
Ask HN: Startup only has 2800 users after a year, should I do more marketing? - steveridout
I committed the first code to Readlang (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readlang.com) a year ago and have been working on it solo since then. It&#x27;s a freemium webapp for reading texts and watching videos. So far I have 2800 signed up users, 70 of whom are paying a $9.99&#x2F;year subscription.<p>My marketing strategy so far has consisted of:<p>- Blog feature updates (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.readlang.com)<p>- Occasional tweets (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Readlang)<p>- An intro video (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ntVQ2L5s6FI) and tutorial screencasts (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=I10qWoQEi5U&amp;list=PLIGa-eWCssj9K_PpNGLnIs8vcENanVx3_)<p>- Posting to How-to-learn-any-language forum (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;how-to-learn-any-language.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;forum_posts.asp?TID=35462&amp;PN=2) and Reddit (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;languagelearning&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1m5ymj&#x2F;short_demo_video_of_readlang_my_webapp_for&#x2F;)<p>- Uservoice page (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readlang.uservoice.com&#x2F;)<p>- Emailing every user, and being responsive to any requests<p>Apart from the above, I&#x27;ve relied on word of mouth, with enthusiastic users blogging and sharing it.<p>People advise me that I should do more marketing. But I feel uncomfortable spending more time than I already do on this stuff. My instinct is to just make the product awesome and let it market itself. I enjoy announcing new features, but it feels like having a prominent presence on online communities and social media to spread a product requires more effort than I&#x27;m willing to spend.<p>Perhaps I need to find a partner to help out with marketing and community management, perhaps there are more efficient ways that I can manage this myself, perhaps I need to integrate vitality into the product somehow, or perhaps I should just carry on as I have been. Any ideas or thoughts would be very appreciated!
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boothead
From my handy "Copy writing for Geeks Checklist":

Is your copy about them, not you?

Did you position your product? eg.: Copywriting For Geeks. Sweeps is a mixer,
not a soft drink.

Do you focus on the single most powerful desire of your market?

Do you promise one large, unique and competitive benefit?

Do you mention that benefit in your headline?

Do you present the benefits of your product, not its features?

Are you making your product remarkable, ie. worth making a remark about?

Do you prove that other people bought and enjoyed your product?

Do you associate your product with things people like?

Can you limit the availability of your product (time or quantity)?

Do you compare your product with a more expensive solution?

Do you remove all the risks that could prevent your prospects from buying?

Do you answer the most common objections?

Do you offer a guarantee?

Do you force prospects into action?

Do you have a clear call to action?

Can you introduce urgency, ie. set a deadline?

Did you setup conversion tracking?

I highly recommend the whole package:
[http://copywritingforgeeks.com/](http://copywritingforgeeks.com/)

By the way - on a completely unrelated note: Did you know that we're 2nd
cousins :-)

~~~
steveridout
Thanks, that's a very useful list.

2nd cousins?! Are you serious?

~~~
boothead
Yep, I met Helen at my Dad's house a couple of months ago and she mentioned
you. In fact I believe your folks are going round to Dad's (Chris's) place
soon. Small word huh?!

~~~
steveridout
Really, that's crazy. So is your dad the Chris that went to visit my dad in
Asturias, Spain earlier this year?

~~~
boothead
Yep :-)

~~~
steveridout
OK, well nice to meet you :-)

------
charlieirish
A commendable result that you have launched and gained some traction not just
with users but customers (paying users). Well done. However, if we take in to
account the major levers associated with a subscription businesses:

\- traffic

\- conversion

\- price

\- churn

\- lifetime value

The easiest one for you to change right now is price. This will have a
noticeable effect on your revenue and your profit. At the moment, $700/year
gross is not enough to retire on (I'm making some broad assumptions about your
lifestyle as well as the costs of the business); it's also much less than the
opportunity cost of offering your services to employers. I'm not dissuading
you from running your own business, far from it. I'm suggesting that you
should see greater value in your work - it's likely that others see it as well
and would happily pay for it.

A few things to try:

\- increase your prices until your gross revenue starts to drop

\- a monthly subscription with a discount for paying for a year upfront e.g.
12months for the price of 10.

\- price tiers for different 'dimensions' of the product e.g. x articles for
$y, 5x articles for $3y, 100x articles for $10y

With regards to marketing, you may find better traction and traffic (which
hopefully results in more sales) through education. Perhaps highlight how you
and your existing customers can best use the app to actually learn languages
i.e. what are the best methods, what techniques work well etc. I'm sure that
you've got enough material for a blog post and even for a free mini-course in
exchange for an email address.

~~~
steveridout
That's very true. I was planning to revisit the pricing once the product is a
little more polished and I remove the beta label. Your suggestions make a lot
of sense.

I think the most important focus for now should be to grow the userbase, and I
do worry a little about restricting growth with an increased price and also
the current usage restrictions on the free tier.

Education as a form of marketing is a great idea, but takes a considerable
investment of effort to do well. I'd need to hone my skills at writing and
teaching to attract a large audience and it could easily turn into a full time
job all by itself. Will give it some thought though.

------
onion2k
_My instinct is to just make the product awesome and let it market itself._

The "build it, they will come" strategy. It has _never_ worked as a strategy
for marketing, ever, in the history of ever. Viral marketing, the "network
effect", call it what you like, is only successful if it's backed by a pretty
huge advertising budget. Not necessarily traditional advertising, but behind
pretty much every successful "viral" campaign that's selling something there's
an agency who are pushing the right buttons to get things shared.

If you don't have the budget for that, you have to put in the legwork in
traditional marketing and _selling_. It's a horrible, hateful reality of
startup life - the fun coding stuff actually comes a distant second to being a
salesperson, especially at the beginning before you can afford to pay someone
else to do that stuff.

~~~
steveridout
I know some marketing is necessary just to get an initial user base. But after
that, with a sufficiently awesome product, wouldn't the strategy of spending
your effort converting existing users into superfans who promote it for you be
effective? This approach appeals to me, especially given my limited resources.

It would be nice to have someone in charge of community management and
marketing, but I don't have the money to pay for it without taking investment,
which up until now I've been resisting.

~~~
onion2k
That's one approach. There are many. All of them require work. The reality of
life is that no app, _no matter how good it is_ , will sell itself. No
_anything_ will sell itself. You have to be willing to get out there and sell
if your company is going to make money.

FWIW, my last startup died because my co-founder and I didn't do it. We wanted
to write code. And consequently we failed. I learned this lesson the hard way.

If you've not read it, Seth Godin's "Bootstrapper's Bible" is worth a look:
[http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible](http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible)
(and it's free at the moment)

~~~
steveridout
Awesome, thanks for the link! I love Seth Godin's philosophy in the few talks
of his I've watched, will give that a read.

Just checked out your current project [http://pitcher.io/](http://pitcher.io/)
which seems relevant to the discussion - classy move on not trying to promote
it in your comments! Looks like it might be useful to help manage a social
media presence, I've just signed up to your mailing list.

------
gk1
\- Are you doing anything to convert the 2,730 free users into paid
subscriptions? It's much easier to sell to existing users than to new
visitors.

\- Are you tracking conversions and conversion rates from different sources?
If your time is limited you can spend it on driving more traffic from sources
that lead to more conversions (not necessarily more visitors).

\- Are you testing different layouts, copywriting, and sign up processes? Use
your Analytics data to spot issues like high bounces or low conversion rates
to find things that are worth testing. For example, if a lot of people are
clicking "Start Now" but leave as soon as the demo loads, maybe the demo is
confusing/overwhelming to them (personally I was surprised because I was
expecting a sign-up form), so you can test that hypothesis by sending 50% of
the clickers straight to a sign-up form and see who converts better. You can
use something like Optimizely to do this very easily.

~~~
steveridout
I've sent out a couple of emails with updates of new features to encourage
existing users to stay engaged, another one is due pretty soon actually. And
I'm in the process of adding an opt-in daily email reminder service which may
also help with engagement. The more engaged users are the more likely they are
to convert to paying customers.

I'm not tracking conversion rates from different sources, I'll look into that.

More testing of UX choices sounds like a good idea, so far I've just gone by
gut instinct and user feedback. Was the fact that "Start Now" landed you
straight into Trial Mode a _bad_ surprise, would you have preferred a signup
form at that point? Or perhaps a walkthrough tutorial?

------
elenak
Marketing is essential and the biggest problem with most startups. And I'm a
founder in a startup that suffered for a while from lack of new users.

If you have the money, you should try advertising in places you feel that will
bring you customers. But you probably knew that and don't have the money ;)

Well, having a partner that has some background on marketing would be good.
Also, posting on hackernews and similar sites can give you a small boost
shorterm. But you've obviously thought of that :P

~~~
steveridout
You're correct that money is a problem, I can't afford to spend a lot of money
on ads until I reach the point where they generate enough subscription revenue
to be profitable. Polishing the product to bring it out of beta and then
raising the price could help here.

I actually did run a tiny experiment with $20 on Google adwords, but I wasn't
impressed because:

\- I had to pay over ¢30 per click. \- It gave me a high proportion of users
using IE <= 9 on which the site doesn't work properly.

I'll probably work on a new ad in future. Do you have any suggestions apart
from Google Ad-words that may be appropriate?

~~~
chrisbridgett
Facebook advertising has always appealed to me. The amount of parameters you
can filter users to display your ads to is so specific, you can really squeeze
it down to your exact target demographic. e.g. Only to users that are over 18
(so they can pay for your service), under xx age (whichever age you expect
people won't be interested), by interests (language learning!), by current
location and birthplace (might be able to figure out some combinations that
would be ideal for language learners. E.g. if they were born in the UK but
living in France) and so on. It defaults to CPM, but I'd definitely go for
CPC.

~~~
steveridout
Thanks, funnily enough I started a tiny Facebook ad campaign to familiarise
myself with it just yesterday. Need to put in some work to make the facebook
page and ad more attractive before drawing any conclusions about its
effectiveness though.

I agree the amount of targeting you can do is very cool.

~~~
gk1
Marketing guy here. Word of caution: FB ads are notoriously bad at getting
clicks. Usually worse than AdWords. It's always great to test, but don't bet
the farm on a FB ad campaign.

------
palidanx
I say read: [http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-
Practices...](http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices-
Salesforce-com-
ebook/dp/B005ERYEGU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385496999&sr=8-1&keywords=predictable+revenue)

Also your website reminds me of [http://www.businessinsider.com/jessica-
beinecke-teaches-chin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/jessica-beinecke-
teaches-chinese-american-slang-on-her-youtube-channel-omg-meiyu-2012-5)

------
miriadis
I think +1000 users is a pretty nice number to find your business model, in
your case, what are your customer acquisition cost and your churn rate? is
your model sustainable?

If your numbers are fine...so go ahead!

~~~
steveridout
I really should dig into my analytics to determine the churn rate.

My acquisition costs are basically free for a base line of about 10 signups
per day plus sporadic increases from blog or forum posts. But this is nowhere
near enough to generate significant revenue.

In future I'll experiment again with advertising and with optimising my site
for revenue to know whether I can make advertising profitable.

------
utnick
Have you tried adding affiliate links or email blasts for rosetta stone or
similar services?

I feel like that could be a bigger money maker than subscriptions for you.

Learning a language consists of 2 parts. Grinding out vocabulary which your
app helps with. And learning the structure of the language which rosetta or
pimsleur can help with. If you can drive traffic to providers of that 2nd
part, it would be valuable.

~~~
steveridout
My traffic is probably too low to earn significant referral income right now,
but it may be a decent idea in certain cases.

One place where I've considered adding affiliate links is dealing with
copyright violations. People have shared translations of Harry Potter in
different languages which I've removed, and I thought that it would be cool to
leave the first few pages and put an affiliate link to amazon to buy the item
_. And in future it would be awesome to actually sell novels and graded
readers directly via Readlang.

I wouldn't email my customers to advertise another service since it seems way
too spammy, but I could imagine referring to another service if I thought it
was really useful. I've been thinking of pointing beginner learners to
Duolingo since I think it could complement Readlang, but since it's a
completely free service it's not exactly a revenue generating idea!

_ You can upload whatever you like for your own private use, but publicly
sharing copyrighted content is obviously not allowed.

