

Ask HN: How did your startup get traction? - nullable

How did your startup get traction? How might we get traction given the details below? (I realize what worked for you might not work for us given certain differences.) What worked for you and why did it work particularly well given your business?<p>Our website has a modestly useful application that provides results that are slightly better than our well-known competitors. Our results are MUCH better than what an average consumer would get on their own without using us or our competitors.<p>Customers have offered very strong testimonials after using our service, invoking the name of God or saying that we're lifesavers. Improvements we've made for some of them have been very dramatic.<p>We are not well known (wouldn't be surprised if you never heard of us), but we have been mentioned in the news (like NYTimes, WSJ, Reader's Digest) in print, on TV, in blogs. We've won a few awards in our industry (like a Best-Of-[year] at an annual industry conference).<p>Our service is something you'd only personally use one or two times now, and then maybe it would be several months or years before you'd be in a situation to use it again. This might be the biggest challenge facing us. Getting traction seems easier for a site that you'd check every day like facebook or HN.<p>Because the use of our service depends on whether it applies to your situation, we are offering something that is only applicable to maybe 5% of the general population at any given moment.<p>The industry is boring. It takes less than 10 seconds or 2 sentences to say what we do, but it isn't something people enjoy talking about. I'm trying to come up with some similar industry for you to imagine -- maybe going to the dentist or refinancing your mortgage.<p>Edit (reason: collating details relevant to my company's situation here for new readers' convenience) One problem is that some portion of this 5% don't even know that our kind of thing can be done in their situation. But every time I go on a random forum and ask people if they know it can be done, all the smarty-pants reply and say Yeah-I-Already-Knew-That. I mean ... who's going to admit ignorance, really?<p>Many thanks in advance! (Tis my first post so apologies if I screwed up anything.)
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patio11
Similar situation: my customers typically use the product once to twice a year
(or lifetime), and if 5% of the country needed it at any given time I'd have
kittens. The thing that has worked best for me is organic SEO.

Does your customer, when they're momentarily in the 5% of the population who
needs your service, _know_ they need your service? If so, they're searching
for it on Google, using a mix of [the most obvious possible two or three word
phrase a layperson would use to describe your service] and a long, long tail
of various questions, concerns, and whatnot. If you are in a high money niche,
and if dentists or insurance were good examples you mostly certainly are, it
will be _very_ difficult for you to attack the head of the query distribution
like, e.g., "$TYPE insurance".

Is there a scalable content creation strategy in your market? Can you make
one? You can leverage your mainstream attention to increase the returns on
content creation targeted at more niche concerns within the niche. (You can
put your earned NYT logo on a page about something much, much more specific
than the NYT will ever publish about itself.)

~~~
nullable
:) re: long tail SEO ... We have had multiple inbound calls from people who
think we're some other institution because they searched for that institution,
came to our site, got our phone number and asked us about their account at
that institution. This happens even though we never pretend to be that
institution on our page, we don't use their logo, etc.

One problem is that some portion of this 5% don't even know that our kind of
thing can be done in their situation. (But every time I go on a random forum
and ask people if they know it can be done, all the smarty-pants reply and say
Yeah-I-Already-Knew-That. I mean ... who's going to admit ignorance, really?)

~~~
JangoSteve
_One problem is that some portion of this 5% don't even know that our kind of
thing can be done in their situation._

This is a subtle opportunity for strategy that a lot of people don't seem to
realize (not necessarily you, but just a lot of people). In regards to organic
SEO, you should be optimizing not necessarily for what it is you do, but
rather for what it is those people are searching.

~~~
nullable
Excellent point. Will have to check with our guy to see if he thought of this.
Thanks!

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endlessvoid94
I run ThatHigh.com.

I chalked the shit out of the quad at my college. Then I visited another
college and did the same thing.

Simultaneously, I put $5 into stumbleupon advertising. Because users liked our
site, they voted up and it got a TON of traffic from SU.

Early on I also submitted the site to College Humor's "sitelinks" section,
which is basically a big moderated bastardization of something like reddit. It
got to the frontpage and despite being just a tiny link in the sidebar, gave
us a huge influx of traffic very early on. It basically eliminated the need
for me to seed the stories, users, and votes myself (by faking it). From then
on, I never had to submit or fake any activity.

Getting involved with bloggers is helpful. There's so much to this, it's
difficult to know where to begin. There's much in common with affiliate
marketing and the "dark" and "spammy" corners of the internet. A lot of those
methods work though, and early on, most people will do anything to get any
traffic at all.

Remember: any attention is good attention. Just make sure you are committed,
because when attacks come, sometimes they're brutal. Just keep on working and
don't give up.

~~~
points
You know you're not supposed to have 8 adsense units on a page right? They
allow 3.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Yeah, I know. I'm using google DFP and I've set it to sell my remnant ad space
to Adsense, and it does it for me. So technically google is letting me do
this.

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vgurgov
One guy that ran VoIP company that most of you have probably heard of. Here is
how he described his experience in similar situation. So he was thinking about
how to spin of his project in similar situation. (Most of us dont change phone
provider quite often, right?) He was staying at some motel and had his TV on.
You know that old weird tv stuff. Then one moment he realized Americans still
watching TV A LOT and all these freaking tv ads as well. So he took a credit
and ran TV ad campaign. And that was breaking moment for company. Sales just
exploded.

So think about making good tv campaign especially if majority of your clients
are not tech guys, but like moms, homeowners etc.

Sorry for obvious advice, but just to mention that "old media" still have some
power these days...

~~~
nullable
How would you convince the decision-makers to loosen the purse strings for a
TV ad campaign?

I imagine the decision-makers asking "Isn't our coverage in several legit news
outlets better than a TV ad campaign?" I'm open to reality being different
from expectation. Just wondering what folks have found to be the case by
experience... Was this VoIP company covered in the news after the TV ad
campaign or before?

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badmash69
Forget about it ! You are unlikely to get any traction as you are not even
able to explain to this roomful of hackers what you do.

~~~
minalecs
have to agree.. there are many different strategies that can be applied
depending on the product/service/site and really I'm clueless as to what you
do. Generic answer for generic explanation.. run ads

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jacquesm
What's the website ? (why speak in the abstract when you can give a concrete
example ?)

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michael_dorfman
Is there a natural middle-man you should be dealing with instead of the
"consumer"?

For example: if your app was about "going to the dentist", I'd suggest trying
to sell to Dentists (to re-brand and sell on to their clients).

Is there an analogue in your industry?

~~~
nullable
Yes, this might actually be the way we succeed in the end. Is this something
your company did? If so, could you share your experience -- getting the
middleman's attention, getting cooperation, what worked / what didn't ...

~~~
mcn
I'm hesitant to post this link because I don't have any personal experience in
the area, but this interview speaks to those questions and is currently on the
front page, so you might benefit from the live discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671852>
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/sean-murphy-
on-t...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/sean-murphy-on-the-
first-1-6-enterprise-customers.html)

>I recently did a Traction Book interview with Sean Murphy who runs a boutique
cutomer development firm in Silicon Valley. We discussed (for ~1hr) how to
approach getting the first set of enterprise customers. What follows is a
slightly edited transcript of the full interview. -Gabriel Weinburg

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atomical
What is the product?

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asanwal
I've always thought "Ask HN" was akin to asking a group of strangers (mostly)
to spend their time helping you. Wouldn't you get better suggestions from the
HN community by telling everyone what your site is vs. this riddle of a
description? Give us the "2 sentences to say what we do".

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JangoSteve
I had a similar problem with RateMyStudentRental.com.By definition, students
are typically only looking for housing twice a year, maybe even only once a
year. Your best bet in this case is to optimize for organic SEO.

Over the years, I've gotten RMSR to be #1 if you google "student rental
housing" and usually close to #1 if you google any address that happens to be
on RMSR. This has been absolutely invaluable for creating _recurring_
traffice, which seems to be the area you're struggling with.

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k0ban
Turn things around. Instead of promoting your main product, create and promote
related-to-that-area product that refers to your main product.

As an example, you have a hosting service. Open a site with a lot of web based
tools like whoise, traceroute, so you will target right segment and use this
tools site to promote your hosting.

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jacquesm
I started out using a mailinglist that I'd built up over the years
tangentially related to the subject.

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petervandijck
1\. Calculate how much a paying customer pays you, average.

2\. Experiment with a variety of customer acquisition methods, starting with
Google ads.

3\. Calculate the acquisition cost versus the lifetime value cost, find
methods that bring you profitable customers, scale.

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nl
Does it target a particular market segment (age or interest)?

Facebook CPM ads are _cheap_ and have pretty reasonable targeting options. You
can get a few 100K impressions for well under $100

