Thank you for sharing. This has given me good ideas to follow through as I try to build up my product. How much resources (capital wise + hours) did you expend? You say in earlier post, 250K bootstrap fund. What percentage on this particular effort?
Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's their choice, obviously. I hate being forced to watch a video, and when I land on a page that only has video content I leave.
I used to do that too. Now I squash my overwhelming desire to leave and I give it a shot. Almost everytime, I leave with a much better understanding of the product.
But are you better for it, or have you just spent more time of your life watching what are, essentially, ads?
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#53You know, I skimmed the article and liked it, and thought "hey, I'll check out GrooveHQ.com, see what their deal is" since I haven't heard of them before. And I get to a page where the only way to learn more is to watch a video. Instant turnoff. I'm in a quiet place, I don't want to make noise or plug my headphones in just to have any idea what it is you actually do. Please consider that people might want to read som…
Did you see this ? It shows screenshots with explanations. http://www.groovehq.com/#what_you_get EDIT: Apparently, this link takes you to "how it works" tab and you still have to click on the "What You get" tab manually.
I get redirected to http://www.groovehq.com/start and get a login screen.
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! We promised to bare it all :)
How many extra customers would being number 1 on HN bring? Would love to hear if you ve got such a number.
My business, LiberWriter.com was at the top of HN at one point in time. New signups? 0. Our target market is completely different from the HN crowd, almost all of whom can do what we do for themselves.
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#55You know, I skimmed the article and liked it, and thought "hey, I'll check out GrooveHQ.com, see what their deal is" since I haven't heard of them before. And I get to a page where the only way to learn more is to watch a video. Instant turnoff. I'm in a quiet place, I don't want to make noise or plug my headphones in just to have any idea what it is you actually do. Please consider that people might want to read som…
It's like the return of the flash intro page from the 1990s. But even worse.
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#56Funny, we're already recycling tech company names. Any one remember the cool group collaboration tool (until MSFT bought them) called Groove[1]?
I think the former Groove inspired a lot of what became Web 2.0 productivity tools. It was definitely at the forefront of such.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks
Edit: I should add, good article
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really depends on the product and the article content. When Lollipuff (women's fashion) was at the top of HN for "Our YC Application", we had very few real signups -- but lots of pageviews and time on site. Having read the Groove blog post... I still have no clue what it is they do. Just putting a simple one-liner in the blog post may have improved conversions significantly. EDIT: If the author of the article is l…
Love this feedback :) Thanks so much for sharing. We try hard not to promote the product on our blog, having said that I think a simple 1 liner in the bio about the app would do well. Thanks again, Alex
For me, and I've seen this feedback here in HN as well, it's annoying when I click on your logo and it takes me to the blog home rather than the product home - even when I'm already on the blog home.
That said - this blog entry is amazing! I'll check out the others in this series as well. THANK YOU for sharing all this!
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many extra customers would being number 1 on HN bring? Would love to hear if you ve got such a number.
Post coming up very soon about that affect :)
Looking forward to it.
There are a lot of well-intentioned opinions here but it'll be interesting to see if there's any correlation with your real-world data and conversions.
I -for one- am really interested in following your growth but I'm not in the market for a support service (yet). I'm not your customer, why would you care what I think about your UX and whether or not you should have a video lander?
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to do that too. Now I squash my overwhelming desire to leave and I give it a shot. Almost everytime, I leave with a much better understanding of the product.
But are you better for it, or have you just spent more time of your life watching what are, essentially, ads?
I honestly think I am getting a quicker understanding than skimming a bunch of text and letting my brain fill in the rest. So sure, I'm better for having taken the time.
Re: Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
#60I went to the main blog page, but completely missed the link to this article. Instead I was looking at the iconic images as the table of contents, looking for the latest article. The "intro" of this article didnt look like a link to a longer article, and there was no underlined link to click, so I didn't try to click it. May be a use ability issue?