sell, and then there’s all the copy, free guides, blog posts and events that help people understand why they should care in the first place."

Running the Test

We set up the webinar on LinkedIn and started running ads. The first round of ads had a low click-through rate — which is normal. Using the competitor research we'd already done, we iterated on our headlines and ad creative until we hit a 2% click-through rate.

The offer converted at about 13%. In total, around 60 career counselors signed up. On the day of the event, we had a 13% turnout. The presentation went well, people asked engaged questions, and afterwards several attendees wanted to connect with Akash on LinkedIn.

Think about what just happened. Akash went from zero access to this market — no contacts, no credibility, no audience — to having 60 people who raised their hand and said "I'm interested in what you're teaching." He now had a repeatable method for reaching his ideal customers and a growing network of real people he could talk to.

“I believe one of your first goals should be getting a reference customer - someone you can start helping and learning from. When you are first starting out you may not know where these people are and an inbound test (event, waitlist page, etc…) is a great way to find them.”

What Came Next

Akash's follow-up offer was 1:1 career coaching — helping counselors better support their students in navigating tech careers. The career counselors he reached out to came directly from the webinar.

This gave him a way to get into the market, deliver real value, build deeper relationships, and continue learning about his customers' needs.

But the transformation went far beyond one webinar. When I first started working with Akash, he couldn't see markets — he didn't know how to identify opportunities, study competitors, or find a way in. Now it's automatic for him. He knows how to spot strategies that could work and take action on them.

He struggled with writing offers. Now it's one of his primary skills and a focus of his ongoing development.

He thought "product" meant software. Now he sees product everywhere — webinars, services, articles, consulting, books — and understands that different formats have different trade-offs. He grasps that a market test validates the problem, not the solution. So a successful test with a simple solution like a webinar opens the door to testing more ambitious solutions later — 1:1 services, software products, anything.

Most importantly, Akash now understands the entrepreneurial loop: get into a market, earn a reference customer, figure out how to deliver value, then sell that value again and again.

As he put it: without guidance, he would have been "lost fumbling around in the woods."