
Finding Early Customers When You Aren't Internet Famous - WadeF
https://zapier.com/blog/2012/04/05/finding-early-customers-when-you-arent-internet-famous/
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daveungerer
Or you could create a startup in a space where being internet famous doesn't
matter. And you probably should.

~~~
dclaysmith
I think the point that launching a startup with no "followers" is difficult.
I'm in the same boat. I haven't blogged in 10 years, I have 30 or so twitter
followers (most of which I'm pretty sure are hookers) and nobody knows who I
am. When Notch or Biz Stone says "I'm launching a startup" they immediately
have traction--the author knows that the rest of us have to hustle.

I'm finding it difficult but seeing rays of light. My project
(<http://www.thetaboard.com>) is just getting of the ground (still an MVP) and
getting visitors is tough. Luckily my product is something HN readers might
actually buy so I get more value than most out of HN posts. I've had a couple
make the frontpage and had some (free) signups from it.

The author makes some great points and I'm defintely going to try some of
their ideas for creating organic search traffic.

~~~
smacktoward
But Notch wasn't "Internet famous" until after Minecraft launched. Minecraft
_made_ him Internet famous. In other words, Notch is Internet famous because
Minecraft was a hit, Minecraft wasn't a hit because Notch was Internet famous.

Don't worry about how un-famous you are. Put that energy into building
something that _makes you famous._

~~~
dclaysmith
No, his hard work on Minecraft made him famous--I'll give you that. But when
he released his MMO the other day, he probably had 1 million people who at
least wanted to check it out. Now the new game will be judged on its own
merits but Notch's Internet celebrity gave him instant traction.

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abuzzooz
Having mediocre design skills, I struggled before to create even the simplest
landing pages for my mobile apps. Like the article says, I was simply trying
to create a one-page site that contains a short description of an (upcoming)
app, and a way for people to enter their email addresses for future
notifications.

Although this sounds really simple (I can cook up the bare html in a few
minutes), I struggled to make it look half decent. Surely there must be some
easy way to create such simple landing pages, but I couldn't find it. I tried
wordpress themes, twitter bootstrap, and other platforms, but my designs(or
lack thereof) always turn out horribly.

My question: is there an easy way to create simple, beautiful landing pages?

~~~
kerryfalk
I don't know if this will be simple for everyone to execute as doing anything
well does take time and skill but I can give a couple of pointers that helps
me make simple pages that work (Convert users at rates >15% - I don't know
what others get but I'm happy with 15-20%).

I used to design a lot of print advertisements. When it finally clicked for me
that many of the principles are the same things started working.

Use AIDA:

\- Attention - Use a super high quality and very interesting (to your target)
picture. You can buy these cheaply from amateur photographers if you don't
have any.

\- Interest: Use a headline that says something to your target

\- Desire: use a little text to make them want what you're selling. IE. tell
them how it solves your biggest problem

\- Action: Use all the tricks you know to make a good looking button (or read
on how to do it, there are lots of sources for this) and place it in the
bottom right somewhere. The bottom right is what print designers do because
it's the last point your eye reaches when reading, it's the best place for a
call to action

Here are two recent examples that I have created (can be improved but you get
the idea). With quality traffic they convert around 20%:

<http://styckyd.com/sell_modified_cars>

<http://styckyd.com/sell_race_cars>

That advice might not be quite what you're looking for as it's not a service
that does most of it for you (someone could create that fairly simply) but
it's working for me.

~~~
abuzzooz
Excellent advice. Thanks for sharing.

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zupreme
Here's my advice (which is contingent upon your actually selling a product or
service):

Setup an affiliate program and promote that as assiduously as you promote your
actual product or service.

Yes, doing so can take lots of work and managing it may take plenty of your
time, but the trade-off can be well worth it. If you do things even 50% right
you will end up with dozens, or even hundreds, of hungry internet marketers
and webmasters promoting your product for you - at almost no cost to you.

Pay your affiliates only after you get paid, (and after your merchant-account-
mandated CC chargeback threshold passes). Flatter your top grossing affiliates
with audio, video or email interviews (which you could publish to your
startup's blog and which they will definitely spam the heck out of to
everybody they know).

Once you get enough traction and revenue to afford it, offload your affiliate
management to a network like CJ or PepperJam.

I used to be one of them so I can tell you, internet marketers are ALWAYS
looking for a great product to sell/promote. Cut revenue-sharing deals with
Internet Marketing forum owners for even more exposure.

Do all that and, while I cannot guarantee that your product will succeed in
the long run, I can guarantee that it won't fail as a result of nobody knowing
it exists.

------
jordhy
One CAN get initial traction and customers without having to be an internet
celebrity.

A fantastic first step is to ask to the internet marketing community. I'll
summarize my tips on this issue to try and help the readers as much as I can,
but please reach out to SEO/SEM/Branding people in the community at each stage
of your start-up journey so you can keep learning, growing and driving traffic
to your site. So here's my advice to find those early customers:

\- Build a fascinating product. Something that is better than every
competitive proposal in one or more dimensions (design, speed, simplicity,
robustness, etc). You know you have this when you feel passionate about your
product. At this point, it doesn't matter to have erred in some minor market
assumptions. Just do a solid MVP given your current understanding of the
market needs.

\- Go to search.twitter.com and find 50 people that are looking for the
solution you provide (i.e. search for "i want a widget that does x")

\- Network with this group of 50, give them premium accounts and give them
early access to your product. Congrats, you've got a nice beta testing team
with a desire for your product.

\- Reverse engineer the "mind-set" of this group of people: do they want
speed, low price or robust functionalities? Then, according to this create
"personas", ergo user profiles.

\- Now comes the fun part: you're going to market to each independent user
profile with a separate marketing effort. Before doing this, install Mixpanel
and make sure you're tracking EACH distinct user profile. Then place one
Google Adwords campaign for each profile. You want to discover which user
profile prefers your product, which type of user converts best, etc. To get
ideas for keywords I recommend Wordtracker.com (some people like the Google
keyword tool, but that's ok as well).

\- Since now you know the type of user you want to target raise your bets:
create multiple landing pages for this user type (the article gives you a good
idea of how to do just that).

\- Tweak the conversion rate (ratio of sign-ups per visits) that each page
gives you. Ideas to do this include: creating professional introductory
videos, adding testimonials, doing basic A/B testing, refining your copy, etc.

\- Keep refining you product. And. keep. marketing. There's so so much you can
do on a budget: pay for press releases to boost your page rank and get initial
awareness (under 400 dollars on prweb.com), join several interest groups and
promote to their mailing list, etc.

\- Internet famous celebrities don't have THAT high of an advantage over you
(when it comes to marketing). They DO have great advantages when it comes to
raising money but, for the purpose of building a compelling MVP... how many
people do you need? Not many. You're better off with a mix of the right people
and a tight knit community.

------
japhyr
Being "internet famous" just gives you a head start on getting traction. I am
working off the conviction that if I build something which solves a
significant problem for people, I can build a solid user base. If I do this
well enough, people with a large following will benefit from my work and share
it. That's when rapid growth should occur.

