Comment by elevation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elevation | Hacker News Reader

Not all businesses need to put effort into SEO.

I'm bootstrapping a niche B2B service. In this space I have the luxury of not relying on google for leads; word of mouth referrals have generated consistent growth by bringing in clients who initially need a few hours of consulting but eventually transition to being customers of my service.

Because my webpage is more of a statement of legitimacy than a sales tool; it doesn't need to rank on google. By the time my clients need to access my website for some information, they know my domain because they've already corresponded with me via email.

Since I haven't needed google's help for my business to grow, and I believe their level of dominance is bad for the world, I use robots.txt to block google's crawler, and generally do anything to avoid receiving any help from them.

This strategy could work for a non-SaaS/consulting company too; if I were running a bike-repair shop on main street, I would build my business through word of mouth promotion within niche bike communities to generate referrals. Once a neighborhood, city, or region full of people trust your brand, a negative yelp review or a google algorithm won't sink you.

If google doesn't build your business, it can't take your business away.

Even if people know the domain they are going to, many people still type it into google anyway.

I know I do this, for a couple of reasons. One, so I don't have to type in the whole domain. Two, to avoid accidentally hitting a typo-squatter.

Google will pretty much always put the domain as the first result for things that look like a navigational search. I imagine closely matching a real, known url that other users click on is a strong ranking signal.

But I don't think you show up at all if you have 'noindex' set?

I am trying to bootstrap a niche B2B service myself and having much less success getting off the ground. I would love to hear more about how you identify, qualify and communicate with new leads/referrals.

I google them

Simply put, I asked an industry contact for referrals to my consulting business, and built a service to address the common needs of the new clients.

For years I'd moonlighted as a backend developer; I'd meet graphic designers who were making amazing-looking websites but were in over their heads when it came to integrating database or API functionality into a client's project since they were more into design than coding. I would code up an integration and bill them for a few hours of effort. This would always lead to an hour or two of future maintenance, but wasn't a reliable revenue generator.

On one project, the client required an web integration with an ERP system so their website could reflect inventory status; the ERP vendor provided an API but it was rate limited and couldn't support production web traffic volume, so I coded up a cache layer and a few custom reports. During the process, I discovered that the API documentation was incomplete so I ended up corresponding with the CTO in order to complete the work.

After that project was over, I hoped to leverage my newfound familiarity with the API to win more business, so I asked the CTO to forward any of his customers that needed integrations beyond the scope that his company usually supports. After a few referrals, I was able to see some common patterns of needs not supported directly by the 3rd party API and was able to develop a service to support those use cases. Referrals from the CTO of the ERP company carry weight with my clients, who in turn have been happy enough with my service that they have also been a source of new leads.

The combination of 2nd and 3rd party referrals has continued to generate new clients for me almost every month, and since my infrastructure costs are relatively fixed, every new client is gravy.

Long term, I will need to automate more of the onboarding process in order to scale up the number of new clients I can onboard in a week. And there are many other considerations as a business grows. But doing good consulting work and then asking clients for referrals was the pattern that allowed me to find the market for the niche SaaS that I developed.

1) Have a solid offer that gets existing clients results and makes them happy.

2) ask for referrals in a polite systematic way.

3) send hyper personalized outreach to similar folks introducing yourself and sharing a bit about the results you’ve achieved for clients. Email and LinkedIn work great right now for B2B.

If you’d like to chat more happy to do so. I help B2B SaaS companies breakthrough $1M ARR and we generally start off with these types of strategies to get predictable higher quality revenue quickly.

I would love to dive a little deeper on these strategies. How can I reach out?

harry [at] convopanda.com

B2B can be notoriously difficult without having connections or simply a proper sales function in your business. You have two options: 1) Go out there and meet people 2) Do marketing and try to generate leads

Depending on where you live, there might be some industry group meeting, exhibitions, online formums,Linkedin groups,etc. Often it cascades pretty quickly after the first few, as business people are willing to recommend companies/people. Just a couple of days ago went to a fantastic training session with this guy,so from now on,if anyone asks,I'd point them his way.

It depends on what you mean by "take business away". A businesses lack of presense could allow the diversion of potential customers to your nextdoor neighbor easily. While you're slaving away trying to drum up word of mouth amd for some reason preventing searchability, regular customers are searching for "deli near me" and you the deli owner aren't coming up hypothetically.

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