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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

If you can get a 100 real users then $2000 is way, way too cheap. If you are just going to shoot through 100 people with no real interest in the product and who are just signing up for monetary reward then you would have to pay me to use your service.

Basically what you are trying to offer is the holy grail of startups. If you have figured out how to get a 100 real engaged customers to any service on demand then you can get a thousand or a million. If you can do this can I please invest in your business because you are going to be a billion dollar company.

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> If you can get a 100 real users then $2000 is way, way too cheap

For some services I've delivered people at $0.70. Other at $1,000+. Both are profitable for supplier and the company. Price has no meaning until you understand eCPA, per user revenue, margin and scale.

> If you have figured out how to get a 100 real engaged customers to any service on demand then you can get a thousand or a million.

Scaling campaigns doesn't work like that, especially in performance channels. Some channels scale better than other but there is always a exponential cost per user acquisition.

This is complete misinformation your saying. Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude. And I'm a bit surprised in a forum that is usually as considered as HN this is getting pushed to the top of the page.

I am not saying that you can't acquire 100 real customers under $2000 (in many niches you certainly can), but that if you can do this on demand for any service then $2000 is far too cheap. If you can get me 100 real customers I will pay you $10,000 in a heart beat.

In my niche we can't acquire customers under $2000 a pop - luckily the LCV supports this expenditure. My customers don't click on ads, don't respond to emails, don't respond to snail mail (even hand written ones), and don't answer their phones. The only way we can reach them is by physical cold calling and we have to visit each prospect multiple times in person to get to the stage we can make a presentation. The only good news is once we go through this ordeal 75% of our prospects buy.

So the 100(+) signups would be people who opted in to the service and answered the question why (by filling in their reason). So on the other side you'd have a list of leads including their individual motivation (instead of a random bunch of email addresses). I've been doing this for some time, it's not that hard actually.

Let's say I run a new service that targets SMB decision makers. Let's say this service is an email marketing service that costs $49 a month. Can you really send me 100 targeted SMB customers who are genuinely interested in using and paying for a new email marketing service? If you can do this on demand you can charge me 90% of the LCV of these people and I will willingly pay.

I obviously can't predict if the price + product is something people want. Which is exactly why I like running these lean experiments. You can only find out by getting the idea out of your head, launch it in a quick and lean way and find out if people are interested. By getting early leads to sign up, you might find out by talking to them that 39/mo is thye magical nr. Or maybe 89/mo if feature X and Y are added.

If the effort is not too great I would suggest you give it a try. My feeling is the traffic you will send will be pretty low quality, but if you do find you can get high quality traffic on demand for different services (especially in the B2B market) then you are on a major winner.

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