One week since our launch...and...
It’s been a week since we soft launched our startup, Moshbag (http://moshbag.in), a distribution platform for artists, and…
“We’ve had hundreds of artists signup & thousands of subscribers!” is what we’d have ideally liked to say, but…the truth the far from real & it’s honesty time!
We’ve had almost no new signups, little response to our email campaigning, & a tad over 5 new likes on our facebook page.
The whole episode has humbled us & we're not so sure where we've gone wrong! Any advice or help from fellow hackers will be much appreciated!
P.S. We’re looking to increase the number of artists who signup with us & truly appreciate any help from your end on this. So if you have a good network of artists following you or if you can just help us reach them, we’d be grateful.
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17 comments
| 14 points
| on HN
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* I don't like the site. Visually it's far too basic and dated.
* Your USP isn't immediately obvious. You need to be screaming from the rooftops about what benefits you and your company/site offer that's different to anything else that currently exists.
* What lead you to believe this would be a success? You've obviously invested time and effort into the concept so somewhere along the line you must have had a realistic idea of how to attract the right number of people within the right demographic. Was that based exclusively on an email marketing campaign?
* Never underestimate Twitter. Twitter drives infinitely more traffic to our site than facebook. I'm sure this varies dependent on your market but more often than not, twitter is the most effective way of reaching out.
* Be patient. A slow start doesn't preclude you from success. Work hard, remain patient and most importantly, remain passionate. If it can work and you believe in it, you'll find a way to make it work. Starting a business isn't easy.
So you have crossed one of the greatest hurdles - that is launch. Rest is bit easy now.
1. You need to focus on marketing now. It starts from your site.
2. Try to get some of your friends to signup. Analyse deeply what are the actions they are doing versus what you have expected them to do.
3. Focus on that one thing which you think is the highlight of your product. Tweak it, re-tweak it until it really stands apart from all your other offerings.
4. Go to local events, try to showcase it to any crowd you can get your hands on.
5. If you have a little budget, try to do content marketing. Try educating people in your niche what are the problems they are facing. You can start doing that on your company blog or other blogs on your niche.
Be your strongest critic, and you will continuously evolve.
My first thought is temporarily remove the subscriber and artist count from the homepage. While you're still starting out the low numbers may be a turn off.
Get media coverage! When I first launched BugMuncher, all was quiet for a few days, then The Next Web published an article about it and the users started coming in. Admittedly that was dumb luck, but since then I've been actively getting more blog coverage, and it really works.
As others have said, at this stage you need to get artists on board, maybe you could try some kind of sign up incentive, and then have further incentives for artists encouraging their fans to sign up.
The design, while clean and very good, reminds me too much of a news paper, I'm not sure that will resonate so well with your target audience.
Best of luck with it
And I agree, we have to work on simplifying our on-boarding process for artists.
However...
- I would have like to see a very quick visual narrative other than the video that efficiently explained what Moshbag is.
- The site has poor UI and UX.
- Visually the site is dull.
I don't know what resources you have available, but here are some nice examples of simple visual summaries/narratives: https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/ https://build.phonegap.com/ http://www.getballpark.com/
Keep going though. You want to be able to say you gave it your best.
One thing I think you should focus on is getting Artists on there supporting you. You wont get any subscribers until you get the artists. Once you've got the artists producing media - you can use their fan base to grow membership.
I would never subscribe to this service unless there was an artist I cared about using it. I would suggest a strong marketing campaign focussed on winning some Artists. I have known bands with tiny but dedicated followings - those are your paying subscribers.
Best of luck!
And No doubt, no one will ever pay for something like this, unless they exactly know what they're getting in return! So we haven't or say won't ask for it until we have something to show for!
You don't seem to be a part of an artistic community.
The minimal design of your site is not appealing to artists and the lack of stuff to look at / download is not appealing for potential subscribers.
What is the value proposition?
You are asking a group of hackers on how to encourage artists to sign up to your site. This seems wrong.
Get out of the office with print-outs of various designs for your home page and get talking to the people who will make your site work, and gain some more perspective. Or, in short, learn about your customers.
Agree on the value proposition & UI! We need to fix it like ASAP! Thanks for the feedback!