I've been writing and selling my own software on the web full time since 2005. On the whole it was a 1000 small improvements to the software, website and marketing that improved the sales day by day and year by year. Rather than a blinding flash of inspiration that tripled sales overnight. But probably the single best improvement in sales came when I 'segmented' my event table planning product from a single price to 3 different price points, with the top one 10x the original price. Some details at:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/02/28/how-i-increased-sa...
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
431–440 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#432Marketing. 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 kinda expected this as the top comment. It's just so simple stupid yet it's a wonder that a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't. I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you ha…
Very true. There is a huge disconnect between what people say and what they do. Especially when they say "I would definitely pay for that"!
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#433Marketing. 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…
For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?
That may be true for massive companies like Google with huge exposure. But if you are some startup no-one has heard of then you are going to be doing really well if 0.1% of your potential market has even heard of you in the first year, let alone tried your product.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#434Marketing. 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?
My approach has been to put out something as early as possible and then be very responsive when people ask questions, make suggestions or report bugs. And this has resulted in lots of useful feedback for all 3 products I have developed. It takes time though and you have to go the extra file with support.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#435Marketing. 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 a solo developer with little marketing knowledge with a few hundred dollars to burn each month, where and how do I spend advertising money? It strikes me as imprudent to split it between Google, FB, and Twitter ads when I don't know what I'm doing.
As with everything to do with marketing, the answer is 'it depends'. Not much point in putting ads for an enterprise ERP system on FB.
Google Ads is complicated. Avoid it unless you are prepared to put in serious time learning how it works.
I tried Twitter ads a few years ago. Their demographics (knowledge of their customers are) was total garbage. Waste of money.
In general, do lots of small experiments and measure the results (clickthroughs, time on page, sign ups etc). If you can't measure anything meaningful, think carefully before handing over any cash.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the code of the app is made by remote people in remote countries, how do you sell software to the US government? What do you answer to “What is the nationality of your developers?”?
I imagine the answer to that is, I've simply never heard of the US government buying from a software vendor with less than 500 employees. Surely it never happens?
I know 1-man-band software companies that sell plenty of software to the US military.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#437Marketing, sales people, and such are all great but if you don't have product-market fit yet, you're beating up a dead horse here by focusing on growth. One of the first things I do when starting a new SaaS is setting up an event tracker (think mixpanel). At this stage, you barely have any users so no need for fancy analytics stuff. I just stare at the event log until I figure stuff out. Why are they not clicking on…
Back, when I did heavyweight GUI development, I went onsite for the first few customer installs and watched the customers operate the system (usually after fixing some bug LoL). Those always gave me basic UI tweaking ideas, but the real lightbulbs would come on when I asked questions like "why didn't you just do X instead of Y" or "how would you change this to make it easier". Or various other generic questions, the…
I once asked a room full of developers how many of them had watched people using their software. Almost none had. It still amazes me.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just use adsense. Haven't shopped around at all . If you have recommendations I'm all ears.
I've got no experience in shopping around for ads, was hoping you did :) My blog gets decent traffic these days, seems like I should stick an ad or two someplace so it pays for itsself.
I initially started with Google Adsense, but has later moved to Freestar. They basically connect you with 10+ ad networks (including Google Adsense) and then all the networks will compete for your ad space each time an ad is shown. In my experience the revenue is a lot better.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#439It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…
Glad you're earning some money, but I turned ad-blocker off to see how you incorporated ads on your site - honestly taking up a quarter of the screen with autoplay videos and blinking ads is some toxic 90s geocities stuff... ad-blocker going right back on.
I started with a lot less ads, but have since then put more on. I don't like it either, but people really don't mind it that much it seems. I also have an option where people can pay to remove the ads. Basically no one uses it.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#440It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…
Any chance you can give me pointers on how to improve SEO for my sudoku site? It's been up for 8 years now and I've left it for dead since user growth wasn't happening. Thanks! http://www.sudokuisland.com/
Congrats with the site. I've only just had a glance at it, but I think there's a lot you can do. Make it HTTPS first of all, research all keywords that relate to sudoku, write a long article about it and have it on the main page. Make sure you on-page SEO is good and keep doing off-page SEO (getting backlinks). If you want to take SEO a bit more seriously, read through a guide like this to start with: https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year. That's what I did to de-mystify SEO in the beginning.