liamgooding

All I want to know with my marketing budget is whats the CPM?

Cost Per Macaw

TL;DR; Dried ramen comes with a fork - not chopsticks. Ramen makers know that their product isn't bought by people looking for a gourmet authentic Japanese meal - they're college students and busy people who just want quick carbs. Look at your product: are you lying to yourself about who your customer is?

So the reason I choose to send a PDF over a Word Doc is total visual control of the end product. If people open word docs on different versions, or with certain fonts missing or whatever, the layout can get screwy and messed up.

With a PDF I can guarantee what the end product will look like on every device, every software version. Even if they open it on a Windows XP machine, a PDF will look the same.

How will this API + HTML5 guarantee the same thing?

(For the record I think this sounds awesome and I'm a huge fan of PandaDoc, but I didn't see anything in the blog post announcement around visual consistency across browsers/devices)

Personally I thought this was a great movie about remote working...

The rest was totally lost on me

Not strictly a coding project, but definitely not the day-job so I'm classing it as a project.

I've been writing a book introducing people to the idea of using data effectively in startup marketing decisions.

"Growth Pirate" - http://growth.trak.io

I launched the pre-orders at the beginning of June and had some great feedback, plus plenty of suggestions for the next release.

I've found it really liberating and relaxing to write something that has a "flow" like a story. Any blog posts or guest posts need to be "standalone" where as the book has to flow and take the reader on a much longer journey, and I've found it hugely challenging but I've learnt tons from it already.

As the book is aimed at "data-driven beginners" (who are mostly really experienced marketers/CEO's but perhaps new to SaaS or tech startups) so it's a very specific target reader. I'll definitely work on more books in the future after the experience so far!

yeah for sure email me on liam@trak.io :-)

Hey guys, loving the detailed preview, do you have any idea when the public launch will be?

This is one of the introductory chapters to the book, so it's intentionally aimed at people who are either new to modern metrics/analytics or are looking to get into Growth Hacking, but don't yet have the foundation theory knowledge to get started with the strategy.

Any questions, or if anyone would like to be one of the case studies for the book, please get in touch!

Updated the post to include input from Mike Butcher after he checked out the first draft. He offered his advice on what to do if you want to get covered by TechCrunch's writers

Sorry I've changed the wording to better reflect that I'm encouraging discussion on here. Thanks for the headsup

I've noticed on a lot of blogs, there'll be 1-5 comments on the blog itself, but 30+ HN comments, so seems like a good idea to allow people to discuss on the forum that they're most comfortable with.

Hi Dwight,

As I said on the tweet, I should have pinged you on the headsup that I was using your tweet for the "against" argument. Sorry again about that, poor judgement call on my part, but thanks for the positive words about the whole idea at the time and again now that I've blogged it all up.

You make a great point, and something I really wish I'd done at the time, in terms of the "trick" article actually having something else of value. Perhaps a list of some of the best (genuine) article headline crafting guides, some posts about real pitch decks, some actual sleep/life hacking posts.. etc.

Looking back I think that would have made the 'testing' phase much better experience for our followers, and just better all around and had a +ve brand impact instead of the minor hit our accounts took.

Yeah 100% agree, particularly with the "Instagram selfie tips to raise a seed round" link, I think people were more likely to be clicking to laugh at the article/author!

Worth noting, I churned a few twitter followers during his period too who I suspect were pissed off at being link-baited :-(

Seems a harsh, unfair and hasty assessment considering you've never met anyone in our team or spoken to any of our users.... :-/

Thankyou!

We do charge now.

Everyone who was in the private Beta sees a "nagware" popup explaining our switch to a paid service, with options to also "Skip" and continue evaluating the product, or to email us to explain why they need a free plan

Original author here.

Yeah but the subtle wording in that CTA is "Try". We have a totally free, no credit card required, 30 day free trial :-) Something which I probably need to point out in my original article, my bad

Yes we offered a free Beta, but as we discussed in this article we intended to make the product 'Freemium' but realised we were going into the trap of 'Free'.

As a young and early stage team, we made some assumptions, and got some stuff wrong. We need to make changes and decisions that can guarantee we create a sustainable business, one where we can keep the lights on :-)

Hi, original author here.

Actually yes, all the beta users who are engaging in conversation with us over this are actually been offered free plans where it's appropriate anyway. i.e. open source projects, developers writing plugins, university/college students, developers testing Trak.io for their employers etc.

Hey, original author here.

Haha Thanks for the point of view - yeah it's a big splash but there was no hiding the fact so we just wanted to be totally transparent about it.

So far the replies from all our beta users has been exactly what we hoped for (expected), either "Thanks for the honesty" or "Cool, we were just checking it out, we're not in a position to need something like this now" or a few "Yeah screw you guys, delete my account I'm not using you anymore".

I understand a lot of your points, but I strongly disagree that we're regurgitating other peoples advice. This is taken exactly from our experiences.

And we're not telling anyone to get lost. We're explaining why we had to evolve and change our assumptions. If we carried the burden of every mistake we'd made as a startup, within a year we'd be so heavy we wouldn't be able to move anywhere!!!

(Oh and the blog theme is following a trend of about 20+ major startup blogs who switched to a typography led, single column design. We rebuilt the design a few months ago and tried to make it as much about the content as possible. I personally think the end goal was more like eerily similar to reading an eBook?)

Thanks!

I did a full write up (with data correct at that time) as a guest post on Sixteen Ventures blog:

http://sixteenventures.com/pre-launch-growth-hacking

TLDR: here's the slideshare version, much shorter:

http://www.slideshare.net/liamgooding/growth-hacking-prelaun...

Interesting point on Github!

In their case, it's like "Free for when you'r working on your own personal passion stuff, but it's paid when you go into the office and hack on your companies private code". The huge community and discussion is essentially a massive funnel, users already have an account, etc.

There's actually some potential parallels with Trak.io and I'm definitely going to keep Github on my whiteboard as a reminder why Freemium can work if you're a tool aimed at developers

Does a unicorn lose it's rainbow if I just go ahead and edit the original article? Never too sure once something has been discussed whether it's cool to revise the original source...

Noted, yeah was a bit 'keyboard warrior' on my part actually. No offense intended.

But yeah I didn't want to have a "meta" discussion and miss the point of the article

+1

hehe you won the internet for spotting that! :D

I originally found the free audio on a royalty free site. The video is very outdated now compared to the product, but at the time all we had were photoshop mockups of the UI and a vision! :D

Anyone who has used a mac before will spot that it's made from a ton of panning around images in iMove. Guilty as charged... :-P

Hey Seth, original author here.

Thanks for the deeper explanation into the history or Urchin, and also, that when it was a paid product you were still happy to recommend it. Thats exactly what we're hoping to get at Trak.io - yeah it's a paid product, but it brings a damn load more value to your business than the couple of bucks we're asking for a month.

Thanks for the good wishes too, I love how supportive HN can be!

Hey Gabemart, original author here.

I understand your objection.

The term 'freeloader' was used because they're taking stuff for free with no expectation to pay anything in the future.

Also, an article that attracts discussion is a good thing, right? :)

[edited]

This looks slick - anyone know what the pricing will be??

Agree with this on many levels, however:

* Right now (as with many startups) we don't have the bandwidth to take out a 30 minute gap to speak with an interested customer - even if we wanted to! We just physically don't have enough people and can't hire fast enough already

* The cost of senior developers doesn't work for support or sales calls. And we don't want to have junior developers on the team this early because of the management overhead

* Talking on the phone effectively and efficiently requires a whole different skillset to technical, and it comes with experience and training

* The temptation is to outsource call handling in the early days, but from first hand experience, I know how easily these sub-par 'virtual assistants' can kill your brand as an educated customer will quickly see through the veil of BS that these sort of people put up. This one is a total no-no for tech startups. If there was a virtual assistant who specifically worked with tech startups, and had great product knowledge across the industry and could speak the language, now THAT I would pay for

* The prices and margins we're talking about don't always make sense for a sales call. How can I justify a 1 hour sales call on a $9 /mo subscription service? Forgetting all customer acquisition costs, hosting costs etc. I'd have to keep that user for 10 months just to break even on that very first phone call

I personally think the different business model of SaaS means traditional sales methods like phone calls where the customer decides the time of the call just don't work. One-to-many methods like webinars and screencasts, and pre-scheduled Skype calls for BIG leads, are the only things that make sense.

For support via phone, that's something which we CAN accommodate but as an upsell incentive. For example, on our $299+ plan, yeah sure you get a private support number, because I can justify the $90 per hour it costs for that engineer to speak with you.

Sorry to disagree on as many points as I'd agree on. However, I'd STRONGLY suggest looking into the "Tech Startup Friendly Call Answering" service with your Beta users as a possible pivot. An end-to-end solution, rather than a sexy PBX solution, would catapult the relevance of this to startups in my opinion and puts you as a market leader rather than in a market with 10+ strong competitiors

Unless someone is being paid over or under what they're worth, this isn't a problem.

If they are being paid under, then now is the right time for them to leave to an employer who rewards employees fairly.

If you're been paid over, then it's time you got your butt in gear and worked your ass off to prove to everyone your worth! :D

Personally I believe in 100% transparency across the board from day 1 (at Trak.io and all my previous companies). That way, situations like this can't arise, and new people coming in are unlikely to ask for misaligned salaries they know wouldn't stand up under peer review.