Ask HN: Rapid fire style questions for startup beginner

[submarine]

So basically I 've built a service for people who do lots of drafting/model making. I did a lot of interviews and face to face meetings in NY and SF. People in the segment I'm targeting like the idea. They're willing to pay.

So what I have now is a beta, a bunch of subscribers to my non-existent newsletter, and 0 marketing efforts. Bull, I actually started a blog. I have a bunch of posts queued up.

1) I hear I should use Facebook to find my audience. Do I use FB ads or do I "promote my page"? What's the difference.

2) I hear I should use AdWords to direct people to my site. Worth it? Is there a guide on how to do this without wasting my hard earned? Seems tricky.

3) What about Twitter? Ads? What would I even tweet?

4) Actually, what's my goal right now? To see if people will pay (use the service), or to get as many "likes" on FB as possible, get traffic from AdWords, and use analytics to figure out who is who?

5) Should my pricing page be on my website if I'm just doing marketing? (aka, if I'm only marketing, what should my website look like? A description and a sign up form?) At what point do I link to a pricing form?

Thanks

[dzink]

I'd set up a page with some A/B testing scenarios if I were you and a bunch of analytics (Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Google analytics, you name it) behind it. Each page tests a different sales message and requires a user action to proceed (a click to another page, or to add an item to a sales cart, etc).

If you have different potential users (graphic designers, architects, etc) set up a bunch of those pages on the same site custom made for each market. This forms your initial sales funnel. Your users will vary depending on what the product is and nobody can tell you where to find the customer who would use your product better than some real testing.

Once you have your funnel testing pages, you can start directing traffic from every source you know via custom urls. Tell your followers, spend $25 in ads on any platform you think fits: google ads, facebook, another channel, twitter, etc. and use the analytics to see how many people come back from each channel, and how many of them click through to your action step.

Validate the channels that work best for you via the referal links and search keywords. Validate the sales pitch that works best via some the A/B page scenarios for each.

Refine, polish, rinse, repeat. This is a standard process for anyone from lean startup methodology followers to Google execs.

[bigiain]

You're missing a lot of critical details before anybody can provide actionable answers to those questions.

Who are you selling to (or hoping/intending to sell to)? What's their buying process/pipeline? Where will they be seeking solutions to the problem you solve for them?

FB "likes" is a completely irrelevant goal for enterprise sales. Leaving pricing off your website will kill your conversion rate on a consumer-oriented low-cost SaaS site. Facebook and Twitter might be _great_ sources of traffic and signups, but they also might be the _last_ place your customers are seeking your product.

Who are you selling to? What are they looking for? How can you make sure you're there when they look? That might be Facebook or Twitter, it might be Adwords or Adsense, it might be a heavily SEO-ed website, it might involve days/weeks trawling LinkedIn for the right purchasing person at a big company to email/call - without considering the "people in the segment I'm targeting", you can't say any of them is the most effective strategy.

How did you grow your mailing list? Is that scaleable?

[submarine]

1) Selling to freelancers and small to mid companies. Buying process? I'm trying to break into a really traditional marketplace. They haven't used new "stuff" in years. They also won't be seeking solutions to the problem I solve. Every last person I interviewed reacted in a "shit, I do waste time doing this. But what option do I have?"

2) I'm selling to designers. They're looking to spend less time on a boring but needed task in their workflow. How can I be seen by them? You mean to say, in an online sense?

3) I grew my mailing list with paid questionnaires (real life- put an ad in an online magazine) , cold calls, referalls, friends.

[bigiain]

' They also won't be seeking solutions to the problem I solve. Every last person I interviewed reacted in a "shit, I do waste time doing this. But what option do I have?"'

To me, that implies SEO is less likely to be a big payoff compared to paid advertising on subject-matter-relevant sites or publications. You need to work out where these designers "hang out", and how to get ads in front of them proposing your solution to them in an eye and mind-catching enough way. Maybe try advertising somewhere like SmashingMagazine – but carefully measure your costs and conversions, it's _very_ easy to spend way more pre conversion than your customer LTV if you aren't measuring things.

Another thing to consider, can you think of a bunch of keywords you could pay for (for example in Adwords/Adsense) or perhaps Facebook demographics you could target - which might let you get ads in front of designers while they're searching for information related to the existing solutions? I suspect finding keywords/demographics that convert at profitable rates is likely to be hard...

[hsuresh]

First of all, i don't know enough about your service and target market, so take this with a grain(actually, plenty) of salt.

Since you have a beta ready, first get a handful of customers pay and get value from your service. This is to iron out any issues that you might not have thought about. Most importantly, it will also validate if your target customers will really pay. Think of this as a dry run. Zero marketing.

Next up, is to take this from handful of customers to say, a bucketful of customers. I am guessing you can do this again, without much trouble, given you know about your target audience. This might be a good time to put up a website and include pricing details.

As to how you should market your service, you don't have to necessarily spend it on ads. You can try to reverse engineer marketing (aka growth hacking). I blogged about it here:http://goo.gl/zVw0Hd).

[submarine]

Are you saying I let them use it for free, iron stuff out, and then ask them to pay to continue using the service?

I expect issues. The service has a pretty long, horizontal and vertical series of steps to complete. I don't know if I can make them pay what I expect and have them experience something awful.

[hsuresh]

Nope, actually do everything to get the first few to pay. Once you do that, you can at least be certain that there are people willing to pay for your service/product. You can focus on growing your customer base after your paying customers give you great feedback.

[submarine]

Seems like a bold move. I feel like if I tried doing that, I'd get requests for refunds and a lot of bad press. But I guess your point is that at least I'd have to learn why, and then fix that for my next trial.

[hsuresh]

Why do you think it is a bold move? Since you have a handful of customers in the beginning, things can never get out of control. Even if your customers don't like the service/product, you can still do something about it - you cannot do it if there are hundreds.

[pmtarantino]

Same situation here (only in another country), so interested in potential answers. (HN should have a "save" feature just as reddit).