[spicavigo]

Hi Jared and Trevor,

I created https://codebunk.com. Its an Online Interviewing Tool for developers. Its the best tool out there. It provides code execution in 23 languages, collaborative editor, REPL shells, AV Text chat, Teams, Question banks and a lot more.

Its cash flow positive and has some of the coolest clients.

However, the rate at which it acquires new customers is pretty low (~3/month). I have exhausted (or nearly exhausted) avenues of generating buzz (PH, HN, Reddit, some tech publications). As a developer without any help, how do I promote CodeBunk further? What's the best way to reach my audience (Hiring Mangers, CTOs)?

[snowmaker]

It sounds like you've tried PR and social media, but haven't tried any other channels.

If you've made something people want, and it sounds like you have, it's time to invest in getting customers. A good rule of thumb is that you should spend 50% of your time working on your product and 50% of your time getting customers. I have a feeling that's higher than what you're currently doing.

There are a number of distribution channels you can try. Here are a few ideas: 1) It sounds like you have some great customers (pebble, flipboard). Do you know them personally? Get to know them, in person or over the phone ideally, and then ask them for referrals. CTOs / hiring managers all know each other.

2) You guys don't seem to have a blog. Content marketing is great for your space because engineers love to read posts about how much hiring sucks - there's practically a daily thread on this on HN. There is so much you could write about the best way to do technical interviews. Each time you get a post like that to go viral, you'll pick up some customers.

3) There are lots of recruiting conferences and events. Those are good places to meet customers.

4) It might be possible to negotiate distribution partnerships with other companies in the hiring space. ATS's, job boards, and new models like hiring networks (i.e., Hired) are all upstream of an online interviewing tool. Maybe they should integrate with one directly.

5) There are a bunch of standard techniques that rarely work amazingly well but usually work to a certain extent that you can start with: everything from adwords and facebook ads to email campaigns to hiring managers.

Overall, you need to be very experimental to find good distribution channels. A good book to get your creative juices going is "Traction: how any startup can achieve explosive growth"

[spicavigo]

Thanks! That seems like a good playbook. I will start simultaneously on a couple of those.

[zodiac]

Hey, a lot of companies I interview with use coderpad, which I'm guessing you're competing with. It does seem like your product has more features than them, but my guess is that it is not enough of an improvement to make companies already using another online interviewing tool to switch to yours, especially if they have no problems with their existing tool (ie your features are just nice to have).

Also, I like coderpad's landing page more. Have you done A/B testing?

[spicavigo]

Not yet. Do you think that I should? I mean, in terms of potential return.

[hanniabu]

A/b testing in terms of creating and closing leads is important. With what snowmaker mentioned about the content marketing, I believe this would be a great time do the A/B testing.

If you already are familiar with and know how to A/B test, you can ignore the following paragraph.

Firstly, within you blog content area, there should be various calls to action. This is one great use of a sidebar to advertise your service. On desktop, after a user scrolls past a certain point(which means they're most likely reading the post) you can have one of those boxes that appear in the bottom right of the screen with an advertisement. Then within the content you should reference your service several times, but don't go overboard with it because that can get annoying. For instance, lets say you mention a drawback of a current interviewing process, you can then follow that sentence with a sentence in parenthesis plugging your service, or you can have it as a caption styled paragraph(slightly smaller text, italicized) under the paragraph which you mention the current pain point. Now here is where A/B testing comes in. After you release an article, watch the (hopeful) influx of traffic. Make sure you're collecting data on the number of page views for the post, views to your sales/service page, link clicks, 'close' clicks, members joined. After you see the traffic start to die down, post another article, repeat another 2-3 times without changing any of the marketing content. After the traffic dies down on the last article you posted, change some of the wording around on the calls to action and marketing and play with the phrases. Make sure you keep track of the changes you're making. Now go through this process again of letting the traffic die down and post another article. Continue these cycles of changing content a few times. When you've gone through about 4 or so cycles, it's time to look at the data. Look at how much traffic you received through each period where the call to action content remained the same and see how the users took to the marketing by looking at the leads to the sales/service page and number of members that signed up. See which period had the greater percentage of conversions and you can either stick with that or repeat the cycle again with the periods with greater conversions to see if there's a clear winner and to confirm the results. There's also the possibility that you may not see any difference in conversions. In this case you can either repeat the cycles again, or just go with your heart for the time being. Every 6 months or so it's a good idea to go through this process again as your audience/market for the content may have evolved slightly and you want to keep your calls to action up to date with them.