291–300 of 492 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But aren't there red flags? How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product? Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.
What I mean is if it's not ready enough, not a good MVP essentially, and then people who see it in that stage might not be inclined to try it again later when you're still pushing it but it is more developed enough now.
If so, how can the founding team save the relationship? If someone is motivated enough to tell you your product sucks, they’re potentially great beta users!!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out. Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you…
> Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
That's not what I meant. With optimising page speed, there is a diminishing curve of returns from the perspective of time invested and the improvement that you make.
My idea, adding to the top comment mentioning the SEO, was to make sure that you don't slow down your landing pages / content unnecessarily which might lead to less organic growth and discovery.
While I wouldn't argue that this is the most important thing that will take your business off, a fast website and good content with keywords might provide you nice boost long term.
To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…
Is the idea that the product (once it's caught up) will be as good or better (and/or at least reach more people) than the original? Or is he OK with people being worse off than if your company never existed and the better product got to take the lead?
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There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past. Some things I'd start with: - Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg) - Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code) - Strip down & combine scripts - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics) - Minify scripts and CSS - Use…
These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too. But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking). Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs. For most SaaS, there aren't a few…
Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…
I agree 100%. I think from an investment perspective putting most of your time into marketing yields the highest return. My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?
Charge for our product. I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while. Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have g…
2. launch before its ready
3. getting our value proposition down to one sentence for each user type
4. seo instead of vanity marketing
5. freemium model instead of free or paid
6. listening to customer feedback
7. deliver tangible results to paid customers before fundraising
8. "do things that don't scale" to compete with large competitors who are focused on IRR and monetization
Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…
I’m glad to see how thinking has evolved on this on HN over the last couple of years. If you’d have mentioned marketing a couple of years ago, someone would have shared the Bill Hicks post by now. Marketing (not just advertising) really is an essential part of building product as it forces you to confront who might actually want the product and how you best go about talking to them and finding them.
He did a routine with a joke that worried Letterman, so Letterman made sure the segment didn’t air. In response, Bill Hicks went on public access television - there’s a really good show from Austin on YouTube - and used that as part of his own pitch.
A number of years later, after Bill Hicks died, David Letterman had Bill Hicks’ mom on his show. They talked about Bill Hicks and aired the routine. Bill Hicks’ impression of his parents was remarkably good.
I’ll share links then make my overwhelming point:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbHYqfYnhg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NTmnG0hmA
When I watch Bill Hicks on marketing, I take it as being about ethics. We don’t have to monetize every little thing. And we don’t have to do awful things for pay.