How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup | Hacker News Reader

How I Got the First Paying Customers for My Startup

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106 pointsjteusa39 comments

Enjoyed reading but have to say that 1) this is a ridiculously crowded market and 2) there are some very good options that start at free (Olark, Zopim). But, best of luck and nice job on breaking the revenue seal.

Edit: Many apologies, I misunderstood the service. $97/month for actually handling the inquiries (up to 500/month) then sounds like a bargain.

Edit: I went back and studied the website more closely and while it does describe the service you mention, it doesn't seem as clear as it could be. The spotlight seems to be on the web chat window which is a very well-understood mechanism and it's hard to get past that to understand that you are actually wo/man-ning the chat sessions. I would really work on making that cleare because at $100/month, it's a no-brainer for a lot of business types.

I think you might have mis-understood what we do. My fault (you're not the first).

In short, we're not a software company.

We manage the live chat for website, so they don't have to. We're a service business.

I actually misunderstood this as well from reading the blog post. I thought it was silly to be entering such a saturated market especially with companies like Olark.

Updated - let me know what you think.

+1 to @pbreit.

I had the same remark; "why on earth another Chat Widget company?". I guess you could communicate better on the service by adding some sort of graphic (user comes to your site, we do this, we do that, ...).

Best of luck!

Totally agree. Got a ton of great feedback from HN community today via (LOTS of) website chats on the site = )

Change tag line to "we are a sales team, that lives on your web site."

Love it! Will consider that. Thanks for the feedback (so many good tips from the HN visitors)

Wow! NOW i got it. That is why "having a team managing the chat" is such a big deal (for phase #2). It is not managing the software, but actually chatting.

I do think it is a good business model. Good luck!

Thanks!

Fantastic write up! A couple of nice take aways from this:

1) Give away the product -- I love how you started up a GoToMeeting and got the product running on a site right there. I know you mention that conventional wisdom says to get the customer to validate by paying first, but that seems like a brilliant move.

2) Don't give away the farm -- I would have stopped right there, I imagine. "Hey, they loaded up my stuff on their site. I'll get 'payment' from them in the form of a testimonial for the site. That's validation enough." Nope, you turned them into a paying customer. Even better, and you can still get the validation.

3) Don't over think everything -- Even though I have been successful in the past, I often over think things. I have to figure out all of the models before I can launch. The actual model rarely looks anything like what I thought up because in reality, it takes running the business/product to really understand the model.

I'll be watching for the future updates!

Re #2

At first, they said (on a Friday) "we'll talk about it *next Monday" (which was almost two weeks).

I casually said "ok that's fine. For now though, let's take it off the site since we know it's working - that will give you guys some time to make the decision without any pressure."

They made the decision by Sunday, paid Monday, and we were back online quickly = )

It's ok to push, if you're providing value and it seems to be working

"ok that's fine. For now though, let's take it off the site since we know it's working - that will give you guys some time to make the decision without any pressure."

This tactic is likely to be useful to more than just those working in the early days of a startup. Nice move!

THANKS HACKER NEWS!!!

Tons of great feedback received, summarized below:

- Explain the service better (i.e. we're not a chat software)

- Answer the main question directly (i.e. how can you possibly know enough detail of the business to answer visitor questions)

- Answer a few other basic questions (chat system included, 24 / 7, etc.)

Here's what I've done so far:

- Revised headline to (as of 12/24 am) "Website Chat Support, Done For You", and also sub headline- will tweak it a bit

- Added FAQ section to the page

- Revised testimonials (with approval of course) to speak more to the main question of "how can you know enough about my business?"

- Included REAL EXAMPLES of chat lots to show how this is working for a diverse group of clients

- (coming soon, recommended by a HNer that I can't find the name of in my logs - comment here for credit) I'll be testing the impact of changing entire focus of home from "here's what we do, it works, here's why, blah blah blah" to "Test Us Out on Your Site Right Now" using the preview feature that pops up our chat on your website right away (i.e. you're connected directly to me via chat). We got bombarded from HN traffic (yay!) but I think that could work REALLY well if I streamline it a bit (and make the feature looks better of course - hacked quickly).

In short, THANKS for all your feedback. I'm taking action as fast as I can (got quite a few customers, so building some backend stuff as we speak) and wanted to say thank you!

Happy holidays!

In short, sales. Marketing and publicity don't really provide benefit unless you're offering a free service to end users. My own startup reached front page of HN. Total sales resulting from that: about $0 (or negative dollars if you count server costs). Every sale is because I directly approached clients I thought needed my software.

Well said.

We're not doing helpareporter.com anymore for now (might later). The right publicity to the right market can work well, but this isn't focused enough for us yet. There's bottom of funnel work we can do better for now.

We got signups from the HN traffic. I totally understand that HN traffic doesn't covert in some cases - it's not been insane conversions for us, but it's working. That wasn't my goal from the post (I've never published to medium / haven't been active on HN), but cool surprise.

To clarify my above comment, I was referring to just my own experience and that focusing more on a traditional sales process worked better for me. And I liked your blog a lot because it talked about the sales side, which we don't hear enough about on HN sometimes (skews toward growth hacks and publicity).

Totally understand.

Have a cool post coming soon re: great process for building a solid prospect list (sounds bland, but there's some magic to it).

Awesome post! Should be included in https://yourfirstcustomers.com/podcast/ and http://www.unscalablestartup.com :)

Will check out the podcast and the book - Thanks for sharing!

Great story, thanks for sharing! I just have one question - how do your support team members get the information to handle the inquiries and how is the information updated? Do you have a sort of training sessions with the customers?

That seems like the huge and I mean huge oversight here.

Great questions! Sorry for delay in responding (been hectic last 24 hours)

The value of what we do seems to be that we're available for the visitor, we do our best to help (fast response, personable, etc.), etc. And if we don't know the answer, we commit to getting them in touch with the right person on your team (i.e. a lead for you, and a happy visitor).

We go through a detailed on boarding process to get the info we need. We study the ins and outs of your site, and also ask questions as needed before starting the chat service.

If we don't know the answer to a question, we are honest with the visitor (visitors appreciate transparency rather than halfway answers - i.e. like a cox.net, ATT, Verizon, or other similar website chat team). We then offer to connect them with someone on your team via email to get an answer asap.

I know this sounds simplistic, but it's working well.

I'm going to put together a case study on the site, and possibly deeper blog post about tackling this part of the problem, as it's a THE QUESTION so far. If you want to check it out, drop your email on the site (there's a "follow our progress" button on the blog posts).

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm not sure I understand what's the added value of the service offered : unless you have a deep understanding of your customers business, what are you going to chat about on their website with their potential customers ?

Good question.

We do have a good onboarding process / workflow to make sure we know enough about the customers business to help visitors (see other HN comments in the thread), but the core value is that we're there, personable, and do our best to help.

congrats - I agree with your approach of getting a real business working before worrying about solving every possible problem that will arise.

It took my startup 6 years of hustling to become profitable (we're around 50k users now) and we did it basically just as you are doing it - creating a product that people wanted, and then just adding features and solving problems as they became known to us rather than trying to anticipate things that may never wind up being important. It feels a bit like flying by the seat of your pants unfortunately but I think it's always going to be that way.

Thanks Jake.

Well said re: avoiding "trying to anticipate things that may never wind up being important".

Today is the "flying by the seat of your pants" day ha. I underestimated just trying out a post on medium. It's been great though.

This is great. Congratulations to just taking the leap and getting it done and proven.

How are you thinking about scaling it? How to understand every websites issues and provide a live Customer Service?

Thanks April.

We've got a solid process for managing chats for a diverse group of websites.

- We go through a detailed on boarding process to get the info we need. We study the ins and outs of your site, and also ask questions as needed before starting the chat service.

- If we don't know the answer to a question, we are honest with the visitor (visitors appreciate transparency rather than halfway answers). We then offer to connect them with someone on your team via email to get an answer asap.

As simple as this sounds, the attention and transparency goes a long way based on what we're seeing.

As far as scaling, we've got numbers around what it takes to manage a customer at various website traffic levels (prices are based on website visitors), so I've got an idea of how we'll scale for customers vs chat team.

What about a way to escalate to my own team via chat? That way you field general inquiries and make it look alive (chat that goes to "leave a message" just sucks), but the moment someone is getting serious or has an in-depth question, you can tx them to me.

I think this is s good idea. At my last company, we did live chat, and it was very popular. But the constant interruption to our few developers wasn't feasible. And later, it was hard to get salesguys to make sure they were really always available. Taking the front load off is excellent.

Could definitely be done.

Right now, we don't escalate via live chat but instead connect them via email quickly.

The bulk of our customers don't seem to be using live chat now, so doing an escalation / transfer process via live chat could be a source of confusion and friction. For now, we'll stick to email connections (working well), but it's on my list.

Thanks Michael!

I assume you're answering many (maybe all) of these chat requests personally (at least to start). Do you operate 24/7?

Yes, running myself for the moment - but on boarding a team member or two to help in the next few days (been preparing for that part as part of running it myself).

It's 730am PST to 9pm PST right now. Will be expanding shortly.

You always use the customer's chat system? Or do you include your own chat system to streamline things in your backend?

We use our own chat system. Very streamlined.

Jon! Congrats dude!

Thanks Darrin. Been fun so far.

I'm sure the first few customers signing up is a really satisfying experience.

Definitely! Getting to that first customer signup ASAP gives you a TON of motivation right out of the gate.

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