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Comment by fabiandesimone | Hacker News Reader

I think you should really invest in your website. I did not know about Float before, but so it happens that I´m shopping for a financial/accounting/cash flow app and I got to be honest: Float might work and maybe is all I need but your site really does not convey the value it might provide me if I become a user (I´m refering to the home page, the tour page does a bit better but you could improve it by tweaking a few things)

I suspect your metrics might have some key info relating to what I´m about to tell you: grab the whole tour page and include it below the Start your free trial in the home page. See if that helps your conversions.

Good luck!

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That's just what I was about to say. Make the tour more accessible. Either what @fabiandesimone suggested or have a big type "take the tour!" appear on top of the laptop screen on hover, and then make the tour slide down the already existing screen shot (which is the one on the laptop as well as the first on the tour).

Hi Fabian,

We are currently quite focused on our target marget of FreeAgent customers, and Float is not currently mass-market (yet) but you are right.

We recently released a page, more like you are suggesting, for Xero customers here: http://floatapp.com/xero what do you think?

Your words:

When you’re working on your product, you’ve got some beta testers, it looks shit but you’re making progress, and you’ve a huge list of things you want to do, it’s easy to put off marketing.

“We’re not ready for loads of customers yet”

“We’ve too much to do to be marketing”

“Let’s wait till the product is great, then marketing will be easier”

The truth is, marketing is really hard. It takes time to work, it can be hard to know when it is working, and you don’t see instant results so it doesn’t feel very productive.

Getting started earlier, and doing a little as you go along is, I think, a much better strategy than waiting till you launch. It gives you time to learn about what works and what doesn’t, it let’s you learn about the process and get better at it, and it gives your marketing time to work.

Market the hell out of the app man!

EDIT: What I meant to say is that as you put it marketing is very hard (I know, that´s what I do) so don´t narrow it down. Go for it, right now!

Fair play sir, fair play.

This is starting to look better :)

Might I suggest putting an extra "Request an invite" between "Let me know when Float is ready for Xero" and the extra form data to get early access? It's a great idea to collect meaningful information in exchange for earlier access, but you might be losing people who just want to drop their email and go by having them scroll over the much longer form.

That's a good idea, we are using Prefinery to collect the form data, and there's limitations on what it can do, but I'll see what I can come up with.

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