Paid Content Promotion: Promoting your content with QuuuPromote

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Is paid content promotion the way to win the marketing battle?

Content Marketing is on the front line in the marketing battle. It’s use is decisive in theaters such as SEO and social media.

While most people (this author included) focus on content creation, they often forget about content marketing.

QuuuPromote offers an easy way out: Pay for it and your message gets posted to hundreds of social media profiles.

I’m not exactly an advocate of social media marketing, but this sounded to good to be true, so I decided to give it a try.

Here is what I learned…

The content I shared

I decided to set this up as a test right from the beginning: I was going to use my article about the best SaaS email marketing tactic I know and promote it on QuuuPromote.

Then I would check how often that link got shared/clicked – except neither did I implement click tracking nor a notification for when the post got shared.

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I didn’t have a way to track either clicks or shares besides the analytics provided by Quuu themselves:

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Having your own share & click tracking

So with one completely botched-up test under my belt (how can this even happen after years in the marketing game?), I started all over again.

This time I shared an article detailing how we decreased the churn rate by 40% with a single email AND made sure I had click & share tracking in place.

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I used a simple “@itengelhardt” at the end of the tweet to track shares. This gave me insight into shares on Twitter.

I don’t know an easy way to track shares on other social media sites, but Twitter seems to be the major channel for QuuuPromote. So I’m good with that.

For click tracking I simply used Bit.ly which does a wonderful job of that, as you’ll see.

Analyzing the results from paid content promotion

The natural tendency is to mistrust any analytics coming from a promotion marketplace itself.

I expected QuuuPromote to over-report both shares & clicks after the first post – which allegedly had 201 shares and 91 clicks.

So after the second promotion has finished, here are the results:

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Now this one got a lot more shares, but a lot less clicks according to QuuuPromote. I didn’t count the shares in my twitter stream, but this is what it looked like for four weeks:

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Judging from that I’d say that the share numbers are not exaggerated.

But what about clicks?

I’m glad you asked. According to Bitly, the number of clicks are actually under-reported:

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Bitly reports a total of 157 clicks – 9 clicks on the link itself, 148 from other bitlinks to the same URL. It also reports 356 shares.

That number is in line with the 353 shares reported by QuuuPromote – plus a few genuine retweets, I guess.

I wonder how and why Bitly actually reports more clicks than QuuuPromote. If you have any ideas, let me know on Twitter (@itengelhardt)

Conclusion

I got 157 clicks (&356 shares) for an investment of $30. That comes down to $0.19 per click, which is phenomenally low Cost-per-Click.

Will I use QuuuPromote again? Absolutely. It’s a cheap investment with good returns and it takes maybe 5 minutes of my time.

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How to Combat Onboarding Churn in Your SaaS Application

Churn is one of the most important metrics for your SaaS application. Whether your app’s revenue curve roars upwards like a Falcon 9 or whether it pancakes into the Valley of Despair like a Sumo-ringer splash diving – it all comes down to your churn rate.

There are a dozen ways to calculate churn, a dozen reasons for churn and hundreds of ways to fight churn; entirely too much for today, so I am going to focus on a type that gets next to no attention and which I call “onboarding churn”.

The quick and dirty basics

Churn is defined as “how many users out of 100 who start as customers at the beginning of a month cancel out and are no longer your customer at the end of the month”.

For example, if you have 200 customers at the beginning of August and 30 of those cancel any time between August 1st and August 31st, then you have a churn rate of 15%.

You can calculate churn either by looking at your users or by looking at the revenue they represent. You usually want to look at the revenue-based churn rate as it is more significant for your business. After all, losing two users on the $99/mo is a harder hit than losing ten users at $5/mo.

15% churn is not uncommon for early stage startups. You don’t have product/market-fit yet, you’re likely missing some essential features, your onboarding is far from perfect and so on. This all contributes to high churn rates.

Looking at churn in more detail

Having that number – commonly called “aggregate churn” – is better than nothing, but it doesn’t exactly give you details. Sure, 15% churn is high, but it doesn’t tell you how to solve it.

Often the users on your lower-tier plans are more likely to churn, and people on the expensive plans are less likely to churn. Talk about counter-intuitive.

For my product, I see the same thing: users on the lowest plan churn out very quickly, whereas the people on the highest plan are with LinksSpy the longest. You don’t get that information from looking at your aggregate churn.

Now, a completely different question is: When do users cancel? Surely, their reasons for cancelling are quite different when they cancel after one month vs. when they cancel after five years. But you don’t glean that information from aggregate churn either.

Again, I have the same problem with LinksSpy. The longer someone is with me, the less likely they are to churn. The churn rate in the first 3 months is 44,1% and after that drops to about 7%.

There are a lot of different ways you can slice up those 15%, but let’s focus on only one type: onboarding churn.

The Strange Case of Onboarding Churn

Onboarding churn is a term I newly coined, so I sure hope it sticks. In the meantime my definition of onboarding churn is churn that happens in the first 2-3 months of a user’s lifetime, because users either don’t get value from your app OR they don’t see the value they get.

I already mentioned that LinksSpy sees quite a bit of onboarding churn, but there are a lot of other companies that face the same value. For example, Moz has onboarding churn of – low and behold – 40%.

In fact, Sarah Bird of Moz was the first to introduce me to the concept of onboarding churn. When she mentioned once that they calculate churn only after a user has been paying for three months, I literally thought “What a cheap trick”. Only after I launched my own product and facing the same problem did I realize that there is some merit to that approach. Kudos, Sarah, for teaching me that lesson before I was ready and my sincerest apologies for thinking you were somehow “wrong”.

As it is there are good reasons to think of onboarding churn as yet another step in your customer acquisition channel. After all users are not really on board as long as they do not use your product.

Free Trials do NOT Prevent Onboarding Churn

The thing that is – euphemistically put – interesting about onboarding churn is that most SaaS/subscription applications have a free trial. So why don’t people figure out whether they like the software during the free trial and cancel before they are charged? After all, that’s what trials are for!

I don’t have an exact answer to that, but I guess that people see initial value in the app and promise themselves to “look into it in a week when there is less on my plate”. Fast-forward a week and they still don’t have time – but next week they will; and so on and so forth. Yeah, that’s the best explanation I can come up with.

Free trials don’t prevent onboarding churn – at least not all of it. Look at Moz! Their trial is 30 days and they still have onboarding churn rates of 40 percent.

In-App Onboarding Does NOT Prevent Onboarding Churn

Surely, having those fancy in-app tutorials that guide you through using the app with those nice bubbles help? Yes… somewhat, they can help if you get them just right.

I’ve revamped the in-app tutorials for LinksSpy at least three times by now, constantly improving on customer feedback. The latest version will go live with the relaunch and will focus on a completely new set of features.

How To Nip Onboarding Churn in the Bud

First of all, you can’t entirely get rid of onboarding churn. Some percentage of users will always sign up for your app, start paying you, never use it and then cancel. Expect the lower bound to be around 20-30%. You can probably drive that number down by going to extreme measures (My friend suggested flying out to them, taking their kids to soccer practice and cooking dinner). But most of those things are not justified for a <$1,000 LTV product.
So you (and I) have to live with a certain amount of onboarding churn.

However, what you can do is to dramatically reduce your onboarding churn.
Two years ago, I freelanced for an 8-figure SaaS company. They are selling access to semi-raw data. We came up with an A/B-test to test the following hypothesis: Delivering actionable advice – based on the data – each month will decrease 30/60-day churn.

We did a minimal test; sending just one email in the first month. The test group completely crushed the control group. Sending just one email decreased their 30 day churn rate by 40%.

It meant that they made an ROI of some 400% on what I charged. From running the split test. For one month. With only half the cohort receiving treatment. Ignoring prolonged customer lifetime.

That’s the power of reducing churn for a company at scale.

Use Emails to Reduce Onboarding Churn

So, emails can work fantastically well. Here are a few ideas what to send:

  • reminders to use sticky features
  • demonstrations of received value (e.g. “You saved $192 this month using our software”) a.k.a. “Get our users promoted” emails
  • reminders to use the app after inactivity

Better First Run Experience

Secondly, having a better onboarding/first-run experience can decrease onboarding churn.

  • Never let your users hit an empty page. If you don’t have data yet, show fake data
  • Lead users down the Minimum Path to Awesome in your product. Eliminate distractions.

I can give you an example of the first point. This is what LinksSpy customers see when they enter the application:

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See all that beautiful white space that designers drool about? Customers don’t like it. Your churn rate hates it.

Now here’s what they will see after the relaunch in 1.5 weeks:

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Look at that! Fake data and an in-app tour! Beauty.

 

Get to Product/Market Fit

Furthermore, reaching product/market fit will lower your churn rate across the board. This is not an easy task. Even after you have found a problem and your product presents a viable solution to the problem, you still need to figure out how to reach your target market.

Rob Walling had this problem in parts with Drip: Drip was initially a tool to collect email addresses and send autoresponders.

He got quite a few customers with this tool, but the churn rate was rather high. Only after he pivoted into Lightweight Marketing Automation did the churn rate go down.

Subsequently, the product and MRR blew way up. The huge problem here is that you need to make a decision to either build new features to satisfy your current audience OR pivot to another audience with the same product. It’s hard to know which steps to take.

Software With a Service

Lastly, you can improve your retention by offering a Done-For-You (DFY) service on top of your product. Users don’t want to learn how to use your product. They care for the results.

This is exactly the path that LinksSpy is going to take in the upcoming months. We will discontinue the $19/mo plan and instead introduce a $499/mo plan where we manage the whole outreach marketing process for your website. It’s completely hands-off and you will get a report at the end of the month detailing the results we got you.

Summary

To summarize all this: Onboarding churn is a thing. You will lose most of your customers during the first 3 months and churn rates do drop after that. This effect is caused by a number of things, most notably by not getting your users invested in your product.

Ways out of high onboarding churn are product/market fit, better first-run experiences, email (retention) marketing, and offering a Done-For-You option for your product.

Let me know your thoughts on the topic. Is there anything you struggled with? How did you overcome that challenge?

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Leveling up – Patrick McKenzie – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: starfighters.io
Twitter: @patio11
Slides:

 

Talk Recap

  • Everything we do: It’s all about the family
    • optimize for it, NOT for business results
  • Flying Geese
    • From dirt poor country to really rich country
    • developing economy: dirt poor, not able to do anything
    • start industry anyone can do: textiles
    • take educated workforce, infrastructure improvements from textiles industry and build refining steel industry
    • repeat and level up to automobile industry
    • take what you learn from automobile and re-invest into software/robots/aircraft/etc industry
  • Flying Geeks
    • Bingo Card Creator –> Kalzumeus –> Appointment Reminder –> Starfighter

Don’t Make Our Mistakes – Make Much Better Mistakes!

  • Tutorial mission: Your first business
    • Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it.
    • Optimize for learning over perfection
    • start accumulating unfair advantages for later businesses
    • Cover “minimum viable financial goal”
  • How you know it’s an advantage?
    • People tell you you’re anomalously good
    • Watch other people around you in community. Note where you’re doing good on something useful.
    • Use your growing understanding of your business to project what X would do in another, larger business, or a business with advantages you lack
    • When you find your superpower: Exploit the heck out of it!
  • The case against SaaS for Biz #1
    • huge barriers to shipping and keeping it in the market
    • Hard to sell and market without any pre-existing foothold in industry
    • Long slow SaaS ramp of death
      • took 6 months to get to $400 MRR
  • The Glide Path To SaaS
    • Plant a flag on the market with an e-book, WordPRess plugin, etc
    • Start collecting email addresses
    • Launch a productized consulting business
    • Gradually titrate up the amount of software offered
  • Typical Bootstrapped SaaS Pricing
    • $29 – $49 – Tier 1, some foozles
    • $99 – Tier 2, even more foozles, maybe a feature
    • $249 – Tier 3, much more foozles, all them features
  • Productized Consulting Base Offering
    • $99/mo: SaaS application to do pricing pages
    • $500/mo: Savvy pricing pages as a service
    • $2.5k to $10k++/mo: Chief Revenue Officer
    • This is aspirational pricing!

“The Peldi Test”: Love What You Do

  • Founder/product/market fit is one of the best advantages you can possibly have
  • do something you love
  • Overlap all products in your portfolio!

Level Up In

  • Scale of problem you’re attacking
  • Engineering acumen brought to bear on target
  • Sales/marketing techniques
  • Sophistication of business operation

Ending A Chapter

  • Deciding when it’s time to move on
    • Business not helping you achieve goals (Live/love/Learn)
    • You’ve stopped accumulating marginal advantages
    • It’s “clearly time to go.”
  • Options for pruning portfolio projects
    • shut it down
    • Put it into maintenance mode
    • Sell it
  • Anatomy of a sellable business
    • Goldilocks zone for revenue/price
    • Low ongoing time involvement from founder
    • Low-risk that present revenue evaporates
    • Growth in market
    • Technical risk mitigated
  • Starfighter
    • Online games (CTFs) engineers play, for fun, by programming
    • We passively identify skilled engineers
    • We contact them and ask about background/goals
    • If appropriate, introduce them to hiring managers
    • If they take a job, we earn a commission
    • Where is this “leveling up?”
      • Trusted relationship with co-founders
      • Scale of technical ambition
        • BCC = “Hello World with random number generator”
        • Starfighter = Stock market with C compiler
      • BCC Investment: $60. Starfighter: …
      • Does Starfighter pass The Peldi Test? HECK, YES!
  • Starfighter Lows
    • Morderous Crunch To Ship
      • Ignored family to make deadline
    • Technical Scope
      • 10x technical complexity in a new business: good. We did 100x…
    • Promised a Ship Date
      • never promise a ship date, because you are going to break it
    • Founder Communication Issues

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How I Tripled My Windows Software Revenue In 3 Days – Anders Thue Pedersen – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: timeblock.com
Twitter: @andersthue
Slides:

 

Talk Recap

  • I was really bad running a business for the first 11 years – got better in the last 6 years
    • The most destructive force in the universe – besides the Death Star – is shame
    • MicroConf changed it for me!
      • Expanding the comfort zone
      • Sense of belonging
  • shame resilience
    • Dave Collins talking about TSR Watermark Image before teardown: “Finally a really crappy website”
    • Cleaned up the website
    • Removed the free version
    • Improved the copy
    • Went from $300/week to $900/week
    • Changes done in one evening AT MicroConf
  • Why did I not do that before?
    • Requires knowledge
    • Requires courage and shame resilience
    • Requires you to reach out and say help
  • Last day of MicroConf / Takeaways
    • Split ego and product/business
    • Started failing, stopped being a failure
    • Kept raising my hand asking for help
  • Today:
    • 150 sales/month
    • $4500 revenue/mo
    • 5 minutes support /day
    • 2 hours of coding /month

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Mistakes That Will Kill Your Business Value – Thomas Smale – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: feinternational.com
Twitter: @thomassmale
Slides:

 

Talk Recap

  • build your business for an eventual sale – even if you don’t plan to ever do that
  • mistakes that will kill your business value
    • “Just one more feature”
    • Not tracking metrics, income & costs
      • get an accountant/bookkeeper
      • important information for buyer
      • missing data –> lower price
    • Single points of failure – owner, platform, third parties
      • common problem for solo-founders
      • SOPs help/reduce pain
    • Overselling annual plans (>20%)
      • annual plans are actually valued LESS than monthly plans
    • Not knowing when to let go
      • growing OR flat growth is the best point to sell

 

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Small Data Science – Marc Hoffmann – MicroConf Europe Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website:
Twitter:
Slides:

Talk Recap

  • The hypothesis is a testable assumption
    • Shopify shops need adwords help (difficult to test)
    • Shopify shops use adwords help (easier to test, look at shopify marketplace)
  • Use all background knowledge you can get
  • Reason Backwards / Pattern Matching
  • Use the “right” statistics (mean vs median)
  • Use heuristics
    • Find most important reason and ignore the rest

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The 1-hour UI Audit – Jane Portman – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: uibreakfast.com
Twitter: @uibreakfast
Slides: The 1 hour UI audit slides

 

Talk Recap

  • Your app/website design is damocles sword hanging over your head: Always threatening, but you never have time
  • Top 4 Design Hazards
    • User doesn’t want your product
    • user fails to sign up
    • user fails to get started
    • user fails to reach his goals
  • 3 modules, 20 minutes each
    • functionality
    • layout
    • style
  • Functionality
    • List the goals
      • Who are your ideal customers?
      • What is their big goal when they sign up?
      • What are their long-term goals, business or personal?
    • List the tasks
      • Primary: What tasks do the users perform daily? What is their daily routine for achieving that big goal?
      • Secondary: What unique tasks are performed from time to time?
    • Extract the objects
      • Work through your tasks from previous step, and list all nouns.
      • Chances are your main menu will list the same objects
    • Define the language
      • Work through list of tasks and objects
    • Classify Existing Screens
      • Primary: items in main menu & first-level descendants
    • Audit each Screen
      • List tasks & objects for each screen
      • Ideal Screen Checklist
        • one big title
        • just one list of objects
        • one prominent task (other tasks subtle)
        • clean corners
        • obvious navigation
    • Now work with the results
      • polish the language
      • split complex screens
      • Group elements in horizontal blocks
      • Polish experience for primary tasks
  • Keep your product crispy
    • simple apps are easier to use, build & sell.

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No exit plan – Rachel Andrew – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: grabaperch.com
Twitter: @rachelandrew
Slides:

 

Talk Recap

  • Have no plan of ever selling to Facebook or anything
  • What happens after you quit the day job?
    • You hit the goal
    • You don’t have a boss anymore
    • But what is next?
  • Created EdgeOfMySeat.com
    • Things were easier back than
    • Swapping hours for money
  • Launched Perch as a result of consulting work (scratching own itch)
  • April 2013 we went full time on Perch
    • “The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.” – Ingvar Kamprad
  • Goal: “Going full time”
    • specific
    • measurable
    • attainable
    • realistic
    • time-bound

What happened after we went full time on Perch?

  • we’ve launched a second product that people love (a smaller version of Perch)
  • still just the two of us
    • still working very hard – 7 days a week
    • but we love the work
  • There is no transformation moment
    • even after going full-time, you’re still you
    • you still have your weaknesses & strengths
    • you may lose a team that covered your weaker spots
  • We forgot to ask ourselves:
    • What did we want our life to look like?
    • What was the next goal for us?
  • “We have a strategic plan, it’s called ‘doing things'” – Herb Kelleher
  • What are your options? 
    • stay small
      • outsource to small team of freelancers
      • not all products suit small (customers need rapid support; mission critical)
    • hire a team
    • replace yourself
      • “get the solution right then remove yourself from delivery” – Brian Casel
    • sell up and move on
  • We’ve tried staying small
    • Perch as a business has a lot of moving parts:
      • Development
      • Ops
      • Community stuff
      • Marketing
      • Support
      • Documentation
    • We can’t do the job of 5 people
    • We could have delayed that jump
      • continue with consulting
      • would have allowed to hire sooner
      • could have self-funded first hire
  • sometimes it is OK to upset a few customers
  • Why not hire/outsource support?
    • as a self-hosted product support is often our first run experience
    • it is truly technical support
    • not the sort of support a VA can easily handle
    • support that every person with technical chops in the company is going to need to help with
  • hiring a developer: what will this give us?
    • more development capacity
    • someone to work alongside
    • focus
    • new ideas and input to the product
    • What’s stopping us?
      • Money – we’re not quite there yet
    • How are we going to get there?
      • Increase profit to hire developer
      • Working strategically on things that increase sales of Perch
      • Focus on most profitable customers?
    • Who are our most profitable customers?
      • Perch is one-off license sale
      • Recurring because people buy a license per site they develop
      • Support costs are front-loaded
    • How do we identify profitable customers?
      • Look at data
      • segmented our customers into groups: casual, committed, super-users
      • current list of top 100 customers on our dashboard
        • I never talked to some of those customers!
    • We want customers who:
      • run a busy consultancy agency
      • Are building lots of websites
      • are more interested in being profitable than playing with the newest shiny thing
    • Your sales data is a goldmine of information
      • you don’t need a SaaS for this
    • Prioritise features wanted by ideal customers
      • Add weight to feature requests based on customer profile
  • Where do our customers come from?
    • our audience
      • seen me on stage somewhere
    • Colleagues’ audiences
    • NOT our ideal customers
  • Where do our IDEAL customers come from? 
    • they have often never heard of Drew or I
      • e.g. in support they don’t know we are the founders
    • cold audiences from Google, or referrals based on word-of-mouth
    • “Our customers don’t come through the one marketing channel that I am good at!”
  • content marketing targeted at ideal customers
  • search engines
    • we do well in organic search traffic
    • which has meant we’ve typically been a bit lazy
  • Placing ads
    • choosing sites that attract our ideal cusotmer
    • using ad copy that targets these customers
    • creating landing pages that speak to these customers
    • TEST!
  • Plugging our leaky funnel
    • we love Drip!
    • Pushing our customer segments into Drip so we can target them as groups.
    • Identifying lapsed customers – those who haven’t bought a license for 6 months – and emailing them
    • Book recommendation: Watertight Marketing
  • We have everything we need to do this
    • Nothing we’ve discovered has been a shock
    • Underlined things we really already knew
    • We’re looking at data through a different lens
  • If you are stuck
    • define your vision for your company and life
    • what does it look like? What is your role? What else are you able to do?
    • “Arrival is not static” – Sherry Walling

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How to build a self-funded SaaS as a non-technical solo founder – John Ndege – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: pocketrisk.com
Twitter:  @johnndge
Slides:

Talk Recap

  • Pocket Risk is an online investment risk questionnaire for financial advisors
    • launched in April 2013
    • $99/mo
    • made it to 6-figures as a non-technical founder

Idea Phase

  • Goal: Establish whether you have something valuable
    • Establish what you want to achieve – $10k MRR, quit your job, billionaire
    • Margin of safety – have money in the bank or a job
    • Find a problem – your own experience or speak to market
    • Assess market size – can I achieve my goals in the market?
      • total reachable market given your resources (i.e. you know SEO, PPC –> that’s your market)
    • Validate problem – speak to 20 prospects and see if problem exists
    • Define the solution – create a mockup. Have a vision for customers, product and industry
    • Customer validation – sell the solution using mockup. Get 10 companies to pre-pay

Build Phase

  • Goal: Hire developer & build something valuable
    • Minimum $15,000 development budget. $100/hour max. You get what you pay for
    • Finding a developer: HN monthly hiring, Ruby groups, referrals
    • Assess Developer – programming test, level of commitment, past work, references, gut
  • Continue marketing and building your list

Launch Phase

  • Goal: Get to breakeven
    • Generate traffic – read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg
    • Find out why people buy, don’t buy, use, don’t use and churn – speak to them on phone
    • Know your metrics and unit economics – traffic, conversion rates, MRR, CAC, LTV, churn, feature usage
      • feature usage tells you “sticky features” that make people happy
    • Develop Relationships – industry journalists, thought leaders, other CEOs serving same customers

Growth Phase

  • Goal: Achieve your overall goal
    • Manage churn – don’t die by a thousand cuts
      • reducing churn doubled my LTV
      • every 30 days check which users didn’t use product for last 6 weeks and email them
    • Keep generating traffic – marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable. CAC < LTV
    • Systems – start building systems so the company can grow without you. Use software & hire
    • Vision – steer company towards your vision for customers, product and industry

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The most sincere form of flattery: Useful & effective website ideas to make your own – Dave Collins – MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: softwarepromotions.com
Twitter: @thedavecollins

Dave published a shortened version of his talk here: The most sincere form of flattery: Useful & effective website ideas to make your own

 

Talk Recap

  • “Good artists copy, great artists steal” – Picasso
  • “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from” – David Bowie
  • We know our websites are important
    • But we settle for “Meh” – why is that?
    • Open your eyes to the design – beyond copy and popups and attention grabbers
  • Get the originality for your website from copying!
    • Swipe file
    • Copy & Paste vs. Copy & Expand & Paste
  • What’s the first thing a website does?
    • give a good first impression!
    • make clear what you DO!
    • make REALLY clear what you DO!
    • focus on the pain
  • Why Do you do what you do?
    • Was offered a pay check with a substantially higher salary
    • SEO is kind of boring
    • Looked at our own website: “Does it communicate our why?”
    • never allow users to think “… What do I get now?”
    • Websites without email capture are a waste
  • Who are you targeting?
    • adjust your language to your audience
    • Use Avatars
  • Logos
    • no one cares about your logo
  • Not getting stuck
    • Don’t leave your website visitors hanging
  • Make it easy
    • forms need to be obvious, quick
    • reduce nav items where possible
  • About what?
    • People like “About Us” pages with pictures of staff
  • Balance
    • need to include what is important on website
    • we need to conform to standards
    • BUT: Stand out
  • Nudges are good
    • the easier it is, the more likely people are going to use it
  • Differentiation through identity
    • Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign
  • Clarity beats Clever all the time
    • have obvious headlines

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