webstartupper

Ideally get a co-founder who is interested in marketing your product. However, if you are single founder like me then technically you could outsource marketing if you have already achieved a product-market fit. These are the steps I would follow before I outsource marketing. (these are very generic steps since there is no information on your product)

1. Find out who my target customer and whether my product solve his problem. This would be done by reaching out to those customers/users who regularly use my product. Depending on customer/product/market this could involve speaking to them on the phone, sending a simple personalized email or an online survey.

2. If I know where my target customers hangs out, I would try to figure out if there is a scalable way to reach out to them. Hopefully there will be multiple channels I could use. I would ideally test these channels to see what kind of conversions I get and at what price. (still just gathering data and not scaling up)

3. At this time, I would look at "retention rate" as the preferred metric to obsess over. "No of visitors per day" tends to be a vanity metric. I would also look at testing out different copy on my landing page to see whether the value proposition resonates well with the target audience (and converts well). Generally the copy wording comes from step 1 - but gets validated with step 3.

Hopefully at the end of step 3 I have a better product-market fit. Targeted users are entering my funnel and with enough retention (and hopefully revenue). This would be a good point to outsource marketing, since you can measure how effective the marketer is.

If all of the above sounds like something you absolutely loathe to do (and that's natural for a lot of devs), then I think the only option is to get a marketing co-founder involved right from the start.

Hmm. What you say makes a lot of sense.

Thanks for the link to the book. It looks pretty interesting.

Thank you. Switched to the default twenty wordpress fourteen theme.

Murhpy's law strikes again!

haha. That's embarrassing. That is the default 2014 wordpress theme. Did not think of testing that.

One thing you could do is ask for marketing help at various forums. For e.g. you could post it here as another Ask HN - "Ask HN: Help me market xyz.com". Apart from getting plenty of good marketing ideas, you might find your business co-founder.

Other forums I would look at are the ones focused on SEO like inbound.org, growthhackers, trafficplanet, BHW, WF etc

Also, put your email ID and the link to your tool in your HN profile. I'm sure there are plenty of people in SEO here who will be happy to help.

Could you give us some more information on your saas project? That might help figure out where to look.

I have no experience with video transcoding. But I do run a single founder online business. So hopefully I can help.

We (technical single founders) have a bad habit of spending time developing code while we should be spending time understanding the market and the customer. Running an online business in my experience is 20% coding and 80% customer support and marketing.

My advice is to follow the below steps for 2 weeks.

1. Stop all development work on transcode.io. 2. Remove the message that this is not production ready. If there are some restrictions (e.g. output fixed to 360p), mention them. 3. Setup a Google Adwords account. Run some ads for keywords that potential customers would use. 4. Setup an online chat widget on your site. (e.g. zopim.com). This should not take more than 5 minutes. Be logged into the online chat all day. 5. As potential customers arrive, you can start an online chat with them. Speak to them about how they use transcoding in their business, find their pain points and find out what they are currently using. Try and get people to use your site by handholding them. 6. Email your existing users (40+) or people who have shown interest. Find out the same info from them. 7. If enough customers have the same pain point and you can fix it by adding a feature, add this to your list. Do not start development on this yet.

This will help validate whether transcode.io solves a pain problem for the customers. At the end of two weeks, you will have a better idea about 1. Is transcode.io solving a real pain point. If not, can it? 2. What are my costs of customer acquisition? 3. What is the market size? 4. Is this a sustainable business?

This will help you decide whether to continue working on transcode.io or whether to sell it. Also try and go for some tech/startup events in Calcutta. Who knows - You could meet your business cofounder there.

All the best!

The ones I've used - Pencil - Free - http://pencil.evolus.vn/ Balsamiq - Paid - http://balsamiq.com/

Hang out where your audience hangs out. As an example, if they hang out at a forum, participate there, offer value and thereby build your brand.

Best advice ever - Be your own customer!

My apologies if I came across as if I was shooting down the opinions here.

Your assumption is that all fields are not required in the default search query.

In our case, joining 6 tables with 14 fields each is going to be much slower than running the query of just the table.

I presume the reason it was slow was because the domains table was write heavy. There are multiple crons running in the background selecting data from the domains table, accessing external APIs and updating individual records.

Selects per hour: 37K Updates per hour: 170K

While the speed of selects or updates by the background crons was and is not important, the speed of selects run by the users on the same table was important. The easy solution was to cache the data so that the users could search domains at a good speed. The memory table just worked brilliantly as a cache.

(I'm no mysql guru and its my first project where MyIsam did not work for me, so I know I definitely could do a better job of optimizing the Innodb table and Innodb settings in my.cnf)

We had tried this before switching to the memory table. I cannot remember exact details, but the resulting innodb table was still too large - maybe around 1 GB and we did not want to add additional RAM.

Another issue with using a second Innodb table would be the load time. Every 3 hours we empty the memory table and load the subset from the innodb table (we actually use an MyIsam table in the middle.. but that's not important). Loading the table takes less than 10 seconds. If we had used an innodb table instead of a memory table, this load time would be significant.

The domains table currently has 84 fields. We collect metrics from various sources, so reducing the number of fields is not feasible. All the field types are the smallest that we could use - e.g. tinyint(4) instead of an int etc.

Since there are so many fields with data from multiple sources, we have queries running searching on individual fields. Due to this we need to have many indexes. 4GB of the 8GB is the size of the index itself.

The Innodb table right now has about 9 million records and is 8GB in size (4GB index size). The memory table has a subset of the same data - 1.2 million records and is 276MB in size.

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, since there are 30 different columns that can be searched on, there are many indexes and the index size for the domains table itself is 4GB. I run this off a 2GB linode, so unless I add a lot more RAM, Innodb is not going to match the memory table speed.

Thanks for the info. I haven't previously come across Elastisearch or Solr. Will definitely check these out.

"MEMORY tables use a fixed-length row-storage format. Variable-length types such as VARCHAR are stored using a fixed length."

From - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/memory-storage-engine...

I had no idea about this either....

Register at the top 5 forex forums and start contributing there. Put your website in the signature (Most forums allow this only when you have been there a while and have a large number of posts). Initially, this might just lead to a trickle of traffic, but over time the more you contribute, this will lead to a stable amount of targeted traffic.

Thanks. Will look at adding sorting to the tabs.

Some of the domains are being auctioned by GoDaddy (TDNAM). They can only be bought through GoDaddy. There are others that can be bought through Sedo, SnapNames, Namejet and Dynadot. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about that.

If you are looking for a domain name for your startup, why not pick one that already has existing page rank? If you can, why not piggy back on SEO done by someone else. This is a list of existing domains with high page rank that can be bought off from various auctions.

What do you guys think?

DomainsAfrica uses the DomCop API - so the data is the same. However the value add comes from the cleaner and simpler user interface. DomCop tends to be very complex for the casual domain searcher.

Thank you for seeing that. I've fixed it now.

Yeah. Had posted it earlier, but it just fell off the new page. Let's hope second time lucky :)

Clickable link - http://www.domainsafrica.com/

The different colors are to represent the different page ranks of the domains. You can check the FAQ for what each color stands for. Basically grey = PR0, blue = PR1 or PR2, orange = PR3, Green = PR4 and Red = PR5+

Hey guys,

I built this as a test app to consume the DomCop API. I managed to make it fast enough and with a (hopefully) useful interface for searching for domains that are on auction across various sites or have expired and can be back ordered.

Hope you guys like it. Let me know how I can make it better

Disclaimer/Warning: this webapp is deemed dangerous for anyone with a propensity to purchase domains they don't need :)

I don't know much about the target market, but I would try and get people passionate about promoting their favorite artists/songs to this site.

You could find forums for specific music categories (electronic, hip-hop, rap etc) and try driving traffic from there to leapfm by posting links to top songs from the category. You could also try and get them to upvote music of the specific category.

You can target Facebook fan pages of artists that have songs posted on leapfm. Try and get the fans to Share the link and upvote the artist on the site.

I don't think adsense is the best option. For this industry, affiliate sales makes a better revenue model. For each interesting domain, give the user a chance to back-order/purchase the domains via a registrar of their choice. In each link embed your affiliate code. You can email me if you want any help in deep linking.

For my webapp http://www.domcop.com/ I use a two revenue stream business model. Users have to pay a recurring amount every month to avail the services and all the links to various domain auction sites bring in affiliate revenue as well.

Couple of comments to make the site better

1. Add a search option - search on domain name as well as the text between quotes for each domain

2. Maybe add some more metrics for each domains - whether the site has been banned by google, page rank and validity, data from wayback archive, metrics from companies like seomoz, majestic seo etc

3. When a user submits a domain, let them choose the category the domain belongs to. As a user I would love to go through all domains for a specific niche (eg. garderning, mobile phones etc)