$800 in two days for infoproduct soft launch --- what next?

Discussions
#1

I’ve had an infoproduct on the back burner since 2013: It’s a series of “no nonsense” guides for all the stuff that we as developers and bootstrappers perpetually put off (setting up encrypted backups, dotfiles, private servers, self-hosted git repositories, etc): https://thedevop.com/

I just revamped the product and announced a New Year’s sale via tweet.
This got 9 retweets and 12 favs, which lead to ~800 views and 5 sales over Dec 27–29.
Traffic is now back to zero.

What do you think my next move should be?

  • Pay for click ads (what terms? backups? devops? the names of popular open source backup libraries?)
  • Pay for podcast ads (I was thinking developer-focused ones — any favorites with this crowd?)
  • Setup free trial / drip emails? I.e., when people come to the site but don’t want to pay, they can enter their email for a free guide and I can send them three or four emails that help them out and establish my credibility.
#2

Congratulations on launching and making your first five sales. This is an awesome niche to be in and I think there is a lof of demand for guides/tutorials for devops.

Next set of moves

  1. Reach out to the 5 customers who purchased your guides. Speak to each one of them, preferably over the phone. You want to build a “customer persona” based on these (and the next 20-30 customers), so that you can perfect your marketing message over time. Specifics to get from these customers - what do they do, where do they work, what benefit did they expect from the guide, did it meet their expectations and other important yada yada

  2. Look at what others are doing in this space. e.g. Serversforhackers.com seems to be quite known in the dev community. While researching this, think about how you want to position yourself. Also see how they market themselves to their customers. (note: devs hate being directly marketed to)

  3. The first 5 customers reached your landing page from your personal twitter network. Trust was already built before they saw the landing page. Before you start advertising to people who don’t know you, you should look at adding some trust signals to your landing page - e.g. images of the people giving testimonials (you can simply use a twitter card and show the relevant tweet here), put up an image of you and your team at Keming Labs, put up specific information on you that markets you as an expert in dev ops - the more relevant information I get about you, the more I trust you. (when targeting the dev community, being simply open and human is a great marketing technique)

  4. Get feedback on the landing page from your target market - messaging, more trust signals, make buttons stand out etc

  5. Start running small amounts of google, facebook, twitter ads. Track conversions, so that you can figure out which marketing channel works best for you.

Once you have tested out multiple advertising channels and found which one works the best, double down on it and go make more sales!

#3

Thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough reply — I owe you a drink! = )

Reaching out to the early customers is a great idea.
I’ll give 'em a few weeks to look through the content and get through the holidays, and then I’ll reach out with the questions you suggested.

In the mean time, the trust signals are a good idea.
There are already text testimonials from several customers and you’re not the first person to suggest that adding Twitter cards (or just faces from their profiles) will make them more effective.

I hadn’t seen the serversforhackers.com site, and it’s not clear to me how they’re earning money from the site.
There seems to be a fairly inexpensive ebook, but it takes a bit of digging to even find the purchase page.

I’ll post again on this thread in a few weeks with the follow up.

#4

I haven’t used ServersForHackers, but I think they have a freemium model. They give out a lot of videos for free and charge for some. I’ve seen them mentioned on hacker news a couple of times and on the bootstrapped podcast.

Definitely post back in a few weeks to let us know what you find.