Ask HN: Subscription web sites: How did you get your first customer?
Question for techies who started a web business with a subscription revenue model: How did you get your first customer?
I'm asking because I'm a typical shy coder: cranking out truckloads of Python code is not a problem, but socializing and having a big network of business contacts is. I'm still grooving on David Heinemeier Hansson's speech at Startup School, and I want to go the subscription route. And I believe that nothing will drive the evolution of a site better than having customers. How to get those early customers, though, looks right now to be a dark mystery. How have other techie folks overcome this problem and gotten those first few customers?
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My product is based on a subscription model. Here's what we did. First: Make something that people want and would be willing to pay for. Second: Tell everyone you know that's what your doing. Ask people who they know that might be interested. People are usually willing to help and give you a name or two. Third: Don't count-out old-school marketing. Cold calls, business events, etc, go to them. Meet your competitors, usually they won't be adverse to this and you shouldn't be either, you can always learn something from them.
Know your competitors very well, and know what they do well and what they do poorly (or at least what you do better). This is important.
Third: Have a working demo. I don't give away free trials, I have a demo. This may or may not work for your product.
Fourth: Follow up with everybody, always send thank you notes, and follow up a week later, every week until they give you some straight answer.
I'm a coder who is very new to sales, but I've had some good people around me that were quite good at sales. Meet those people, show them your product, ask for some help.
Are you solving a real problem for someone? Whose problem are you solving? You should have a flesh-and-blood person you can point to (not just "surfers", or "facebook users"). If you don't actually know someone who has that problem, how do you know people are willing to pay for it?
So I'd say you have to know your first customer, and build from there. If you don't personally know them, go to a meeting, conference, or mixer and meet them. As uncomfortable as you may be, just do it, or find a partner who is good at it.
Maybe for a free site like facebook, you can "build it and they will come", but if you want people to pay you, you have to get up from your computer and sell your product.
Open your product to beta testers, and hopefully once the beta period stops, a certain percentage of the testers will have built a reliance upon your software, and sign up to the paid account.
You can also use the testers for testimonials etc for your site. A referral fee will then help push your current customers to recommend it to their friends.
It'll be a lot easier to find people to sign up for free, then it will to sign them up immediately for a paid account.
You can then convert them later :)
I don't know you, and I could probably churn out a bunch of semi-valuable tips, but instead of doing that, I'm going to suggest the following: Find a partner that has the business skills you lack in marketing/sales/promotion.
I think you'll be much better off with someone like this worrying about these problems while you handle the technical realities. Once you get customers, the problems of getting them will seem trivial to the problem of keeping them.
Good luck.
Offer a compelling free service that reels users in and then sell added-extras in the subscription account that they can't live without - aka the "freemium" model.
This is what 37Signals do so well, we operate a similar model at Zamzar and more recently Animoto seem to have struck gold with this approach - with them you can cut a 30 second video mix of photos and music, but if you need more time you have to pay.