

Ask HN: So I got first two paid customers, now what?  - vgurgov

Hi Guys,
This is my third or forth try to address this community and ask advice w my startup (previously I got zero responses).<p>I am launching my project (as part of HN - November Launch pad initiative) 
Ystd i got some 1k uniqs about 50 registrations (couple paid), few calls from potential customers, advisors, investors etc<p>My question is again the same. What now? What should i do now? I have solid roadmap on developing product, but feel like I am all over on business dev strategy: I was sure my initial market is education(screencasts, tutorial, etc) and got some good agreements there, but yest couple guys from Hollywood called and said that i should go to LA for big guys in Movies and entertainment industries... I feel like i am lost a need some good advices.<p>Thanks in advance. Hope this post will not get lost again, please consider upvoting, i really need some advice from respectful ppl here(not more  traffic, thats why i am not posting link to my site here.)<p>Edit: 
Based on feedback in comments here is the link: http://videolla.com
======
prs
Keep going and build upon that initial momentum.

A few other thoughts:

"Videolla is a media business revolution!" on your homepage is enclosed in
quotation marks. If it is a real quote, attribute it correctly and let people
know of its source.

Getting the [Site in 70 seconds] video onto the main page is something that
could also increase your conversions.

Seeing the word "Sign" twice in your menu bar (Sign In/Sign Up) somehow does
not look right to my eye. I believe something similar to Log In/Sign Up might
improve usability of your site by approximately 0.0018%.

Details like these are not necessarily what you should focus on right now. But
as your schedule permits, you might want to allocate some resources to A/B
testing if you are not already doing so. Find out what works. Rinse and
repeat.

~~~
AgentConundrum
This could very much be a personal preference issue, but the scrolling steps
on the right hand side just bugs me. I expect new steps to be _below_ their
predecessors, so when the slide scrolls _up_ to the next step, it's a bit
jarring to me.

~~~
vgurgov
Never thought about this :) Thanks! I will surely change it if your comment
will get few upvotes :))

~~~
mattmanser
A/B test it ;) I know what AgentConundrum means though, it's just a little
jarring.

~~~
nickbarnwell
Exactly what these two said. I was reading through the copy and kept getting
distracted by the slides scrolling down rather than up

------
bigohms
I have a little experience in this domain: developed a video product/model for
a large publishing company that produces a little over 500K rev/annum.

In short: Keep on pushing the product. Do not pay much attention behind any of
the hoopla that comes with a product launch - but entertain all opportunities
nonetheless, you never know when the contacts might be beneficial.

Where you have positioned yourself makes this a perfect solution for a small
business or entrepreneur with a unique content offering. The service is
cheaper than Brightcove but more optioned than YouTube. Target coming up with
a Wordpress plugin to market directly to that very powerful segment and
promote to them. Wordpress + your service would be a 80% solution to a
challenging issue related to monetization of video.

Find some way to integrate distribution with YouTube to leverage the power of
their network (perhaps set up a site for preview videos).

Target the educational video providers (5min and others), make sure you scan
the ENTIRE ecosystem to see what the other competition is doing right / wrong.
See what guitar lesson video producers are using, for example.

Once you have some notable customers (even give away a free/discount account
to a notable customer just to get their testimonial). Post their VIDEO
testimonial on your site.

Even before features, you may want to explain "How it Works" in a brief tab so
that users do not have to view the whole 70 sec video to find out how this
works.

The word "Alfa" in your header is spelled "Alpha" in common English.

Play the intro video on entry into the page, better yet, create an illustrated
video of how things work (not technical, just illustrative) and place it on
the homepage.

No offense, but I had a tiny bit of trouble understanding what you were saying
in the 70 second video. You may want to replace that with a female voice
reading the script.

I'm not sure I see the pricing model set up working for micropayment videos
(anything less than $4).

Also, how does the authentication/sessions work? Will a user that's paid for
one video automatically be able to buy a another video on the same domain (or
within the Videolla domain) without another authentication?

Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.

~~~
vgurgov
Great practical advices, thanks! I have most of this developed already or
planned in my roadmap.

What do you mean by:

>Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.

~~~
bigohms
When/If you are seeking a cash exit and the product is stable, growing &
profitable.

------
maxklein
Don't let the hype get to you. Just focus on developing your product and make
sure you solidify your customer acquisition process. These people will only be
around for a short while, afterwards they will move to the next featured
thing. Make sure the basis of your business is strong.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks, I was thinking along the same logic. What do you think about market
niche i should focus on initially?

~~~
maxklein
I have no idea, I'm not very conversant with how your business works. Just do
what you feel is best, build strongly on the biggest, then expand to the
smaller ones till you discover the one that takes off strongest.

------
matwood
This is what I do for building internal software and it may work for where you
are now. Look at your existing roadmap and then get feedback from your
customers (the ones who are paying for and the who are using the site). Take
this feedback and incorporate[1] it into your roadmap. Now go back to work.

I'm always apprehensive of 'Hollywood guys.' In my opinion there is just a
much higher ratio of BS in LA than many other places. You should certainly
talk to them, but keep your BS meter on high alert :)

[1] You don't want to let your current customers completely drive your vision
since their feedback is going to be based around their exact needs (this isn't
always true for example when dealing with fewer but very high paying
customers), but you should be able to use their feedback as a stepping stone
to understand the bigger picture and if your current roadmap makes sense.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks, very general but still good advices. Especially about Hollywood guys!
I wish i could share some conversations i had with that type of ppl )))

~~~
matwood
Well other people were giving you detailed advice on your site (typos, A/B,
etc...) and since you're the only one who knows your current roadmap and any
feedback you're receiving you're the only one who can make the big picture
decisions going forward. I like the idea and wish you success!

~~~
vgurgov
Practical advices are always useful. Listen to clients, iterate, do split
testing, etc are all great. I am gonna do most of this anyways. This is not
all new to me and I believe do have so experience.

But right now I am mostly looking for general advices regarding my product,
initial market, grow strategy, etc

Like:

DHH replied me and advised that I should get some partnerships in hollywood
and get some premium content like movies to grow audience.

Another well known guys suggested to focus on smaller producers and materials
like tech tutorials.

~~~
tsbaron
I would say start with small producers and learn from your experience.It's
always better to make mistakes with the small players before swimming with the
big fish.

In terms of your homepage and conversion rate, you have five call to actions
with two sign up for free buttons. I would consolidate these to the one or two
most important ones to make them more effective.

Congrats and good luck!

------
nck4222
"Custom Plan We have special offers for Serious Businesses Please get in
touch"

I wouldn't call them "Serious Businesses." For one, it looks odd as a proper
noun. Secondly, it makes it sound like you're putting down smaller businesses
or single people.

Also, periods would be nice.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks, i will change it! My eng sucks, sorry.

~~~
metageek
You should probably pay somebody to proofread your site, or you're going to
lose customers. Your tech could be rock-solid, but a potential customer can't
see that, so they look at what they _can_ see. If they see bad English or bad
design, they'll assume that the rest of the business is of similar quality.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks, great advice. Gonna do this anyways. Just didnt have time yet.

~~~
revorad
I can do it for you if you like. Email me (in profile) or give me your email
address. I'd also like to discuss some collaboration with my startup if you're
interested.

Please put your email address in your profile. You never know who might want
to get in touch!

~~~
vgurgov
thx, just added

------
brk
Well, I don't know you (sorry), or what your product/app is, so it's hard to
give much advice.

All I can say, if you got 2 customers, go get 2 more. Keep doing that until
profit :)

In all seriousness you have to be careful about trying to look at trends from
small data samples. Your first two or twenty customers might not be
representative of your best user base, they might just be a couple of early
adopters that happened to hear about you.

Pay attention to the trends though and try to look for commonalities among the
customers, or other use cases or verticals you might not have thought of,
while at the same time trying to make sure you don't get yourself pulled down
a rabbit hole by following the wrong data.

------
lt
This seems to be his site:

<http://videolla.com/>

~~~
bigiain
That sites redirecting my iPad to the mobile subdomain/site. You don't want to
do that.

~~~
vgurgov
Thats interesting(I spend couple days making this mobile version). Why? I dont
have iPad, but tested it on iphone and adroid. Can you please check if same
happens when you go to youtube or it has some custom version for iPad?

~~~
sil3ntmac
Are you redirecting based on user-agent string? The iPad reports Mobile Safari
in its user-agent:

    
    
      Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10
    

You might want to white-list user-agents containing 'iPad' from the redirect.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks, I know how to do it technically. I am just not sure how other video
sites do it with iPad. Custom mobile version or redirect to general site?

~~~
vlod
Worth going to your local apple store and testing with their display models.
;)

------
TheSaaSGuy
Hi - Good luck with your business. As a technology marketer & first time
visitor (and someone not in your target segment) to your site here are few
points of suggestion:

1- Market & Biz Dev: -You said your target market is education, this is a very
broad vertical. I suggest picking a segment from this broad market, for
example K-12. You could do one step better by focusing on a sub-segment within
this group, for example science teachers/content creators.

2- Look & feel: \- The auto scrolling 1,2,3 steps to getting started is too
fast to follow and read. Makes it difficult for users to learn about your
service. \- The current page is too busy with too many calls to action
(support our campaign, upload, browse, tour, singup, sign-in etc), simplify
this for higher conversion.

3- Hollywood or not: -I think meeting with new folks (Hollywood or not)is
always good for business. But don't waste your money flying there - tel calls
are cheaper and more effective.

Hope this helps and the very best to you.

------
agaton
I would recommend you to focus on the busines side for a while. Your minimum
viable product seems to work, you've already a pricing strategy and a few
customers. To validate your pricing and offer you need to get a few more
customers. 5-10 at minimum.

Do everything you can to get your first 10 paying customers, you'll learn a
lot, and after that focus on your product roadmap. You don't know what your
customers need, or want, until you have a bunch of 'em.

So, call people, sell, market your site, try to get some PR and do everything
you can come up with to get these 10 customers. When you've done that, you
will start to get real feedback from your customers not other entrepreneurs
and will a better clue on how the product roadmap should look like. And how
your product will fit into the market.

Then, it's time to get 100 customers. Do everything you can to get them.

Then, it's time to get 1000 customers. If you have 1000 customers, you know
you have a scalable business. Time to celebrate!

------
unohoo
To begin with, I would suggest making a list of your target customer segments,
if you havent already. Who will use this service to distribute video ? Media
agencies, DIY publishers, sports publishers etc. Your service is not targeted
to the users who upload videos to Youtube.

Once you have this list, figure out what are current solutions available to
that segment of users. Then, start your customer acquisition process. Be it
google adwords marketing or organic SEO or whatever. If you want to begin with
a niche and evolve from there, thats fine too. Identify which target segment
is tech savvy and will be easy/cheap to acquire and can easily try out your
service. For instance, DIY publishers might be easier to approach and convince
in terms of trying out your service. Wedding videographers might be another
(just thinking out loud here).

Once you start this way, you should get a good feel of what the market needs,
how and where you can acquire users etc.

------
noahc
The Hollywood guys are giving you good advice, but their wrong about the
reason.

I wouldn't go after the movie industry. It's something I don't understand and
something you probably don't either. However, you need to dominate a niche. I
e-mailed some advice on how I'd go about doing this a couple days ago to you.

The most important thing is to become THE website for x. You can always branch
out from there.

One way to pith this to bloggers is basically for $25.00 a month a person can
subscribe to your channel. This where you dump all your excess thoughts about
your niche. I have a lot of ideas that I think are useful, but I probably
couldn't write a 1500 word minimum blog post on. I could make a 3 minute video
on it though and produce 2 or 3 of these a day.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks Noah! Your email is still in my "Stared", sorry I am so busy in these
days with this and other projects, but i will reply to you in a few days

------
notahacker
The part of the site that looks like it needs the most work at the moment is
the browse section. Get people to tag their videos - make it searchable as
once you start getting content you're going to want people to see that similar
videos are up there. It's also the simplest form of feedback - are people
tagging their films "movie", "ruby" or "money"? Which ones generate the most
revenue, and which ones prefer which payment plans?

Possibly you can suggest people place their video under certain headings for
them and develop vertical browse pages for people looking at those markets.
These categories prove to might well warrant their own landing pages similar
to the home page but with targeted content "sell your screencasts - charge per
video or per course" and their own testimonials and examples etc. If you can
effectively silo your content and marketing messages you can directly target
more than one audience.

Going after big deals with the movie studios sounds like it could be a big
waste of time unless your contacts aren't simply wannabes.

------
Keyframe
Get a few more and form a VIP club of first n customers - and give them
special benefits -> they'll get you more customers.

------
sghael
congrats on the first few paying customers. Feels great, doesn't it?

1) if you have enough "volume" of unique and registrations, analyze you
acquisition cost. How is it relative to your margins? Try to account for
externalities (your time) and see if it's sustainable. It's ok to be
upsidedown on your acquisition cost early in the game if you think you can
optimize the acquisition engine.

2) Be willing to talk to partners, but be weary of hollow partnerships. Its
easy to fall into the trap of thinking you are making progress because you are
"in talks". IMO, this is especially true of hollywood/music industry.

3) Talk to you customers. Both paying and registrants. Learn what their pain
points are and their use case for your product. You will learn a crazy amount
of stuff you never thought of.

------
trevelyan
Post the URL of your service so people can give more constructive feedback
based on specifics.

------
jeromec
If you have two paying customers it means you have something people want.
Congratulations! That means you actually have a business. Now, all you have to
do is keep growing and improving. One thing I would do is reach out to those
first customers, and thank them for being early customers. Ask them how you
might help them even more, and why they found you valuable enough to buy. If
you can find out more about them, then you should be able to find more people
like them, and target your marketing to them. Good luck!

------
angelbob
_couple guys from Hollywood called and said that i should go to LA for big
guys in Movies and entertainment industries_

Is it your full-time job? If not, don't do this. You are talking about a huge
investment of time for sales. Are you a good salesman? If not, you will need
to become so to make this work.

Alternatively, you have 50 registrations and a couple of paid ones. Perhaps
you could find out who your first few customers were, and do more of that?

------
revorad
You are probably losing a customer by not linking to your business here. I
wish PG would add this to the site guidelines: when asking for help, be
specific.

~~~
vgurgov
To be honest, after PG's recent post about rising spam wave from low carma
accounts (I have 160), I was afraid to post my link. Link posted above is
correct though.

~~~
revorad
You are right. But, you are clearly not spamming! If genuine posts like these
don't contain links, then we are only worsening the problem.

------
neworbit
Having spent far too much time dealing with Hollywood I advise you to avoid
them like the plague. They will expect a great deal more from you than you
will be willing or able to provide/spend.

However, do get your DMCA ducks in a row sooner rather than later so the first
major copyright infringement that someone misuses your service for doesn't
take you down.

------
codyguy
Can you repeat the acquisition process for 10 more customers? Getting the
initial set of customers is extremely tough. Good luck.

~~~
vgurgov
Thanks! I believe I can. So far i have like 0.5% conversion (and i can improve
that rate). I am not looking to grow traffic right now as I want focus on my
initial users and improve product a bit (like fix obvious typos on site),
experiment with pricing etc...

~~~
codyguy
Are you paying for traffic or is it organic? Do a cost analysis to see how
long you'll last at the current burn rate. Make amends accordingly.

~~~
vgurgov
I am not paying anything for traffic (well except some interesting experiments
with fb ads). its mostly from twitter, fb, blogs and google. I do have enough
savings and my freelancing/consulting brings me enough, so money isnt an issue
here so far.

------
vgurgov
Thanks everyone for your suggestions and feedback! What a great community
here! If you know somebody with experience in this field, please forward my
contacts (in profile). Lets get in touch.

I am looking for advisors for that project(not looking for funding atm).

------
vaksel
Well the first thing you need to do is get market validation.

You got a few signups...but your actual market validation is whether someone
would actually buy the videos. Noone is going to pay you a subscription if
they aren't making sales.

~~~
vgurgov
I believe that market is validated and quite big. Idea is nothing new. Some of
competors are everyone from iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Video, down to sites like
Railstutorials.org...

I am struggling to find my initial place in this wide market. Where should i
focus - Education? Movies? Sports? I got some good feedback and contacts in
all these niches and dont know where should i focus my efforts.

I got two real(not counting number of test) purchases(i suspect from friends
of my customer).

~~~
thorax
I would recommend it to the ebook selling crowd. Those business owners would
love to have more "How to raise a parrot" sort of ebook sales, but in video.

------
revorad
Now that you have a few customers, why don't you put up some testimonials? For
your site, video testimonials would be great as they would help your customers
promote themselves too and showcase the technology at the same time.

------
aquark
In your pricing slide you have 'monthly' spelled as 'mothly'

And as a minor preference thing having the slides scroll downwards looked
wrong ... maybe upwards or sideways would look better.

------
metageek
"Any currency, any payment method"--I think you're overpromising here. Someone
is sure to want to pay in something unreasonable, and then your customers will
complain that you misled them.

~~~
nkassis
Like Canadian tire money? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money>

~~~
metageek
Or even just a niche payment card. "Any payment method" includes things like a
Macy's card, or the stored-value cards some subway systems use.

Obviously a reasonable person wouldn't expect to buy a video with a farecard,
but that just means you'll be getting complaints from _unreasonable_ people,
which are the worst to deal with.

------
mathgladiator
Get two more. That's 100% growth.

