Ask HN: Stuck at $500 MRR and Seeking Distribution/Marketing Advice | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Stuck at $500 MRR and Seeking Distribution/Marketing Advice

28 pointsmilanspeaks19 comments

Hey everyone!

I'm Milan, founder of Robofy, an AI chatbot tool I've poured countless hours into. Robofy is live for around 3 months now. Our Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) has been stagnant at around $500 for the last 3 months, which has been a tad frustrating. I rebranded in June to Robofy but still am stuck at $500 and I am looking for fresh ideas.

One thing I've noticed is an extremely large number of similar products popping up in the market. It's both exciting and scary because it confirms a demand, but also adds that much more competition. I think most of the competitors are coming up because of the cookbook published by OpenAI and the progress made by Langchain.

Nevertheless, here's where I need your help:

Marketing: I've tried the basic marketing channel's (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) but the ROI hasn't been great. In fact, I would say that I recovered only 20% of my investment of $2500 in ads. Hence am in need of fresh, out-of-the-box strategies that can help stand out in this saturated space.

Distribution: While product is great, I believe our main challenge lies in getting it in front of the right eyes. Any ideas or channels we might not have tapped into yet? I tried Twitter but again I faced the most common problem - not getting enough eyeballs.

I tried creating a reseller plan so as to change target audience from direct customers to smaller IT companies. I got 2 orders for it now and that creates a bulk of my revenue.

A few additional points:

The primary audience is small to medium businesses looking to streamline their customer support.

We have a free tier, as well as paid packages with more features and benefits.

I genuinely believe in Robofy, and I've had really positive feedback from our few users. It's just the scaling and distribution part where we're having a hiccup.

Thanks.

Oh boy, I have quite a lot of thoughts. I'll try and compress them and order by priority:

- The popup on your website persists on every page, on every reload, and it locks scroll. This is terrible UX and should be eliminated. In the future you might consider an A/B test with a popup, but it shouldn't trigger on scroll, rather a time delay.

- Yes, this is an extremely crowded space, and your home page language doesn't differentiate Robofy whatsoever. On the Wordpress page, you claim "the first and only Wordpress AI Chatbot powered by ChatGPT" and that type of language is off-putting; are you prepared to defend that statement?

- Your first three key selling points (KSPs) are 1) Reduce support time & cost by 50%, 2) Customised ChatGPT, and 3) Multi-channel integration. I don't think those are the most compelling ideas.

- You have some really great reviews/testimonials, but they're on the pricing page?? Definitely move those to the home page.

- How well defined is your core target audience? If your first KSP is "reduce support time" are you competing with Zendesk, Intercom, and similar customer support solutions? Is your primary goal to offer support?

- My suggestion is to emphasize "increased engagement & conversion" in some capacity. The KSP on the site could be something like "Increase (leads, sales, signups, etc) by XX%" and then support that with some external sources; eventually you could replace that with case studies.

- A video showing Robofy in use would do extremely well for your target demographics (assuming generally less/non-technical people).

I could go on but I've exceeded my allotted time in writing this reply. I'll send you a bill (just kidding).

Good luck :)

I'll take a crack at helping in a very small way by giving some feedback on your landing page.

When visiting your website, I immediately got a pop-up, which felt spammy. It feels like a template website, and "Best AI Chatbot for Your Website" doesn't tell me much.

You need to tell me what your value proposition is in big bold letters. Convince me to keep reading.

Checkout https://www.intercom.com/fin - study it.

Here's another example which isn't nearly as good at marketing language, but they have their product inline, right there, ready to use, which is fantastic https://www.mendable.ai/

Also - something you didn't mention - what part of the funnel are your ads not working? No one is clicking? Churn from your landing page? No conversion from free trial?

I am planning to get the home page redesign.

I would share some data in case if it makes any sense:

So till now I have got around 5200 Visitors on website and 562 sign-up. Roughly 10.8% sign-ups for free trial.

Out of the 562, around 80 installed the chatbot on their website. Most of this 80 website were really ugly looking 1-pager website to be honest.

Out of 80, 14 converted to paying customers. 2 out of the 14 are resellers.

I spoke with all the 14 and they gave me some suggestions and I started including in the product development.

Firstly, congrats on make sales! You have overcome the most difficult part of starting a business, and you should be proud of it!

Regarding your product/website, I concur with the feedback given by the other commenters here.

To truly understand what they are trying to say though, I would recommend 2 books:

Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford. This talks about how to position your product to your customers.

StoryBrand : It will specifically help you how you tell you & your customer's story on your landing page

Both of these are really short books. You can read each in a day but totally worth 10x for the time you put in.

This should help you get on to the next step! All the best!

> ...similar products popping up in the market. It's both exciting and scary because it confirms a demand...

Does it? Or does it confirm that other people also think there might be a demand? Do those other product have customers? Who are they?

If I were you, I'd take your 2 resellers / 14 customers and ask them specifically what made your solution the right answer for them. Hopefully their answers are similar, and then you have confirmation of what problem your product solves. Then your marketing can adjust to focusing on the problem and who has that problem, instead of promoting a product to an overly broad market.

What differentiates / makes your product "better" than competitors? However one would define "better".

Improve (& advertise) that aspect, while keeping other aspects 'good enough' (compared to competitors, or your own standards). Again: however you define "good enough".

Maybe not elaborate here. Competition might be reading... ;-)

What made users go for your product in the 1st place? Don't know? If so, find out. In this context:

> I spoke with all the 14 and they gave me some suggestions and I started including in the product development.

Is crucial. If not the most important. User input is valuable. Input from non-paying users too. Possibly even non-users.

And fixing bugs, performance issues, integration in user's systems, documentation, etc may be just as important as developing new features.

In some sense you may allow users to guide the direction in which product is developed. How much community-steered vs. controlled by yourself, is up to you.

Advertising... in initial stages it might be crucial. But it has a cost (as you found out). Word-of-mouth is free, and the best advertising you can get. Even a small userbase might do to keep growing, as long as you keep those users happy.

Personally I'd start doing outbound. Find websites that are selling something complex, ideally B2C - like Shopify for obscure tools. You need companies that are overloaded with support tickets. Reach out to them and see if you can get them on a call.

At all costs do not do this in a spammy way - you will see 0 results if you do. Take a ton of time understanding each specific website you're reaching out to and why they'd benefit.

This will be a slog and the ROI on your time will likely be terrible but the feedback you get will be invaluable.

As for you actual website - it's incredibly cluttered and quite ugly. I attached my favorite landing page guide. You're solving a problem, not selling features. Even more so for a customer support bot.

[1] https://www.julian.com/guide/startup/landing-pages

Most of the available addressable market of websites that want a chat widget already have intercom, drift, crisp installed. All these companies have AI-features either deployed or on the horizon. You're going to have differentiate considerably to get someone to rip and replace. I'd say you should look at app stores on website builders like Shopify or wordpress, but they have AI chat apps as well. It's just a crowded space.

I have a WordPress plugin. Will try to list on the plugin Store.

Regarding market size, I still feel that market size is huge and multiple new players are coming

First of all, congrats on reaching $500 MRR, I have been running my own product for longer and I'm still not there yet, I also know many friends in a similar situation.

Related to sales strategies, have you considered talking directly to people? Try finding a niche where you product is well-received, then, ads could be better targeted.

Also, by trying your website bot, I typed "How much does it cost?" and the response was huge + some html tags, I can imagine that potential customers wouldn't be keen to get this in their website.

In any case, talking to people could help you to discover why people is not purchasing the product.

Good luck.

For scaling, the best to find good marketer and pay for consulting.

He should suggest to buy market research on your field, where he will see what exact niches exists, how large them and how to tune your product to fit.

Unfortunately, possible that nearest in technical terms niche is saturated by large budget concurrents. What I mean - if somebody buy 80% of ad space in your niche and you have 1%, you will got nothing from ads.

I would share some data in case if it makes any sense:

So till now I have got around 5200 Visitors on website and 562 sign-up. Roughly 10.8% sign-ups for free trial.

Out of the 562, around 80 installed the chatbot on their website. Most of this 80 website were really ugly looking 1-pager website to be honest.

Out of 80, 14 converted to paying customers. 2 out of the 14 are resellers.

I spoke with all the 14 and they gave me some suggestions and I started including in the product development.

I am looking for momentum now as I see few competitors doing amazing work with marketing.

14 paying customers is better than what I managed with my AI startup so far. Although I did not have any money for marketing. Working on the third evolution of the idea which has reduced costs since it's so much harder to get paying customers versus people that want to use it for free.

There are a few minor English issues on the home page. Such as using singular instead of plural in some cases.

Congratulations on getting this far. Maybe consider adding an enterprise plan for large companies with priority support or something.

Also all of these things say they are training but I don't think any of them are including yours. You use vector search to find relevant text chunks to add to OpenAI prompts right?

Congrats on reaching $500, some suggestions;

- Double down on whats working, go reseller only, will make it easier to advertise to highly converting customers.

- Improve the design on your page, it has many flaws.

- AI generated voice in your video makes the site more spammy and less professional.

- Talk to the users that integrated the widget and did not became customers, offer them the product for dirt cheap/free if they respond with valuable feedback.

It seems to me that your competitive angle is being WordPress-focused. The WordPress business community is less online than you'd probably think. I wouldn't try to target them via Google Ads.

Have you been to any WordCamp events? Sponsored WP news sites? Done podcasts? Etc. I would do all of those before spending more money on ads.

Have you tried using places where you can already find distribution?

- ProductHunt -IndieHackers -betalist.com

AppSumo is a great place to get some early paid users at an insane deal for early cashflow.

Apart from that, what iterations did you make? Did you change your pricing? Was the website copy right?

What about integrations? Do not try to integrate with Salesforce! Do an integration with Zapier, IFTTT, Workato, Microsoft, Slack...

Some integrations might look like an upsell points, but they will give you insights about what customers want.

have you tried picking up the phone and onboarding leads manually? if you can close sales that way, you can delegate that sales process.

It's simple: Pay people to star your plugin.

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