Show HN: Customers are your best advertisers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Customers are your best advertisers

orbik.com

9 pointsjensenbox13 comments

Sorry, but I don’t see the value you provide.

> A business signs up and sends a link out to potential advertisers.

> Using the link, you sign up to become an Advertiser for the business.

> An advertiser sends a link to people they know.

> The recipient from the advertiser creates an exclusive offer voucher and brings it to the business. The business redeems the voucher and the advertiser gets rewarded.

What keeps me from doing this without Orbik?

> For people that are interested in getting rewarded for having a large contact list. If you know a lot of people, chances are that you know people that want a deal. Orbik rewards you for bringing businesses customers.

Not every maker has a large contact list. You can of course email people and ask them to advertise your product. But by asking them to become advertisers on Orbik, they also get money rewards and can also advertise multiple products.

After throwing dollars out the window with Facebook advertising, I feel this exactly what I'm looking for.

Niche products that are very useful for a specific group of people are best advertised by word of mouth.

You comment is music to my ears. I have been working on this project for a while now and the first few days of rollout is always the most "pit of despair" generating. I did basic market validation when crafting this but to hear you say this is what you need lifted my spirits. Best thing that has happened to me this week. Thank you!

Please sign up as an advertiser! I have an undocumented "feature" that I added recently - writing it here for the first time: If a business signs up with the platform and came to us without a referral from an advertiser, the platform will pick a random advertiser withing 100KM and give that advertiser 50% of our profit for the first 2 months. Effectively, as an advertiser, you have a chance to make cash even if you do nothing except be on the platform.

Unfortunately, I'm not based in Canada or US. I tried signing up as a business to find more users for my app [1] but the country dropdown was a blocker.

Is this for legal/tax reasons? Too much paperwork? I can totally understand, I'm just curious of the limitations.

[1] https://lunar.fyi

It comes down to how Stripe handles payouts. I walked into the process thinking "This is going to be great! I can work with all the currecies that Stripe supports!" But, the reality is, to do payouts, you have to keep all the currency in the same country - so I had to craft both a US and Canadian business entity so that the banking could flow as they allow.

I do intend on bringing up more business entities in other countries but I am limited on my resources available to expand at this time.

What country are you in?

Thanks for the great feedback - keep it coming!

I’m from Romania. Not exactly the country you’d be eager to expand to.

But I’ve been using Wise (former TransferWise) to receive ACH payments and payouts from Stripe in an US based bank account. So it should be possible to have any business/advertisers from any country as long as they provide an US/Canadian bank account.

I suspect you are right. I could probably open up registration to all countries but with the disclaimer that you would need a US or Canadian bank (or whatever we offer at the time) account.

Nothing stops a business from doing this themselves - you can absolutely do this yourself.

Like most things in tech, this is a convenience tool. By using Orbik, you don't have to do the management of the reward flow. Most businesses provide some sort of in-store credit or provide discounts for the referrers. The idea with us is that paying out cash directly is much more attractive than in-store credit.

I definitely appreciate the feedback though. I suspect making the value proposition a bit clearer would be a good action item.

Any and all feedback welcome.

What is the average reward you expect businesses to pay out? Flat fee of 10 dollars means the reward itself has to be pretty high (>50 dollars). I’m curious which companies spend that much for user acquisition.

Props for the landing page. The landings perfectly hit my thought process (am at „I still don’t get it“).

I'm not so sure this means the landing page is effective. On the contrary, they fully expect people not to understand their product and need more explanation. Even then, I didn't get the value prop without reading the comments here. Why not just strip that all away and say what was said in the comments here, "By using Orbik, you don't have to do the management of the reward flow."

One sentence. Perfect clarity. Put that on the landing page.

And this is why I love HN - Your feedback here is invaluable and please do expect to see it on the next release. You are a genius.

Thank you!

In my opinion, the best advertising tool is a landing page

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