Ask HN: Startup only has 2800 users after a year, should I do more marketing?

[steveridout]

I committed the first code to Readlang (http://readlang.com) a year ago and have been working on it solo since then. It's a freemium webapp for reading texts and watching videos. So far I have 2800 signed up users, 70 of whom are paying a $9.99/year subscription.

My marketing strategy so far has consisted of:

- Blog feature updates (http://blog.readlang.com)

- Occasional tweets (https://twitter.com/Readlang)

- An intro video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntVQ2L5s6FI) and tutorial screencasts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10qWoQEi5U&list=PLIGa-eWCssj9K_PpNGLnIs8vcENanVx3_)

- Posting to How-to-learn-any-language forum (http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=35462&PN=2) and Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1m5ymj/short_demo_video_of_readlang_my_webapp_for/)

- Uservoice page (https://readlang.uservoice.com/)

- Emailing every user, and being responsive to any requests

Apart from the above, I've relied on word of mouth, with enthusiastic users blogging and sharing it.

People advise me that I should do more marketing. But I feel uncomfortable spending more time than I already do on this stuff. My instinct is to just make the product awesome and let it market itself. I enjoy announcing new features, but it feels like having a prominent presence on online communities and social media to spread a product requires more effort than I'm willing to spend.

Perhaps I need to find a partner to help out with marketing and community management, perhaps there are more efficient ways that I can manage this myself, perhaps I need to integrate vitality into the product somehow, or perhaps I should just carry on as I have been. Any ideas or thoughts would be very appreciated!

[boothead]

From my handy "Copy writing for Geeks Checklist":

Is your copy about them, not you?

Did you position your product? eg.: Copywriting For Geeks. Sweeps is a mixer, not a soft drink.

Do you focus on the single most powerful desire of your market?

Do you promise one large, unique and competitive benefit?

Do you mention that benefit in your headline?

Do you present the benefits of your product, not its features?

Are you making your product remarkable, ie. worth making a remark about?

Do you prove that other people bought and enjoyed your product?

Do you associate your product with things people like?

Can you limit the availability of your product (time or quantity)?

Do you compare your product with a more expensive solution?

Do you remove all the risks that could prevent your prospects from buying?

Do you answer the most common objections?

Do you offer a guarantee?

Do you force prospects into action?

Do you have a clear call to action?

Can you introduce urgency, ie. set a deadline?

Did you setup conversion tracking?

I highly recommend the whole package: http://copywritingforgeeks.com/

By the way - on a completely unrelated note: Did you know that we're 2nd cousins :-)

[steveridout → boothead]

Thanks, that's a very useful list.

2nd cousins?! Are you serious?

[boothead → steveridout]

Yep, I met Helen at my Dad's house a couple of months ago and she mentioned you. In fact I believe your folks are going round to Dad's (Chris's) place soon. Small word huh?!

[steveridout → boothead]

Really, that's crazy. So is your dad the Chris that went to visit my dad in Asturias, Spain earlier this year?

[boothead → steveridout]

Yep :-)

[steveridout → boothead]

OK, well nice to meet you :-)

[charlieirish]

A commendable result that you have launched and gained some traction not just with users but customers (paying users). Well done. However, if we take in to account the major levers associated with a subscription businesses:

- traffic

- conversion

- price

- churn

- lifetime value

The easiest one for you to change right now is price. This will have a noticeable effect on your revenue and your profit. At the moment, $700/year gross is not enough to retire on (I'm making some broad assumptions about your lifestyle as well as the costs of the business); it's also much less than the opportunity cost of offering your services to employers. I'm not dissuading you from running your own business, far from it. I'm suggesting that you should see greater value in your work - it's likely that others see it as well and would happily pay for it.

A few things to try:

- increase your prices until your gross revenue starts to drop

- a monthly subscription with a discount for paying for a year upfront e.g. 12months for the price of 10.

- price tiers for different 'dimensions' of the product e.g. x articles for $y, 5x articles for $3y, 100x articles for $10y

With regards to marketing, you may find better traction and traffic (which hopefully results in more sales) through education. Perhaps highlight how you and your existing customers can best use the app to actually learn languages i.e. what are the best methods, what techniques work well etc. I'm sure that you've got enough material for a blog post and even for a free mini-course in exchange for an email address.

[steveridout → charlieirish]

That's very true. I was planning to revisit the pricing once the product is a little more polished and I remove the beta label. Your suggestions make a lot of sense.

I think the most important focus for now should be to grow the userbase, and I do worry a little about restricting growth with an increased price and also the current usage restrictions on the free tier.

Education as a form of marketing is a great idea, but takes a considerable investment of effort to do well. I'd need to hone my skills at writing and teaching to attract a large audience and it could easily turn into a full time job all by itself. Will give it some thought though.

[onion2k]

My instinct is to just make the product awesome and let it market itself.

The "build it, they will come" strategy. It has never worked as a strategy for marketing, ever, in the history of ever. Viral marketing, the "network effect", call it what you like, is only successful if it's backed by a pretty huge advertising budget. Not necessarily traditional advertising, but behind pretty much every successful "viral" campaign that's selling something there's an agency who are pushing the right buttons to get things shared.

If you don't have the budget for that, you have to put in the legwork in traditional marketing and selling. It's a horrible, hateful reality of startup life - the fun coding stuff actually comes a distant second to being a salesperson, especially at the beginning before you can afford to pay someone else to do that stuff.

[steveridout → onion2k]

I know some marketing is necessary just to get an initial user base. But after that, with a sufficiently awesome product, wouldn't the strategy of spending your effort converting existing users into superfans who promote it for you be effective? This approach appeals to me, especially given my limited resources.

It would be nice to have someone in charge of community management and marketing, but I don't have the money to pay for it without taking investment, which up until now I've been resisting.

[onion2k → steveridout]

That's one approach. There are many. All of them require work. The reality of life is that no app, no matter how good it is, will sell itself. No anything will sell itself. You have to be willing to get out there and sell if your company is going to make money.

FWIW, my last startup died because my co-founder and I didn't do it. We wanted to write code. And consequently we failed. I learned this lesson the hard way.

If you've not read it, Seth Godin's "Bootstrapper's Bible" is worth a look: http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible (and it's free at the moment)

[steveridout → onion2k]

Awesome, thanks for the link! I love Seth Godin's philosophy in the few talks of his I've watched, will give that a read.

Just checked out your current project http://pitcher.io/ which seems relevant to the discussion - classy move on not trying to promote it in your comments! Looks like it might be useful to help manage a social media presence, I've just signed up to your mailing list.

[smartwater → onion2k]

Never say never.

Build it and they will come worked for me, although only once out of about 20 attempts. It happened to be exactly what a lot of people needed and every day it grew faster than I could keep up with it. The average user would refer 10 or more friends and most users came back daily. It didn't matter how shitty my website was, they always came back, the value I was providing was that good.

[drewrv → smartwater]

What was the site?

[gk1]

- Are you doing anything to convert the 2,730 free users into paid subscriptions? It's much easier to sell to existing users than to new visitors.

- Are you tracking conversions and conversion rates from different sources? If your time is limited you can spend it on driving more traffic from sources that lead to more conversions (not necessarily more visitors).

- Are you testing different layouts, copywriting, and sign up processes? Use your Analytics data to spot issues like high bounces or low conversion rates to find things that are worth testing. For example, if a lot of people are clicking "Start Now" but leave as soon as the demo loads, maybe the demo is confusing/overwhelming to them (personally I was surprised because I was expecting a sign-up form), so you can test that hypothesis by sending 50% of the clickers straight to a sign-up form and see who converts better. You can use something like Optimizely to do this very easily.

[steveridout → gk1]

I've sent out a couple of emails with updates of new features to encourage existing users to stay engaged, another one is due pretty soon actually. And I'm in the process of adding an opt-in daily email reminder service which may also help with engagement. The more engaged users are the more likely they are to convert to paying customers.

I'm not tracking conversion rates from different sources, I'll look into that.

More testing of UX choices sounds like a good idea, so far I've just gone by gut instinct and user feedback. Was the fact that "Start Now" landed you straight into Trial Mode a bad surprise, would you have preferred a signup form at that point? Or perhaps a walkthrough tutorial?

[elenak]

Marketing is essential and the biggest problem with most startups. And I'm a founder in a startup that suffered for a while from lack of new users.

If you have the money, you should try advertising in places you feel that will bring you customers. But you probably knew that and don't have the money ;)

Well, having a partner that has some background on marketing would be good. Also, posting on hackernews and similar sites can give you a small boost shorterm. But you've obviously thought of that :P

[steveridout → elenak]

You're correct that money is a problem, I can't afford to spend a lot of money on ads until I reach the point where they generate enough subscription revenue to be profitable. Polishing the product to bring it out of beta and then raising the price could help here.

I actually did run a tiny experiment with $20 on Google adwords, but I wasn't impressed because:

- I had to pay over ¢30 per click. - It gave me a high proportion of users using IE <= 9 on which the site doesn't work properly.

I'll probably work on a new ad in future. Do you have any suggestions apart from Google Ad-words that may be appropriate?

[chrisbridgett → steveridout]

Facebook advertising has always appealed to me. The amount of parameters you can filter users to display your ads to is so specific, you can really squeeze it down to your exact target demographic. e.g. Only to users that are over 18 (so they can pay for your service), under xx age (whichever age you expect people won't be interested), by interests (language learning!), by current location and birthplace (might be able to figure out some combinations that would be ideal for language learners. E.g. if they were born in the UK but living in France) and so on. It defaults to CPM, but I'd definitely go for CPC.

[steveridout → chrisbridgett]

Thanks, funnily enough I started a tiny Facebook ad campaign to familiarise myself with it just yesterday. Need to put in some work to make the facebook page and ad more attractive before drawing any conclusions about its effectiveness though.

I agree the amount of targeting you can do is very cool.

[gk1 → steveridout]

Marketing guy here. Word of caution: FB ads are notoriously bad at getting clicks. Usually worse than AdWords. It's always great to test, but don't bet the farm on a FB ad campaign.

[palidanx]

I say read: http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices...

Also your website reminds me of http://www.businessinsider.com/jessica-beinecke-teaches-chin...

[miriadis]

I think +1000 users is a pretty nice number to find your business model, in your case, what are your customer acquisition cost and your churn rate? is your model sustainable?

If your numbers are fine...so go ahead!

[steveridout → miriadis]

I really should dig into my analytics to determine the churn rate.

My acquisition costs are basically free for a base line of about 10 signups per day plus sporadic increases from blog or forum posts. But this is nowhere near enough to generate significant revenue.

In future I'll experiment again with advertising and with optimising my site for revenue to know whether I can make advertising profitable.

[utnick]

Have you tried adding affiliate links or email blasts for rosetta stone or similar services?

I feel like that could be a bigger money maker than subscriptions for you.

Learning a language consists of 2 parts. Grinding out vocabulary which your app helps with. And learning the structure of the language which rosetta or pimsleur can help with. If you can drive traffic to providers of that 2nd part, it would be valuable.

[steveridout → utnick]

My traffic is probably too low to earn significant referral income right now, but it may be a decent idea in certain cases.

One place where I've considered adding affiliate links is dealing with copyright violations. People have shared translations of Harry Potter in different languages which I've removed, and I thought that it would be cool to leave the first few pages and put an affiliate link to amazon to buy the item. And in future it would be awesome to actually sell novels and graded readers directly via Readlang.

I wouldn't email my customers to advertise another service since it seems way too spammy, but I could imagine referring to another service if I thought it was really useful. I've been thinking of pointing beginner learners to Duolingo since I think it could complement Readlang, but since it's a completely free service it's not exactly a revenue generating idea!

You can upload whatever you like for your own private use, but publicly sharing copyrighted content is obviously not allowed.