webstartupper

You only get 5 seconds to let the visitor know what value you can provide them. This is typically done with a large page heading and maybe with a small secondary heading.

With a conversational landing page, you are making the visitor click on 3 buttons before he gets to "What is this and why should I care?". That is 3 clicks too many. I would expect a much poorer conversion rate with the new landing page. I have not previously head of conversational landing pages, but I don't see any benefit, and expect them to die soon.

Your old landing page needs a headline that explains the value add. All I see is (i) "It's finally time to live" (ii) "Zenify – Meditation, Clarity and Mindfulness" and (iii) a large block of text that is unreadable. I have no idea what your app does, whether it solves any of my problems and whether I really need it. I suggest you add a headline at the top that quickly tells me what to expect.

If you really-really want to try out the bot, I would go with putting the bot where you have the large block of unreadable text on the old landing page. - but ensure that you have a good headline and maybe secondary headline explaining what this does first.

P.S. I much prefer the colors of the new landing page v/s the old, so maybe you could copy the color to the old landing page.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned improvely.com by Dan Grossman.

I think it makes around $40K to $50K per month. Over the last few years, I've seen it grow from around $10K to $50K. That slow steady SaaS growth is pretty inspiring.

Find other solo founders from forums like http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ and start a weekly mastermind

1. Pick up a tiny niche based on

(a) target audience already pays for tools online

(b) target audience is easy to find online - there exists at least one forum targeting this niche

(c) niche is so small that it is not profitable for most companies to go after

(d) you are passionate about the niche or already have some link to it (know enough people in your social circle)

2. Figure out how you will market to your audience. Spend tiny amounts of time/money on each channel to test whether you could gain traction through any one.

(a) Posting on forums

(b) Content marketing

(c) SEO

(d) Paid acquisition

3. Research on existing tools and competitors in the niche. Focus research on

(a) lack of functionality in the tools provided

(b) tool is too generic for the niche

(c) they are not using a specific marketing channel that you think would work very well

4. Out-compete your competitors on the following

(a) Build a better tool

(b) Do better marketing

(c) Provide better customer support

Important things to keep in mind

1. Never compete on price

2. Do marketing before product development. For e.g. if your main channel is content marketing, start writing content before you build your product. If it is forum posting, start posting on multiple forums and gaining credibility there before you think of your product.

You may want to follow how self published author of Wool, Hugh Howey has sold his books on amazon.

He broke each novel into a four or five book series and sold each book for a dollar. He also made sure to schedule the releases every two to three months. (agile-writing?)

He makes six figures a month on most months [1]

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/07/tech/mobile/kindle-direct-...

If your project does not generate any (or enough revenue), then it might make sense to purchase a $20 theme from websites like themeforest.net or wrapbootstrap.com.

These look polished enough that your customers won't know that you purchased a theme v/s hired a designer (they don't care anyways)

Once you have enough revenue coming in, you could then hire a designer to create a custom website for you (if you still really want to).

On Writing by Stephen King (narrated by the author)

Marketing is about figuring out what channel best works for your business and then scaling it up (what Dan said). Unfortunately, you cannot outsource this, until you have figured the channels out and chosen a few to focus on. Once done, you can then get someone who has experience in optimizing that channel and scaling the campaign up efficiently.

Adwords is amazing for validating your idea, but with the increased competition, it is becoming too costly if your LTV is not very high.

SEO takes a very long time (three years) as your domain needs to build authority. I would not bother about it at all, till I achieve product-market fit.

Look for other channels that your competitors are ignoring - channels like forums, or facebook ads, cross-promoting with a complementary product. Spend a fixed amount on each channel - say $500. You can then figure out which channel works best for your business.

As an example, for my self funded business, I did all the marketing and dev work for a year and a half. I tried adwords, facebook & twitter ads, buying banners on various relevant websites and forum postings. Once I had figured out the channel that converted the best (in my case forum sales threads), I hired someone for doing all the work in that channel.

If you want some suggestions on channels which might work, don't be afraid to mention your business here.

The math comes out to about $6k per year. I am guessing that is the starting salary for a fresh out of college engineer.

Interesting - Windows Defender is an antivirus product for Windows 8+. However, for Windows 7 and older, it is only an anti-malware product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Defender

I believe Windows Defender only protects you against malware. You need a separate anti-virus solution along with it.

If you are only paying him equity and no salary, he is a co-founder. How much equity he gets depends on what each of you bring to the table and on the negotiations with him. Google "founder equity calculator" to get a good idea of what factors to think of. Those calculators are not perfect, but make for a good starting point.

Firstly, congratulations on finding a large enough industry you are passionate about.

Pick a niche in the coaching industry based on the following conditions.

1. The niche must be small enough such that there is no current market leader (or market leader can be displaced)

2. The niche is big enough that there are enough customers to validate the idea.

3. You have some unfair advantage in that niche. For e.g. You have experience in business coaching or you have access to customers in the fitness coaching, or you have a close friend working in relationship coaching.

Then, validate your idea by talking to customers in that niche. Build and market your app till you are the market leader in that niche. After that, you can decide to pick and dominate another niche (or all of them)

Benefits of this approach

1. By sticking to a small niche, you can make something that resonates with the customers. It is much easier validating a product built for a very specific purpose.

2. By starting with a small niche, your goal will also be small. So it will be easier to figure out whether you are on the right track.

3. You will be able to become the market leader in a small niche much faster than you can become the market leader in the coaching industry. Once you have validated your business in the niche, it is much easier raising funding for the larger goal.

I would sit down with the two guys and ask them the following questions

- Who is our target market? Who are we building the chat app for?

- How do we get traction in this market?

- Who are our competitors? What is our differentiator / unfair advantage over them?

- What are the monetization plans?

- What is the end goal? Being acquired by a big company, IPO, lifestyle business etc

- What are the responsibilities for each of the three founders? How would each of them add value to the business?

- How would we know if we are on the right path? e.g. x% per month increase in number of users/messages/revenue etc

At the end of this, you will either be sold on the idea or you will not. I'd advise you to join only if the two guys are able to convince you of the idea.

1. Sell to our laziness - does this product save me X hrs of writing the same boring code for each project (e.g. creditcard.js)

2. Can I try it right now? A dev might need authorization from a manager to buy something, so a free trial will go a long way in getting the dev to try out your product.

3. How good is the quality? Detailed documentation goes a long way. Devs care a lot more than any other target market about what is under the hood.

Spend your marketing dollars creating a very high quality, targeted blog with the sole goal to capture my email. Send me regular emails (once/twice a month) about very specific things that I am interested in. Gain the trust of a dev before you start selling to him.

BTC-Tech: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies from Princeton University - https://piazza.com/princeton/spring2015/btctech/home

Some ideas below in no particular order. Pick the lowest hanging fruit.

- upsell to your customers. Looks like on the average each customer pays $10 per month. Is there anything you can do to give more value to the customers and charge more. (depends completely on your business and customer profile)

- look at new customer acquisition channels - adwords, facebook, retargetting, forums sales threads, affiliates etc

- increase spending on current customer acquisition channels. If you have a good idea on your customer LTV, you can figure out how much you can afford to spend to get a single customer.

- decrease churn - if your churn rate is high, you could analyze why it is so and focus on reducing it. Apart from increasing MRR, reducing churn automatically increase customer LTV and thereby justifies higher market spend.

- increase number of plans - if you have three plans, add a fourth plan priced at 2X-5X relative to the third plan (offering something of value to customers who can afford to pay more - e.g. phone support).

- increase pricing across the board - there is no way to know whether you are undercharging without actually increasing the pricing and seeing no change in customer acquisition numbers. The largest plan in my SaaS business has gone from X to 2X over the last 6 months (in three price increments), with no customers complaining of the price being too high. I plan to keep doing this until a decent number of customers tell me that the price is indeed too high. (do remember to grandfather in existing customers)

Starting April 21, Google will be using "mobile friendliness" as a ranking factor. These messages are to get webmasters ready for that change. I actually appreciate that they are sending these messages out, instead of just making the ranking change without giving webmasters a chance to fix the mobile related issues.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.nz/2015/02/finding...

If you can find the contact information for the app owners, you could maybe email them directly and find out what went wrong. There could be some pitfalls that you only get to see once you execute the idea.

One way to decide on the free trial duration is by asking yourself - what is the shortest amount of time that my typical customer will find the "aha" moment using my software. This could be as little as one day and as much as 90/120 days depending on what the software does.

One benefit of a shorter trial is that it lets you iterate fast - if your trial period is just 7 days, you could make a change and see its result in 7 days.

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons : Sam Keam - http://samkean.com/thetaleoftheduelingneurosurgeons.html Quite liked the writing style - neuroscience book written in a story format

Other good books in similar genre

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales : Oliver Sacks http://www.amazon.com/An-Anthropologist-Mars-Seven-Paradoxic...

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science: Norman Doidge - http://www.amazon.com/The-Brain-That-Changes-Itself/dp/14915...

1. In case you do not currently have a marketing site that lets people signup for an invitation to the beta, stop all development and create the marketing site right away. Having this done before you code lets you gauge whether your value proposition resonates with your target audience.

2. Start sending prospects to the site (post to forums where your customers hand out, run some ads via adwords or facebook etc) and let them sign up for the beta invitation. During the signup, get some additional information in order to segment them for step 4 below. Be very clear that your product will be in a beta stage, so that customers know there may be bugs/unfinished features. Promise to grandfather in the beta customers for a significant lifetime discount once the beta is over (and actually do so when the time comes).

3. Code and get your product ready for beta. This should be the minimum viable product and you can call it beta v1.0. Now segment your list so that you allow only x customers for v1.0, then later y additional customers when you go to beta v2.0 and so on. This will ensure that you do not get overwhelmed with too many customers giving you too much feedback. Depending on your product, segment the customers based on niche, so that you can focus all your energies creating a product solution fit for that specific set. Each beta cycle should be iterative - learn, build, measure.

4. Charge for the beta v1.0. This will go a long way in validating your idea and your product market fit. If you are not sure what to price your offering at, go with your gut instinct. You can always increase or decrease pricing later.

5. Take feedback over skype, phone or email. If you start with a small set of early customers, it should be possible for you to spend enough time with them. Scaling using UserVoice can be done later, since you are limiting the first set of customers.

1. I would suggest you look at options to monetize first. Even if you do not plan to implement it right away, knowing what kind of monetization the project can have will give you good idea of how, where and what is the cost to market.

2. If your project is centered around user generated content, I would suggest reading up on how websites like reditt overcame the chicken and egg problems (they seeded content till they had enough users who would generate content for them)

3. From your screenshot, you seem to be getting 5 to 10K visitors. You can start collecting user emails by offering something of value to them. (its never too early to start building a mailing list)

4. Check the pages that users visit using GA. Check the bounce rate with relation to source of traffic. This would give you a good idea of what traffic sources to promote, what kind of users find value in your site and what type of content gets your user's attention.

If you'd like some more custom feedback for your website, feel free to drop me an email.

Step 1: Define your customer segment. Who is hiveflux for? bootstrapped, startups, remote teams, specific industry? If you are not sure yet, look at who your competition is targeting. Niche it down. You can always expand horizontally later.

Step 2: Once you know your customer segment, change the copy on your website to drive the value proposition home for that specific segment.

Step 3: Find out where your target customers hang out. People from specific niche industries hang out at specific niche forums. Hang out at these forums and ask questions and contribute. If you are strapped for time, you could advertise directly on the forums - a lot of them allow you to open paid sales threads.

Step 4: Build a community from the early adopters you find from these forums and then get them to spread the word.

If you are offering a trial, let it be the best experience for your potential customers. A simple way of ensuring they do not abuse the free trial is to take credit card upfront (or setup a paypal subscription to start charging them 14 days later)

You could also have the trial based on how many files they can process instead of how long they have access. If it takes only one file for a potential customer to have the aha moment, enforce a "one file" trial. If it takes three, let it be three.

From what you've said, your service lets people extract data from files. Unless your customers have an ongoing need to process files, it might make sense to test a different pricing strategy instead of a SaaS one. This may also help you differentiate from your competitors who I presume have SaaS plans as well.

Also, if you can post a link to your service, maybe HN can give you better advice.

That's exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for - the kinds that helps in finding direction for the app.

I'd love to chat with you about making this work for both Stripe and PayPal (as well as about how you use the metrics in your business). If you are interested, you can sign up at https://www.saasymetrics.com/ or just shoot me an email (email in my profile)

By staying within the PayPal rate limits :)

We are definitely going to face technical challenges scaling up, but at the moment the rate limits do not seem to be an issue. If you'd like to chat more on the technical aspect of the app, just shoot me an email. (my email is in my profile). I'm always happy to talk tech.

Thanks for the feedback. The comments make sense.