Ask HN: Got my first customer Now what?
I launched http://geekrations.com ↗ this weekend and got my first customer! Huge celebration ensuing, but now what? How can I drive more high quality traffic to my web site in a cost efficient manner? Adwords at $1 a click may prove to be way too expensive.
Trying to keep things lean, so are there other experiments I can run to help me find more customers ASAP?
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I recently launched my first public beta for Decal CMS[1]. We had released http://stacklayout.com/ ↗ a few months ago and had a few followers on Twitter and Facebook, the plan being that we would have a few people to tell about it when we released Mockups which is a tool for quickly creating StackLayout sites in a browser.
It didn't work, however - none of the StackLayout crowd really seemed to care.
Rather than getting bummed out, I setup a search stream in HootSuite for the word "mockup" and would ping people personally if they talked about a mockup they were working on.
I also went to "list blogs" - you know "top 10 list of X" and added a link to Decal Mockups in the comments.
The result was that we got 80 signups in the first week from about 400 page views.
The lesson for me was that "social" doesn't have to be entirely passive and there are polite ways of doing "push social marketing" without actually being all that pushy.
I've only experimented with Twitter so far but I'm sure there are other venues where you can find your voice.
WARNING: following people to get them to notice you SUCKS! I tried that few times, got no results and it's a dangerous game to play - very spammy.
A lot of the founders in Mixergy interviews talk about their early days and they say they spent a lot of time in forums providing answers (much like I'm doing right now :) and linking through to their produce.
Slow and steady wins the race :) We can't all be threewords.me!
[1]http://decalcms.com/mockups/ ↗
Make it more clear what you get, i'd consider signing up right now if I knew the kinds of things you offer, instead of so many stock images.
Also I had to scroll down to the bottom to understand the product, maybe try to make it clearer from the get go so you don't see people dropping off before they read all of the copy.
Starting a blog with posts about your market or with stats/info graphics does wonders as it engages your current user audience and builds up a new audience of blog readers who may be interested in your product. The only problem is it can be hard to manage and blogs take a lot of work.
As mentioned above pinging people via Twitter can be 'spammy' if automatic but if you personally reply to messages relating to what you're doing it can be really powerful and builds a lot of twitter conversations which does some similar things to running a blog. If you tweet high quality content from your industry, even if it's your rivals blogs you will find respect and people will follow for the content.
A great example of this is Bufferapp. They are a Twitter app and run a blog where they post all kinds of tips for using their product but also for tweeting on the whole and regularly tweet out interesting articles in this space. They reply to every tweet in full and thank people for mentioning them, this drives engagement and most of their user audience.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928 ↗
Helped me a lot. Also I think your website it awesome. I love the idea behind it.
"Just ship us back the bad stuff so we can send it to someone else." Man, I DO love your sense of humor. Awesome ;)