Notes on 4 years of starting up | Hacker News Reader

Notes on 4 years of starting up

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56 pointsmadmax1086 comments

+1 on your point about marketing. I also deeply undervalued how much goes into a great/thoughtful marketing plan, all the way from choosing the broad messaging and distribution channels through the “tiny” details like nailing the copy on your landing page (this may seem easy or straightforward, but it took us a while to truly understand what worked).

At TechLoaf, we experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that expounded on how amazing our newsletter was, etc...

And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.

About 30% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing, which is drastically higher than what we saw earlier iterations do.

(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)

How qualified are the leads you get from the opaque landing page? Seems like subscribers would be unlikely to read a newsletter having signed up for it while not knowing what it was about. I would imagine you’d want to optimize for opens over subscribers to avoid vanity metrics, though perhaps not.

Interesting. Curiosity beats dazzle I guess. Will beta-test something like this. Thanks for the tip.

I have no idea what techloaf is but visiting that landing page made me want to subscribe, wow.

Agreeing so much with 1) the days you don't know what to do next despite having an endless list of tasks and projects to work on ranging from fixing a typo on the website to fixing a long-lasting bug only visible to you and 2) marketing... gosh this is a world I did not know much about, and still don't, but it's fascinating to see what people react to... Quite surprising.

Thanks. After 4 years the only thing I know for sure about marketing is that you have to spend more every year. Everything else is a shot in the dark.

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