How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup

Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by pbreit on Monday December 22, 2014 @07:37PM (#8786176)

Enjoyed reading but have to say that 1) this is a ridiculously crowded market and 2) there are some very good options that start at free (Olark, Zopim). But, best of luck and nice job on breaking the revenue seal.

Edit: Many apologies, I misunderstood the service. $97/month for actually handling the inquiries (up to 500/month) then sounds like a bargain.

Edit: I went back and studied the website more closely and while it does describe the service you mention, it doesn't seem as clear as it could be. The spotlight seems to be on the web chat window which is a very well-understood mechanism and it's hard to get past that to understand that you are actually wo/man-ning the chat sessions. I would really work on making that cleare because at $100/month, it's a no-brainer for a lot of business types.

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by jteusa on Monday December 22, 2014 @07:49PM (#8786223)

I think you might have mis-understood what we do. My fault (you're not the first).

In short, we're not a software company.

We manage the live chat for website, so they don't have to. We're a service business.

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by dmak on Monday December 22, 2014 @10:00PM (#8786593)

I actually misunderstood this as well from reading the blog post. I thought it was silly to be entering such a saturated market especially with companies like Olark.

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by jteusa on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @01:25AM (#8787023)

Updated - let me know what you think.

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by zakelfassi on Monday December 22, 2014 @09:03PM (#8786459)

+1 to @pbreit.

I had the same remark; "why on earth another Chat Widget company?". I guess you could communicate better on the service by adding some sort of graphic (user comes to your site, we do this, we do that, ...).

Best of luck!

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by jteusa on Monday December 22, 2014 @09:30PM (#8786528)

Totally agree. Got a ton of great feedback from HN community today via (LOTS of) website chats on the site = )

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by md2be on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @11:01AM (#8788634)

Change tag line to "we are a sales team, that lives on your web site."

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by jteusa on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @01:56PM (#8789564)

Love it! Will consider that. Thanks for the feedback (so many good tips from the HN visitors)

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by soneca on Monday December 22, 2014 @08:11PM (#8786301)

Wow! NOW i got it. That is why "having a team managing the chat" is such a big deal (for phase #2). It is not managing the software, but actually chatting.

I do think it is a good business model. Good luck!

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Re:How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup by jteusa on Monday December 22, 2014 @08:28PM (#8786351)

Thanks!

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