How are you acquiring customers?

Discussions
#21

For us (KickoffLabs) the lesson we learned early was to engage with (potential) customers on existing own sites and communities.

Too many startups focus on direct advertising and writing blog posts (we we did as well). They forget to add comments to relevant blog posts, other Facebook pages, etc (for us the biggest honeypot of customers has been quora).

Long term, this may not directly scale, but the added benefit is it will yield new customers month after month because of the long term Google effect.

#22

Diving deeper into the moz.com link above this whireboard chat is some great advise.

We have done a great deal of ā€œcomment marketingā€ and it works out pretty darn well. We never set out and have comment marketing campaigns. Just when we read something that we like or we have something to contribute we just take the extra time and leave a thoughtful comment.

You do not see the results overnight but when I check in on our web stats over 6 months or so comments lead to a fair amount of traffic. Just a little bit everyday.

1 Like
#23

Itā€™s mostly been word of mouth for us so far. Over half of our customers have recommended us to a friend.

Itā€™s awesome (and cheap), though Iā€™d love to add some sources that I could turn a knob and scale. :slight_smile:

#24

@starr how do you know that number? Do you have an in app tell a friend thingy or something else going on?

#25

Weā€™ve had success with making tiny apps that are focused on specific communities that we want to target with bigger apps. For instance, when we launched Are My Sites Up (website monitoring) we also launched a web app that let people get instant up/down results for any website (kind of a precursor to Down For Everyone Or Just Me). That got us a lot of traffic from people who were interested in a product like ours, and it was easy to sell them on it. Also in this realm: Tada List from 37signals -> Basecamp.

2 Likes
#26

@ian - Just surveys.

#27

@starr bah, thought you had some secret sauce for us :smile:

#28

@sean - How did you get those microsites to rise up in Google? Are folks linking to them individually? Do you tweet about each of them? Just curious how search traffic finds a microsite.

#29

Nope. I just submitted each site through Google Webmaster Tools. On-page SEO can get you pretty far (sometimes). :smile:

#30

Yeah, our http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com gets thousands (at one point tens of thousands though Iā€™ve let it languish a little) of visitors. Mostly SEO and some nice people linking to us back in the day.

1 Like
#31

Damn, thats a brilliant idea. Makes complete sense. Going to steal that trick too!

#32

What we have been doing lately with Frettie, is focussing heavily on partnerships and creating a strong backer/following of our idea and product. We are more interested in growing from word of mouth, primarily because we need to develop that relationship with our audience. It is a small target, so it requires real focussed marketing. It has been working really great so far for us, because it is also positioning us a major player in that landscape. With Frettie, we also have a ton of ways we can engage deeper than just Ads. Things that we have been doing are: Chat Rooms, Sponsoring of Events, Minor Ad spending in newsletters, Interviews and a Blog. With that said, this may not work for all cases.

#33

Iā€™d love to hear more about partners and affiliate marketing and distribution channels.

One thing that really intrigues me about marketing, is that once you find good channels, youā€™ve basically invented a money pump. As long as LTV > CTA, you have a money machine.

I used to think that if you had to advertise your product to sell it, your product sucked. Thatā€™s a narrow minded mentality that leaves a lot of customers and money on the table.

1 Like
#34

I used to think the same thing early on in the business, itā€™s very wrong. Thereā€™s no such thing as pure organic growth even if you built the most amazing thing. Now, another ā€œproblemā€ is that there are people arround that are experts at selling crappy/good enough stuff to a lot of people and if you focus too much on the product they might steal your lunch money :slight_smile:

#35

My little ebook operates almost 100% on content marketing through blog posts.

As for word of mouth ā€“ hard to say. More specifically, it can be very hard to measure. I canā€™t find many reviews of my book (Rebuilding Rails) and itā€™s only mentioned on a few web pages. But I keep talking to people who say things like, ā€œoh, in the Ruby Users Group I was just in, nearly every single person took out their laptop at some point, pointed to your page and said, ā€˜do you know if this is any good?ā€™.ā€

And I have enough sales and enough occasional tweets and enough web mentions that thereā€™s at least a bit of ā€œyes, itā€™s goodā€ background noise.

Though Googleā€™s big recommendations for searching on ā€œrebuilding railsā€ are ā€œrebuilding rails pdfā€ and ā€œrebuilding rails download.ā€ So I may just be underestimating pirate activity :wink:

#36

Iā€™m curious if, assuming you get primarily search traffic, how well do you get new newsletter sign-ups?

Any ball park as to microsite landing to conversions?