

Getting traffic for your newly launched startup - derwiki
http://derwiki.tumblr.com/post/40523233923/getting-traffic-for-your-newly-launched-startup?utm_source=hn

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Matt_Mickiewicz
Since you where collecting sign-ups, it would be really interesting to see
registrations by marketing channel and calculate a CPA for each. In terms of
building the "seller" or in this case, the "lens renter" side of the market,
I'd probably do targeted facebook ads to photographers with messaging around
"Make Money Renting Your Gear" or even more specific messaging "Make up to
$20/day/lens renting your unused gear".

You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where
photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0%
commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.

You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher
capital costs, where you own the inventory.

PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as "camera
lens rental + city name" has decent volume, as does "lens name + rental" and
"lens name + rental + city", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.

All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it
will be difficult to differentiate:

<http://www.borrowlenses.com/>

<http://www.cameralensrentals.com/>

<http://www.lensrentals.com/>

<http://lensrentalscanada.com/>

<http://www.lenslenders.ca/>

P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your
site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with
incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach
internet marketers/affiliates, though we strongly discourage it.

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jmonegro
Borrowlenses is pretty awesome, too, and has a formidable reputation.

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Matt_Mickiewicz
Yep, so there's pretty good access/liquidity in this market.

I don't necessarily think that camera lens rentals is "biggest player wins"
either, unlike crowdsourcing graphic design (you go to the site with the most
designers) or selling websites (you go to the marketplace with the most
buyers) or even engineering recruitment (you go to the marketplace with the
largest number of VC funded employers participating).

Unlike the three use cases above, the end consumer will only care:

1.) is the site trustworthy

2.) is the pricing competitive with what else is out there

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wtvanhest
As a photographer who has rented lenses online I'd say your biggest issue is
lens options. Especially under featured lenses.

The vast majority of people who need to rent lenses due so for a professional
shoot where they cannot afford to drop $2k.

The lenses you need are popular pro lenses. The lenses you have can be bought
for 3 weeks worth of rental. Basically no one rents kit lenses because they
are so easy to buy used and are not very good relative quality.

You need stuff like: 70-200 f2.8 constant app

Go after getting people with those lenses and offer them insurance or some
other comfort and you can prob ramp much faster.

Consider a very strict system for checking out the lenses and a very clear
policy on what is who's fault.

Add in fraud protection of some type etc.

Then you will be offering a real service.

Eliminate lenses which are not a minimum of $300usd from your site

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rdl
I don't even think 70-200 f/2.8L IS II is where the sweet spot is. If you
shoot a lot, you probably have one of those (I have the 70-200 f/4L, but I'd
upgrade sooner if I didn't just do wide angle and macro).

The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably the
market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending program
from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an evaluation 500mm
f/2.8L.

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wtvanhest
My thesis is: Wedding photography is the biggest market for rental lenses and
the lenses REQUIRED for wedding photography are fast lenses that range from
$900-$2200. Additionally, there are many people who may shoot a limited number
of weddings per year which do not have the cash to spend $2,000 on a lens.

\--

Once a photographer has a 70-200 f/2.8, a fastish wide angle and a prime or
two, they really don't need anything besides strobes to shoot weddings.

Wedding lenses are important for your business for 2 reasons:

1) Non-pros going to weddings are a great market for rental lenses (1 time
use, going to get some great shots).

2) It takes a while to transition to wedding photography fulltime and it is
the only place to make real money down the road in most cases. During the
transition from 1 weddding a year to 20 weddings a year people will need to
rent lenses or not eat if they want to use what is basically required
equipment for getting quality low light shots.

They will want to own the body first so that they know how to use it.

\--- I don't have data to support that the sweet spot is $2000, fast lenses,
but I'd be shocked if I were wrong.

 _The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably
the market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending
program from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an
evaluation 500mm f/2.8L._

I'm sure this stuff gets rented too and is probably rented more than bought,
but the overall market size (in terms of days used) for people shooting with
500mm 2.8 is far less than the 70-200 f2.8.

\--- Additionally, those that own the lenses are likely to have them unused 20
weeks a year which provides the other side of the market.

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rdl
That makes sense. I've never even been to a wedding (except one as security),
but wedding photographers seem to be a world apart. It makes sense. It's also
a particularly undemanding physical environment for a lens.

It would be cute to do it _just_ for the wedding vertical, to test this
theory. Advertise specifically in the wedding market, and try to get weddings
to promote "bring your own SLR! Bride's mom covers lens rental of 70-200s for
canon or nikon!" Maybe add some other wedding-related stuff (like a free
camera check before/after, classes on wedding photography, and resources to
hire pros).

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BobWarfield
Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom
that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well
down into the noise.

CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something
that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your
site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow
you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.

And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for
your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great
content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something
or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.

Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of
traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd
focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some
audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe
with content marketing opportunities.

What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your
products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO
parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid
advertising?

Those are among the key initial questions to answer.

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derwiki
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it's too early to chalk up wisdom learned -- but
the main point of writing this was to get a discussion started and see what
feedback people had. In my experience, blog posts do better if you offer
something in them. In this case, I was sharing what the first two weeks of
launching a site and trying to get traffic were like, for all the readers who
haven't done it yet but want to do it some day.

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simonbarker87
Nice break down of what you did, I have a couple of similar stories of
launching something (after fully building it) and then getting very low
traffic but a fairly high conversion rate(as in, user arrives, uses the site
to do thing I designed it for and maybe comes back in the future). I seem to
struggle with growing traffic though.

I have heard StumbleUpon is great for traffic, especially paid discovery, but
each time I apply to paid discovery they turn me down on a "Lack of content"
issue so I guess they safeguard what they present on Paid Discovery.

I have found, for other projects that I no longer run, that "offline" buzz
works well - so press releases getting picked up in local media and that kind
of thing works well, you just need to know which reported to sweet talk I
guess.

My current side projects are <http://oneqstn.com>,
<http://efficientthings.com>

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abossy
Are sign-ups intended exclusively for people listing their gear? Perhaps you
can have sign-ups for people trying to rent, too, and request additional
information that would help you hone the site, such as equipment sought. For
example:

Email: xxx@yyy.com

Equipment Sought: <text field or drop down listing camera lenses>

This could be done under the guise that you will send them an e-mail
notification when the requested equipment is posted to the site. This would
help identify whether:

1\. Users are camera-savvy at all or are indeed random people "stumbling" upon
the site

2\. Get more detailed user needs

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jessepollak
Not related to the post, but I think it might be worth trying to target a
slightly different demographic for the rentals: casual photographers who don't
necessarily have nice cameras. As one my self (I've never owned a DSLR), I'd
definitely be interested in being able to 'rent' a nice camera for a vacation
at the right price.

Just a thought.

~~~
derwiki
Would a 'rental package' suit you better? Something like, an SLR and one or
two lenses that you rent for the weekend. What price would you be willing to
pay? Especially considering you could get a new SLR and kit lens for ~900.
$50/weekend? $100?

Thanks for the feedback! This is a suggestion I've been hearing a lot and may
pursue.

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jessepollak
Yeah, that could be cool. Probably in the $50 range, maybe less, but I'm a
poor college student.

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IceyEC
You might want to fix the link to <http://www.cameralends/rent?promo=launch>
to actually include the TLD.

Quick response: I would like to see a different color button from the default
bootstrap info button.

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derwiki
Thanks! Fixed. Any suggestions on button colors?

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IceyEC
Pretty much agree with tobyjsullivan, I'm just tired of seeing that particular
shade of blue ;-)

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kunle
Some ideas:

1\. go offline. find photography specialty stores as well as 2nd hand camera
equipment stores. Get them to list some inventory, as an additional revenue
source, and perhaps you can post some handbills there. There's a little bit of
conflict here, but the additional revenue might justify the risk and allow
them to keep more/broader inventory while they're at it.

2\. Find their sites. If you can find photo equipment sites who'll list with
you and link to you, even better

3\. Craigslist: respond to every buy request, autopost inventory etc

4\. Autoretweet everytime someone on twitter mentions a model of equipment
that you carry (This last one might be spammy).

Good luck!

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simantel
Maybe it's just me, but your site design doesn't really inspire confidence,
which is probably hurting conversions.

\- The top navigation is left-justified, but "Peer to peer local camera gear"
on the next line (also in the header) is centered.

\- Right below your call to action "Find a lens", you have very distracting
social sharing buttons that should probably be in the header or footer.

\- The line spacing on the titles of your featured equipment is huge. The
pictures down there being different sizes also bothers me, and they seem
cramped in that frame (they look better on the rent page, so maybe just give
them a little bit more padding).

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Namrog84
Well. Although I don't live in the area. Are there any physical boards.
Perhaps at airports or sight seeing spots you can post paper based flyers too?
Also offer for a small fee. Some kind of instructions for you to teach people
basics of photography and or using this particular camera. Because although
not a photographer myself. I'd imagine the nicer cameras being a bit harder to
use properly and that would scare me away from renting it.

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kerno
I rented an 18-200mm Nikon lens for a week in England when we went away for
Christmas. The process relatively pain free, it was posted in a very padded
box, and I just posted it back when I was done. I think it was about 60 pounds
all told.

I found it a great way to try a lens I'd always wanted but couldn't afford -
good luck with your business.

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jonathanjaeger
Facebook ads are going to be expensive, as you mentioned, but it takes time to
learn the optimization needs of each channel. For example, your click through
rate of .031% can be improved (image and copy performance is going to vary
dramatically).

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mladenkovacevic
Give users who list their gear a way to do some of the work for you (after all
you both want more traffic to the site)... Maybe allow them to embed YouTube
videos showcasing their gear on their product listing pages.

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jonaldomo
thanks for posting the data. heads up: you left out the .com in the "price is
free" link.

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derwiki
Thanks! Fixed.

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nathan7
Aperture Science logo!

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bloggersway
nice post, but tell about free methods.

