

Ask HN: Should I find a business co-founder or learn marketing myself? - scollins

I have developed a SaaS product for devops after a user survey. I got 500-600 users to signup for invitation list. After sending them invitations, around 10% users signed up but didn&#x27;t engage with the product, and didn&#x27;t respond to feedback emails &#x2F; widgets.<p>Now I am trying to find new users and have followed tips from various &quot;How to get first X users&quot; threads without much luck. I have a co-founder who has background in web marketing and sales, but he hasn&#x27;t been much help with this.<p>Should I find a business co-founder who will be able to sell the product, or just tweak my signup process via iterations?
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dylanhassinger
You need to find a key channel. By this I mean, 1 reliable mechanism that gets
people into your funnel. Examples might be...

\- A podcast or blog or email list that talks about your product and your
progress on it. ex: Startups for the Rest of Us and Drip app \- a really good
viral hook built into the product \- Facebook ad strategy (probably not good
for devops product) \- a webinar strategy. (i.e. do a free monthly webinar on
DevOps and have calls to action at the end)

Your key channel needs to be able to feed the funnel and end up with enough
conversions to get you some compound growth going.

Whether you do it, or someone helps you, doesn't matter. You still need to
find that key channel.

I would probably recommend trying a personal blog/podcast + occasional
webinars. you might even find a cofounder once you get this going.

The other thing I recommend is what I call "The 2 person test". Find 2 people
in your target market, show them the landing page. If at least 1 of them
doesn't go "I need that!" then you probably need to work on product/market
fit.

good luck!

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fasteo
You are assuming - big assumption - that the product is not the problem, but a
100% churn rate for 50-60 users makes me suspicious about the product itself.

Then, right off the bat, you have started blaming your co-founder for a failed
product launch. This is no good.

Submit a "Show HN:" post with your product, let´s see what you have got and
let´s see how HN community can help.

