Show HN: Unlimited marketing advice and consulting from $89 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Unlimited marketing advice and consulting from $89

marketersondemand.co

The reason I make a living from marketing consulting is _not_ because marketing advice is hard to come by, but because it's difficult to separate the good advice (0.01%) from the crap advice (99.99%).

If you actually do deliver "some of the best marketing consulting in the world," then where are the examples, case studies, influential articles, and testimonials?

Forgive me for being skeptical but a lowball price with vague promises doesn't instill confidence.

Is $89 for 30 minutes of work really lowball in marketing? If so, I'm in the wrong business...

There are two prices offered:

- $89 for one 30-min question

- $175/m for unlimited questions

The first one might pass for a normal rate, but if you expect 30 minutes to result in actionable advice that's applicable to your business, you're in for a disappointment.

There's no question about the second one.

Yes, 30 minutes of work is probably just enough to figure out what the business does, not how to market it. I wonder if this all is just an intro offer, trying to sell you real consulting services. I remember reading somewhere about a consultant (not in marketing IIRC), who would give the first hour for free, the next hour at $1, then $2, and so on. The idea was that the work early on is not as valuable to the client, and bigger projects should pay a higher rate. Never tried this myself, but I think that's a neat idea.

There are six listed examples of tasks you could do. None of those could be effectively done in the 30 minutes you wish for a task to take. Marketing evaluations even on small companies with a low number of pages, landing pages, emails, and conversion funnels should take several hours. In 30 minutes you could provide heuristics/best-practices which could be effective, but could be a waste of everyone's time. I doubt you're going to be able to implement anything in 30 minutes, so you're just giving advice on what to do, which will then take someone else many hours to implement, which is very wasteful if they're implementing the wrong thing. Planning is extremely important.

On the unlimited plan I can execute on the initial advice in bursts.

For example, if you have a spa in Toronto, Canada. I can make a channel or campaign suggestion and then spend your sessions in the month setting up and optimizing that campaign.

I would leave this thread, but comments like this make me think that you're actually dangerous so I'm going to follow this up. In thirty minutes, you CANNOT learn enough about a single spa, its services, or its competition in its particular area of Toronto to gain any sense on whether or not Adwords is a good channel. I think that you simply have bought so many Facebook/Google ads that it is the only game you know, so it is the only channel you will ever recommend.

I wish you the best and I hope that your advice does not outright kill any companies.

Learning and executing are 2 very separate things.

In 30 minutes you definitely can execute a campaign. Then come back a few days later and spend another 30 minutes reviewing and optimizing.

Learning is something that is very separate from the request process. The 30 minutes is execution time post-learning.

That being said, for quick results Google AdWords is a very reliable channel for hyper local businesses. There definitely are other passive lead generation channels like Instagram, but as an example Google AdWords is an easy go to.

This still doesn't add up. You offer a 24 hour turnaround, yet you hope to learn about a company, plan a campaign around that situation, figure out appropriate metrics to evaluate whether it is effective, and then execute on that in 30 minute bursts.

Even if you can do that, you will have an incredible amount of trouble making a consistent profit unless you can keep your acquisition costs very low. And, frankly, based on what I've seen it's very hard to trust you so I'm not sure how low your acquisition costs could get.

I'm having trouble getting my head around the pricing. 1x for one task, 2x for unlimited. Can you expound a bit?

Specifically, what do you mean by unlimited? Could I schedule you every day for a 30 minute consultation?

Also, I'm one shop but we have several properties. Correct to assume I need an account for each one? (roughly 4 accounts)

Very interested!

Edit: I see now that you have one business day turnaround, and allow one order in the queue. Each task is about ~30 minutes, so effectively up to 10 hours of marketing consultation a month for $175. That's very compelling! Cool!

Ideally I want to avoid one offs, hence the small jump.

Everything goes into an email based queue system. So you could schedule 30 minutes of consulting daily but the timing will not be as consistent.

If you have something you need help with, I will be able to jump in to help daily if that is your request.

It would be one account for one brand, business or individual. In your case, each property would be 1 account.

So, first off, unlimited advice starts at $175. At $89 you get one task, not unlimited. That's like saying "the brand new 2015 Toyota Camry starting at $300". Yes, you can buy a Camry for $300 from a junk yard, and you can buy a brand new 2015 Camry, but you can't buy a brand new 2015 Camry for $300.

What types of tasks are you talking about and can you actually acomplish anything useful in 30 minutes. Examples please. Are you talking about setting up AdWords campaigns? Reviewing the <meta> tags on my website? Helping me refine my headline? Or will you help me set up a marketing strategy and research my customers? The latter can take days or weeks. Can I have you do that under the unlimited plan, 30 minutes at a time?

Also, "Ideally a request is about 30 minutes of work" is a pretty terrible way to phrase what you are saying. As a customer, I probably have no idea how long something takes you. I know what I need to acomplish, and will dump a crapton of work on you for the low price. Without examples, I will simply ask you "I need 10x the traffic I have now to site X" and expect that you will deliver.

I think this is a really aluring idea, but I need more details!

In 30 mins I can do a basic AdWords campaign setup, review and probably adjust meta tags on your website, write you new copy, setup a marketing strategy (this would be multiple sessions), etc.

You would be amazed with what can be done in 30 mins. If you are on the monthly plan I go above and beyond. If I need to spend an hour learning your brand and company, I'll do it and then spend the 30 minutes executing. But as I said, 30 minutes is ideal, but not 100% set in stone. If it takes an hour, it takes an hour.

My goal is high quality output. But on the monthly plan you can get small bursts of that output.

For example, if you want a 1 year marketing strategy, that would take multiple sessions. But I can break it up over a month and put in the time required.

You can set up a quality marketing strategy in 30 minutes???

30 - 45 minutes x 10 - 15 sessions over a month is possible. It depends how in-depth and how far out the strategy is effective for.

A 3 month strategy for an early stage company is workable in the 5 - 10 hours in a month.

So what is your strategy in terms of making money here then. At $175/mo for 30 minutes a day, you are working for $17.50/hour. Is the idea that most people won't use up the entire 10 hours/month?

I am going to wait and see if reviews/testemonials show up that talk about results this actually delivered in terms of increased traffic, conversions, etc.

I'm running this as part of a test of the 7 Day Startup method. Just generating revenue to start is the goal, but the pricing and everything will be iterated on over time.

From past experience there is usually a divide of those who will make full use of the service and those who will use it as a net to help when it's needed. But that has yet to be seen and iterated on.

Interesting idea, but there are a few flaws in the execution.

1. I use an iPhone 5c and at that resolution, I only see 90% of your logo - it cuts off after "Marketers on Dema". If you front page Hacker News in the morning, you will see mobile traffic from people during their commutes. Not catching that during QA and recognizing it as a marketing problem is a concern.

2. You write "Marketers on Demand empowers business owners to build their business without worrying if their marketing is on track." In my opinion, that's pretty bad marketing advice - the kinds of business owners and entrepreneurs who use HN need to have a handle on whether their marketing is working or not.

3. You say "Ideally a request is about 30 minutes of work." How is anyone who is unsophisticated enough to use your service supposed to gauge that? How will that uncertainty tank your conversions? And, not to be rude, but in light of my first and second points, do you think charging $178 an hour provides good value?

The poster has claimed to make $150/hour on a freelance basis. [1] So this pricing is not out of line with that as a reference.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8460101

I wish you well, Jamil. Here's a freebie:

Put on a jacket & tie and get a professional headshot. That image negates everything else you're trying to communicate on your page.

Do you do job-based consultation? Say one has a project/website, and that person has some marketing goals in mind, can you quote a price instead? Also, any guarantee on effectiveness?

Projects I take on aside from this I usually tie goals and performance metrics to. It very much depends on the goals and objectives to be achieved for the project.

For example if your project is to take an iOS app from 100 users to 1,000,000. That I wouldn't take on as a project, that's what someone should take on as a career/job more than a contract. 100 users to 10,000 is something I would consider freelance/contract size.

Marketers on Demand was setup as a test of the 7 Day Startup framework and to run an idea validation thought. Not really for full on projects.

I see. Make sense. Thanks

How can you have a solution ready in 24 hours? Or even a thought through solution proposal?

Some questions takes time.

It's marketing advice, not solutions. It's not "increase my business 10X", it's "I'm trying a bunch of Facebook ads, why is it not working?"

It can be. I have spent beyond $300,000 on Facebook ads and I'm learning more as I keep spending. If you have a Facebook campaign that's not converting, I can jump in and use the request to optimize.

Funny enough I was actually going to make it 2 business day turn around because I want to account for quality over quantity of output.

All the advice in the world won't help if it's not effective.

That being said, I do take consulting outside of this project, but I have yet to tie it back.

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