31–40 of 157 posts
HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.
If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing: 0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA. 1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect. 2. Once connected you h…
This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal. If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention. Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosti…
That reminds me of a technique I used when doing freelance Web design. I focused on restaurants with bad websites. I wrote a crawler that searched for restaurants with email addresses on the site, but bad html like font or center tags or flash. I would then email them a sample site with their name and logo inserted programmatically. It got pretty good response.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a very good example for shooting against the target niche where you have your best audience to listen to you. But the question is: "when he was building WPEngine", there are already 40 folks "who were Wordpress consultants"? Then the result is not unexpected, and can not be consider a good example. Sorry if I misunderstood you. What we want know is how he got that 40 consultants to working on WPEngine in the…
There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers. He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP) He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)
Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introduced. And this is still happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of it to improve the system is a little easier.
Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far 1. Set up a blog on your domain 2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic) 3. get a number of emails from prospective customers 4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive My response rate…
With LiberWriter, I targeted forums where our users actually hang out, and gave useful answers to questions, with the URL at the end of the message as a sort of '.signature'. HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.
If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing: 0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA. 1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect. 2. Once connected you h…
This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal. If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention. Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosti…
I get some cold emails that, while slightly disguised, boil down to: "a paper you wrote came up in a Google scholar search for 'Prolog', and we also have a logic and/or rule system that's great, pls see this website and let me know if you want any details on licensing". Those are not usually that interesting, since of course I know there are such systems out there, and can Google for them myself...
On the other hand, if you read in the Future Work section of a paper I wrote something along the lines of, "it'd be great if X existed, but it doesn't seem to", and you think you really have built something meeting the description of X, then emailing me saying so is usually quite interesting and non-generic.
It's super early, but we've already gotten 500 users who are looking to beta test software and we've already started sending out codes.
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If you're interested please sign up either as a user or a developer—we're sending out stuff weekly!
With LiberWriter, I targeted forums where our users actually hang out, and gave useful answers to questions, with the URL at the end of the message as a sort of '.signature'. HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.
Me too. I tried hard here, but I dare not to attaché the URL with every post. I got 0 conversations too, even though part of my target users/customers are here.
But yeah, I would think few startups would find the HN community a bullseye.