

Some things I learned so far in bootstrapping my part-time startup - farmdawgnation
http://farmdawgnation.com/blog/2013/5/4/bootstrap-checkpoint-zero

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dshipper
Nice post, and the home page is well designed but it's hard to tell what the
product does without a screenshot or walkthrough of some sort.

It sounds reminiscent of HelloBar although you say in your post that it isn't
like HelloBar at all - bad sign. I'd also recommend saying explicitly a few of
the customers you're targeting e.g. bloggers, companies with large audiences
etc etc.

Good luck!

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farmdawgnation
Thanks for the feedback man! And yeah, I guess part of our problem with the
Hellobar comparison is that we're solving a problem they've been solving for a
small subset of their users for awhile.

They're really optimized for "I have a user on a page, and I want them to go
to X." X could be a product information page, or a page to add their email to
a list. We're optimized for "I have a user on a page, and I want them to put
their email on my X list so they can get my updates." where X is the name of
your email marketing service. That distinction means we can get some tighter
integration and a few more UX brownie points for that use case than would make
sense for Hellobar to implement.

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Felix21
Aha.

If passive email is what your product is for then you need to:

    
    
       1. make the bottom bar slightly bigger
       2. allow me to be able to add a picture of the lead magnet im offering
       3. the bar should slide up after after 1-2 seconds
    

This will result in a 3x bump in conversion(if i remember correctly), when
compared to the side bar opt in form on most blogs, so if you were getting 50
subscribers a day, this will increase it to about 200.

You are essentially a saas version of <http://instantslideup.com/> and your
target audience is BLOGGERS.

~~~
farmdawgnation
Thanks for the ideas. We've had all of these ideas come up before. 1 is a
clear possibility in the near future (or possibly the ability for it to be
configurable) and 3 is configurable by the user (I also want to add a
scrolling trigger to it as well, but that's not on the schedule yet).

The one that's the most problematic is the image. I've struggled with a way to
implement such a feature and avoid it from being gimmicky-looking. Or, rather,
some up with mechanisms to prevent the user from making it look gimmicky. I'm
open to any ideas/suggestions around that.

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aaronbrethorst
I read your blog post and the front page of Anchor Tab and I still have no
idea what the product does.

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farmdawgnation
Like I mentioned in the blog post, we have a messaging problem. Though the
blog post really wasn't intended to communicate that message. Ha.

Our product is an email marketing toolbar that sits the bottom of your blog or
website and can accept email addresses onto an e-mail mailing list. So, let's
say you run a company called Widgets, Inc, and a part of that is you have an
email list that gets an email each time you post a new blog. You could add an
Anchor Tab to your page as an elegant way of getting users onto that email
list. (They enter their email onto the bar at the bottom of the page and it's
added to your Constant Contact or MailChimp list.)

Does that make sense or am I just perpetuating the fail?

~~~
jamesjporter
I think it would really, really help to have a few example images of what the
damn thing actually _looks like_ on a webpage. People are inherently visual
creatures and imho this would go a long way.

~~~
farmdawgnation
That's a good thought. There is an example on the page, but we _do_ need to
draw some more attention to it. Maybe we'll do it in style using the <blink>
tag. ;)

But seriously, thanks again, this is really helpful!

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rubinelli
I like the idea, it seems like there is a pretty large, mostly unexplored
market there, but the thing that personally makes me pause as a potential
customer is that _I have no idea how to write those emails._

If you could create a micro-course that illustrates what a mailing list should
be like, or even bake some kind of "meta wizard" into your product, I'd be
much more willing to sign up.

~~~
farmdawgnation
That's an awesome idea. I'm going to pass on a direct link to this comment to
the Cirion guys. That's right in their wheel house.

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tarr11
". As it turns out, we had enough people enjoy the beta and sign on after the
30 day trial that we're covering our monthly systems operations expenses. "

This is great, congrats. Would be willing to share more information about
this? Conversion rates? Were these "real" customers or people that you know
who paid?

~~~
farmdawgnation
I'm not going to go into conversion rates and exact numbers for the moment. I
avoided that in the blog post mostly because we haven't, as a team, had the
conversation about how much we want to publish in that regard, and I don't
want to make any unilateral decisions about it.

I will say that most of the current customers do _know_ us, but a majority of
them know us because they have some business relationship with my partners,
Cirion Group. It makes sense because it was these same clients who first made
the need for such a product known to my partners, and who, however indirectly,
sparked the idea that made this happen. Also, most of our advertising has been
word of mouth up until this point and will likely stay that way until we fix
the messaging problem.

So, do they know us? Yes. Are they are posse of friends? No. There's no quid
pro quo. They're people who, like us, are running a business, and aren't
likely to buy something because it'll make our socks roll up and down.

~~~
tarr11
Fair enough. Thanks for sharing.

