Ask HN: Getting users to use the product, overcoming obscurity

3 points·Apane··5 comments

I'm the co-founder of venuevortex.com.

We're having a problem with users using the product, a lot of the visits are one-off visits from paid ads, content marketing etc...

How can we make the visits more "sticky" and make them come back and actually continuously use the product?

I've successfully on-boarded the supply side but the demand side I could use some advice on.

Thoughts?

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The fact that users have to select a city as the first step is probably costing you 20-50% of your visitors.

You should be guessing what city they're in by IP. https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo

In addition to that, is the paid advertising being geotargeted enough that it is only reaching people in those cities? If not, that would definitely explain a lot of the bounces from the advertising click-throughs. (Though in my experience, high bounce rates from search advertising can be common anyway.)

Yes, I'm targeting only folks in those cities. Since we've initially launched in Ontario. We're only targeting Ontarians at the moment. The issue is really with the demand side, is there a real use-case here? Perhaps a pivot may be necessary.

I'm not considering myself an expert, but the front page doesn't look interesting to me. Maybe in your case it would make more sense to learn from front pages, similar to Expedia/Kayak. At the very least, A/B test it.

Small point: The site has too many exclamation points.

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