Ask News.YC: I need remedial marketing lessons

I bookmarked your site and may get around to trying it sometime, although I may have almost as little time as a new parent. :)

Quick thoughts, no intelligence guaranteed:

Your pricing plans are organized backwards. Click the link, glance at the leftmost column where the cheap option always is, see "$52", have a 500-millisecond heart attack. Then keep reading and notice that it does get cheaper. Great! Except that the damage has been done: the $52 sticks in my brain. Not good.

$52 is too much to quote. Especially with your wacky (nifty?) "pay for what you use" plan. If you have that plan, use it! Quote a price per picture! Or, if that's too late-night-infomercial a tactic for you, quote a price per 250 pictures, which is conveniently about $26. (Price of a 1 year Flickr Pro account with unlimited pictures: $25. Unless I'm missing something. If I am missing something your site needs to explain it to me or I'm just going to buy Flickr.)

"TBD" is bad. Flickr doesn't give me any of this "TBD". I can tell exactly what the limits of my free account are. You should pick a number and put it there... having "TBD" there gives the subliminal impression that you're a newb and haven't figured it out yet. :)

You have a hard row to hoe. Flickr has the mindshare, they've got the network effect, they've got deep pockets in the form of a giant corporate owner who may soon be sold to an even larger corporate owner. You might consider positioning yourself as the perfect place to move to when you get sick of having your Flickr photos owned by Microsoft. I'm only half joking. How's your Flickr import tool? :)

Finally, if you have good photo support for bloggers but can't get the bloggers to move to you, can you move to them? Can you take any small bites of Photobucket's market? Is there any point in a Facebook app? (Doubtful, but what do I know?) A plugin that lets you embed slideshows into a Blogger/Livejournal/MySpace/??? page?

Good point on the TBD. I've changed it.

I'm actually not worried about Flickr. I'm gunning for a much larger competitor: people's hard drives. Flickr is a perfectly fine social network for photography enthusiasts. For normal people who want to share their doings, I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance. Flickr is a grid. OurDoings is an illustrated story. The only problem I expect to encounter related to Flickr is people getting the expectation that your photos won't be organized unless you put effort into it.

That said, your point about MSFT is a good one. Perhaps the time is now to make a Flickr import tool.

I've made something clearly better, in ways you can see at a glance.

That presumes that I have seen my photos in both places. I haven't. I barely use Flickr, and I've never used your site.

My glance at your demo didn't sell me on the difference thoroughly enough. Make the demo even more of an illustrated story, perhaps? More timepoints? More captions? A screencast might be nice if you want to show people the automatic-organization feature in action.

Get your first ten users cracking! Get some photosets into the system and showcase them in a box on the homepage! Nothing moves the flock like the sight of other happy sheep. :)

I'd make sure iPhoto import worked well before I went for Flickr. I really am mostly joking about the MSFT thing. I don't actually think that very many Flickr users harbor illusions that their data is private, and getting invested Flickr users to convert is a completely different marketing game from the one you're playing now.

Ok, I should have said "one" instead of "you".

Screencast of the automatic-organization feature (among other things) is here:

http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/windows1.htm

Almost all of my users are using it for non-public photos. One notable exception:

http://ourdoings.com/neverlandtheatre/

I will improve the demo.

Ironically, non-public photos are a great feature. But it doesn't advertise itself! So find some less-shy sample users, or send someone out to a parade or something and document it.

Sorry I missed the screencast, but I guess that's the point of the drive-by demo: to see what casual visitors notice and what they don't. Of course, at this point, I should remind you that I may not be the ideal sample of your target demographic. :)

The best way to get users is not through marketing jujitsu, but simply by making great things. Word of mouth was good enough for Google. So go talk to your users. What do they like about the site? What would make them like it more? What do you have to do to make the site so great that they not only use it, but gush to everyone they know about it? When you get to that point, your problem is solved.

What you're saying is true, but not simple. Suppose I'm providing a shoe-shine service. I understand my customers well and make every improvement I can think of, but still don't generate excitement. How do I tell if (1) the next improvement will lead to the tipping point or (2) no improvement will generate excitement until I target a different set of people more likely to get excited about shoe shining or (3) Nobody else is as excited about shoe shines as I am, and to generate excitement I need to take my service in a different direction? There are three possible paths. Which one leads to making something great?

(1) is the closest to the right path, though it's not phrased as one. And in fact you never do know when you'll hit the tipping point. So you have to work fast.

But your existing users are the place to start. There must be something they like about whatever you have, or you wouldn't be there. So you just have to learn to understand them well enough to turn that like into love. In the process you may appeal to a broader set of users, and as you iterate the "typical" user you focus on can move.

[holy geez, this sure turned into a book!]

I'd be interested in working with you more on this. Shoot me an email if you'd like to hear more.

On the site:

On the hosting plans page, you have a long list of features starting with "Auto-organize photos by date" that all of the plans have. There's no need to have 5 columns of all "YES". Just break it out into a subsection below saying "All plans include these great features:"

Also, your design is really great but your text is really...programmery. Make it bigger, make it prettier, make the copy a little friendlier. For instance, "Send attachment-free email updates" could be "All OurDoings emails include picture thumbnails so you don't have to go back to the website" or something. There is big benefit for wordsmithing to match your audience's language. A/B testing will work better than your suspicion.

The navigation is inconsistent and confusing. The only consistent link I saw across all pages was the logo that takes you back to the home page. I'd recommend the following (links, tabs, sidebar, whatever): Home, "Create a new album" (if not signed in) or "Album home" (if signed in), and "Help".

I agree the with m_fish, the pricing is confusing. It looks like $1/500MB for one week, or $0.10/MB/year. This doesn't mean a thing to normal people. Also, the Max price is a nice idea (reassurance against overcharging) but it makes the otherwise identical plans confusing.

Clicking on "Buy" takes you directly to a PayPal login screen - that's horrifying! Hold my hand, please, I don't even understand what's going on here. (that wasn't sarcastic)

Also, the ad supported free account is a good idea, but it's not clear where the ads will be or what they're for. That's a little creepy in context with my kids. Will I be spamming my kids' aunts with your site?

As far as the ads, where are you getting them? Are you putting them in emails? Do you think they would pay well enough to have your service associated with ads?

Your creation pipeline is a little hairy too. The only place to find it is with the Free plan link, then you get a generic login screen that doesn't reassure me that I'm making a photo album and doesn't even tell me I'm creating an account. I don't know what happens after that but I'm too scared to go somewhere so poorly marked.

I'd make a free trial the default, then let people offer to let people upgrade if they want more pictures/fewer ads. 37signals apps like Backpack do a good job of this.

As for getting traffic to the site:

Include a blurb at the bottom of every notification email along the lines of "Like what you see? Wish you could share your pictures like this? Create a trial album at OurDoings.com" and create a landing page where you can track referral sources.

Try to get in the new parents guides that hospitals, parenting magazines, Babies 'R' us, local kid attractions, etc send out. Include a coupon with referral number so you can track effectiveness.

Are you even getting traffic? Is a really leaky funnel that's keeping you from getting paid accounts or just a low flow of potential users?

Make it easy for users to spread the word. Give them credit (affiliate style) for getting new accounts.

Have a contest for the best picture per (week/month/etc).

pg says that making something great sells an app, but he also hired an expensive PR firm and said they were worth the money. I wouldn't hire a firm, but I would put effort into marketing.

Lest you think I'm trashing you, here's the good:

Your site is pretty. That's reassuring and will keep people on your site long enough to give you a chance once you get there.

Once you're actually in an album, the navigation is pretty good.

I think your approach to photo sharing is dynamite - you're clearly not getting into a fight with Flickr that you would lose, and it's such an obvious upgrade over "nothing" which is usually what people are doing with their pics right now.

pg says that making something great sells an app, but he also hired an expensive PR firm and said they were worth the money.

I hired a PR firm in 1997. Things have changed in 11 years. And also, we were fairly established at that point: a year and a half old, with roughly a million in funding in the bank. When we were in the OP's position, we just focused on making users like us, and that was the right thing to do.

I just asked because Bruce has 10 users paying < $50/yr.

I always hesitate to ask Viaweb questions because you prob get tired of them, but since you brought it up: :-)

How did you get your first users?

Or did they find you?

How long after you started was it before you had customers?

We got our very first users through friends of friends, or by cold-calling them. The first two users were two technical bookstores. One was run by a guy who'd worked at Interleaf at the same time as me. The other one we probably cold-called.

We started working on Viaweb in July 1995, and I think we got the first users in November or December. We didn't publicly launch till January, though, because we felt we had to have 5 or 6 stores already online before we launched, or we'd look lame.

Thanks!

>>I have about ten people actively posting photos to the site, but they're all people I've directly talked to and/or shown the site to.

I don't know about going viral, but marketing is hard work. You have to budget time for it every day, especially early on. Of course, I'm an advocate of working smart, and hopefully some other people on here will have the kind of tips you're asking for; I'm just saying that pounding the pavement, especially for something that isn't inherently viral, is a necessary but not sufficient part of marketing.

There was a good article on Techcrunch a while back about how most of the "viral" videos you see on the Web actually have had a lot of effort (and in some cases dollars spent) in getting them out there.

What I'm afraid of is that you're totally right. Given the choice between improving the site and pounding the pavement, I'll always be drawn toward improving the site. But maybe I need to change that.

It's not an either or, but there needs to be a balance. If you're product is 100x excellent but your marketing makes you 0.001x obscure, you need to play some marketing catchup. Word of mouth is fine, but 10 users is a pretty small user base to expect them to bootstrap your growth for you.

I don't think going viral works as well with busy parents as it does with teens and college students.

If you want to focus on busy parents, I think working this from a different angle would work best. If your service has any special features that you feel are newsworthy, you could try submitting it to local newspapers (used by busy parents much more than the internet still).

Another angle to consider: What if you could partner with a camera manufacturer to bundle a client-side program that integrated with your site? If you could convince a manufacturer that your service is worth partnering with, you will see a tremendous amount of growth and revenue (if things are done right).

I think in order to successfully market to busy parents, you have to be a seamless link in the chain that links the picture from the moment it's taken to the moment is arrives in grandma's inbox (which represents what the majority of busy parents want to do with their photos - that and archiving). One product I've seen that has this in mind is a wifi-enabled SD card that automatically sent pictures to your network when it was in range. Your service is the next link - the one that brings the images from the computer to the internet, and even to grandma's inbox. Keep that in mind as you go forward and I think you'll do well.

The seamless chain is actually what people like about the site. It ends up in grandma's inbox in the best possible way.

Embarrassingly, the camera-to-internet part of the chain is only seamless on Windows right now. It's a little more manual on Linux and OSX. Still, I'm questioning now whether it's another improvement that the site needs, or if it's marketing.

There are even photo frames that support media RSS, so the chain to grandma doesn't have to involve email. I actually give two Media RSS feeds--one text+photos, one photos only.

Further, if grandma is comfortable clicking buttons on web pages, she can take over from mom and dad the job of picking good pictures from among many that were taken. Mom or dad just needs to turn on the option.

You know, I would even remove the linux option from view. I doubt that your customers (busy parents) will be dealing with linux installations.

Here's another though I had. Is there a simple rss reader that the grandmothers could install? (I apologize to all who are offended by the term 'grandmothers.' I mean it with the most respect and only to represent the non-technical picture receivers.) You could build something that automatically sends the pictures to the end-user's desktop. Maybe something similar to MSFTs and Google's sidebar program that cycles through the images on the server.

Not only does it make the process of receiving photos from loved ones simple (once the program is installed the user only has to wait for their family to upload new images), but it's also a feature that is almost newsworthy and certainly an advantage over the recognized competitors.

You could even rotate in advertisements between photos for free accounts.

You need to do a better job of convincing users that the product is trying out. Photos grouped by date, is that your biggest selling point? Emailing photos is nice but I wouldn't name it as one of the three selling points. And I'm sure I can upload photos and I'm sure it's safe too - tell me something cool about your site I don't know.

And if you aim for users with a huge backlog of pictures, why don't you mention that? Can I try it out for free for a month? It's not on the front page.

Maybe you need marketing, but you need more work on the selling aspect of your site first.

Get Google Analytics. Measure your bounce rate.

I'm a parent with kids who go to a small private school. All our own photo sharing needs are met with what we have but your private school blogging idea makes more sense to me. There are lots of things you could do.

Your site could accept submissions from parents who want their kids to get attention. Parents could create their own subsets to highlight the events involving their kids. The school could encourage kids to write their own accounts of the events. The best stuff could automatically go into an online yearbook. Sell them a $10 compact disk when their kids graduate.

One thing to keep in mind if you try to sell something to the schools directly is that they have annual budgets. The best approach would not be to ask for money upfront but to charge them at the end of whatever "year" makes sense for them.

One person you may want to focus your efforts on is the school librarian. The one at the my kids school is also in charge of the library web site. I'm pretty sure she would be interested in a system that made it easy to organize pictures and discussions of new books along with pictures of the kids. Something like http://www.delicious-monster.com

Hey there. I like the site redesign. I think you have a good product and a good looking site. But it doesnt tell a story. You have a great voice on the blog, but that doesnt come through on the site, which seems 'blah.' There is no 'About Us' page, that can help tell your story and why you built it (at least I couldnt find one). Also, you've mentioned so many features and reasons for why you built the product on this page, but I cant see them highlighted on your home page. Tell a story! All that said, good luck and keep going.