If you build it, they will not come; how to avoid launch failure | Hacker News Reader

If you build it, they will not come; how to avoid launch failure

tbbuck.com

41 pointsmootothemax26 comments

The biggest problem I face is finding the initial set of users whom you can interact with to identify the product/market fit.

Lets say your customers are small businesses. - Do you cold call them about an online product/webapp? - Adwords is too expensive when you are not sure if there is demand for the product.

Finding the first 100 customers who love your product is the hardest thing (or so it seems to me).

I would love to hear stories on how you guys went about finding the initial set of customers.

I use Adwords to test things ranging from product titles to high level ebook concepts to optimum price point. The only way I could see it becoming too expensive is if you're shooting way too broad, so I'd like to hear your experience with Adwords and how our usage differed.

Great stuff! Can I ask what your typical budget is for testing these things? I understand if it's confidential, but I'd like to start working out how much a typical test costs :)

I recently spent just $150 in Adwords to get enough CTR data to choose from a list of product titles over a couple days. Most I've spent was $500 simply because I drilled down so deep into slight variations. The cost is really simple to figure. (How much are you bidding per keyword) X (How many clicks do you think you need for a good data set). 500 clicks at $0.30 is the $150 I spent. 500 only because I was testing between so many broad variations. You often don't need more than 100 clicks to see a clear preference trend.

Do you cold call them about an online product/webapp?

Absolutely - at the very least, send an email, but phone calls are always way more intimate, as long as the person you're speaking to is receptive to the idea of speaking to you in the first place.

Adwords is too expensive when you are not sure if there is demand for the product.

I'm about to experiment with this. Honestly, if I could spend $30-$50 to validate an idea with real, live, targeted visitors, I'd consider it money well spent. The only lingering thought I have is: is that too little to spent?

How does this guy's blog articles always get promoted to the front page of Hacker News?

Because you don't see the ones that don't get promoted to the front page; of which there are plenty ;)

Another common problem I think it that people realise that their product has a potentially huge market but they haven't thought about how they can engage and raise awareness amongst that market.

In other words, identifying a market is not enough - identifying and proving a repeatable way to sell to this market is key. If it costs too much to get attention versus the profit you'll make from a sale, the size of the market is irrelevant.

Hi everyone - Tom here, all ears as ever for questions :)

Somewhat OT: I am trying to get traction for my latest project: Ping Brigade (https://www.pingbrigade.com/). I have had a few visitors, but it seems that the price point is wrong. So far I have had very little conversion from free to paid accounts. Do you figure it's a matter of getting more exposure or changing the price points and getting better exposure?

How do you compare to all other monitoring services and why would one want to pay you $8/mo and not, say, Pingdom?

Bonus question - How reliable your monitoring infrastructure is? If I don't have an answer to the question within few seconds of landing on your page, you won't get me to stay. The competition in monitoring segment is fierce, and your service simply does not stand out.

Ah. Fair enough. The infrastructure is pretty damn reliable: the web stack and database are running on two separate, shared-nothing nodes that run checks independently and concurrently. All the monitoring nodes are separate geographically, and usually with separate providers to avoid total system downtime.

As for the pricing: Pingdom charges $10/mo for similar service, though they do have more features (and a terrible UX, IMHO). Others in this space offer free plans (with crappier service/no reliability/single node) or more restrictions under $8/mo. For example Binary Canary starts at $5/mo, but for only 10 monitors.

I guess I need to include all this info somewhere visible.

May be a partnership with web hosting companies will drive traffic? Affiliate marketing in those area probably will help.

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into this.

$8/month seems like a fair price to me when taking into consideration the problem you're solving. Maybe try running a special on AppSumo.com. I'm sure a majority of their users are in your target audience.

I got in touch with AppSumo a little while ago and never heard back. The products they usually promote seem to be in the right category.

As others have mentioned, take a look at Pingdom, find out where they're getting links from (e.g. using http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) and try and copy their marketing strategy. Seems the least hassle way to me - but I'm still so new to this marketing lark :)

Hmm, since you are offering comment size consulting...

I built http://impromptudo.com a few months back to scratch my own itch (I'm bored right now, whats going on around me). Simply: I want to be the padmapper of local events.

I'm not selling a product all I want right now is traffic. I've got some great ideas for features but don't want to spend anymore time if it's a dud.

I did spend some money on reddit ads, but it was mostly useless (but at least I know why).

Any ideas on just getting traffic? I've spammed HN as much as I can spam I think already.

Cool site! You have a pretty good spectrum of events (at least in Seattle). What event websites are you scraping?

I think a good question would be: How long did it take for padmapper to get popular? Maybe ask Mr. Padmapper that.

I aggregate a few different services, the most popular being meetup.com. I currently integrate with 5 different event providers and looking to add more, but in a holding pattern until I figure out my next move.

I think I reached out to padmapper during launch. Maybe time for another message.

This is very cool. A way for me to filter by activity type would be helpful.

Re traffic, it is the lifeblood of any site. Couple thoughts:

- Buy banner or link on site(s) that attract the type of users you want. - Submit to bloggers who'd find this cool. - See if there's anyway you can create original content out of this and seo that. Thinking out loud here, perhaps snapshots of what happened in different areas per day, and then seo those pages. But that'll take time to start building traffic.

Hi Thanks.

Yea an activity filter is one of the features and also a daily/weekly email of events happening in your area right to your inbox.

I agree on buying some eyeballs but right now I'm not plugged into this community enough to see those opportunities. I wouldn't know where to start. Like how do I find communities that revolve around solving the boredom problem, besides reddit (which I've done)/digg/4chan/etc?

Need mobile version. I rarely use my computer anymore when I'm looking for local data, I almost always go straight to Yelp or the Google Search widget on my Android.

There is a mobile version, it should auto detect by user agent, or if you go directly to http://m.impromptudo.com. It is however a bit buggy atm, working that out though.

the mobile web experience is terrible imo, and i need to build native apps, which will come if I can validate this project.

Not sure I see the point of the Email Protection app. If you care for a product like this, you would enable 2 step verification and then there is significantly less chance of this being needed.

For a start, it's not aimed at techies who know what they're doing. More at people who have half a reason to be concerned, but don't have the technical wherewithal to do anything about it. 2 step will work... unless you've enabled the remember option, in which case you have no idea if someone you share a living space with is checking your email on your laptop when you're away from home.

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