

Ask HN: Got my first customer Now what? - darkxanthos

I launched http://geekrations.com this weekend and got my first customer! Huge celebration ensuing, but now what? How can I drive more high quality traffic to my web site in a cost efficient manner? Adwords at $1 a click may prove to be way too expensive.<p>Trying to keep things lean, so are there other experiments I can run to help me find more customers ASAP?
======
dools
I recently launched my first public beta for Decal CMS[1]. We had released
<http://stacklayout.com/> a few months ago and had a few followers on Twitter
and Facebook, the plan being that we would have a few people to tell about it
when we released Mockups which is a tool for quickly creating StackLayout
sites in a browser.

It didn't work, however - none of the StackLayout crowd really seemed to care.

Rather than getting bummed out, I setup a search stream in HootSuite for the
word "mockup" and would ping people personally if they talked about a mockup
they were working on.

I also went to "list blogs" - you know "top 10 list of X" and added a link to
Decal Mockups in the comments.

The result was that we got 80 signups in the first week from about 400 page
views.

The lesson for me was that "social" doesn't have to be entirely passive and
there are polite ways of doing "push social marketing" without actually being
all that pushy.

I've only experimented with Twitter so far but I'm sure there are other venues
where you can find your voice.

WARNING: following people to get them to notice you SUCKS! I tried that few
times, got no results and it's a dangerous game to play - very spammy.

A lot of the founders in Mixergy interviews talk about their early days and
they say they spent a lot of time in forums providing answers (much like I'm
doing right now :) and linking through to their produce.

Slow and steady wins the race :) We can't all be threewords.me!

[1]<http://decalcms.com/mockups/>

~~~
darkxanthos
Thanks for the tips! It sounds like I am/will be dealing with the same pains
you did.

------
brackin
Make it more clear what you get, i'd consider signing up right now if I knew
the kinds of things you offer, instead of so many stock images.

Also I had to scroll down to the bottom to understand the product, maybe try
to make it clearer from the get go so you don't see people dropping off before
they read all of the copy.

Starting a blog with posts about your market or with stats/info graphics does
wonders as it engages your current user audience and builds up a new audience
of blog readers who may be interested in your product. The only problem is it
can be hard to manage and blogs take a lot of work.

As mentioned above pinging people via Twitter can be 'spammy' if automatic but
if you personally reply to messages relating to what you're doing it can be
really powerful and builds a lot of twitter conversations which does some
similar things to running a blog. If you tweet high quality content from your
industry, even if it's your rivals blogs you will find respect and people will
follow for the content.

A great example of this is Bufferapp. They are a Twitter app and run a blog
where they post all kinds of tips for using their product but also for
tweeting on the whole and regularly tweet out interesting articles in this
space. They reply to every tweet in full and thank people for mentioning them,
this drives engagement and most of their user audience.

------
aorshan
[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-
marketin...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-
with-giant-infographic-11928)

Helped me a lot. Also I think your website it awesome. I love the idea behind
it.

~~~
darkxanthos
Thank you!

------
moonlighter
"Just ship us back the bad stuff so we can send it to someone else." Man, I DO
love your sense of humor. Awesome ;)

~~~
darkxanthos
Thank you! It was a risk but I actually A/B tested it on my landing page. One
version was my sense of humor and the other was pretty matter of fact. They
performed identically so I went the fun route because... Well it's more fun!

------
fezzl
Make your first one happy first.

