I'm a builder, not a seller. How do I grow my startup?

Hello!
I took a look at your site. Here's some quick feedback that I hope can be useful to you. Note that I am not a developer, but I do have many years in tech and product management.

Many sites struggle with similar problems as yours. I call it the 'sentence fragment' syndrome. It means that your value proposition to your customer is only a sentence fragment. Like this - imagine your target user saying "I need to run these SEO diagnostics because..." And then you fill in what comes after 'because'.

If your answer looks like this "because everyone should run routine diagnostics", then you are relying on a specific customer behavior to drive your traffic. Unreliable and unpredictable. This is especially true when you are relying on 'shoulds'. All people SHOULD clean their kitchens. All people SHOULD balance their checkbooks. All people SHOULD get their oil changed. Yeah, well they should, but not all people do. Don't rely on what a customer should do as a way to increase traffic.

If your answer looks like this "because SEO optimization is a good idea", then you are failing to sell me on why its important and why I should do it. Especially if I don't have a deep technical background. Another one that might fall into this camp is "because I need to fix my broken links". As a customer I don't know I need to fix any broken links until someone (you) tells me how much traffic I've lost or how many disgruntled customers I have because of broken links. Pain sells, but sometimes you have to open the eyes of the customer to recognizing the pain they didn't even realize they had.

If your answer looks like this "because I am about to buy a website off of EmpireFlippers or Flippa and I need to know what kind of shape the site is in before I buy it"... NOW you have a value proposition and a target customer. Or, "because I just bought a website off of Flippa that said I could make hundreds/thousands if I only put a little work into SEO." Now you have a second target customer.

Couple of more thoughts:

• You might want to re-consider your 10 day free trial. You might be giving away all the value in the free trial so customers have no reason to buy. After all, how many times can you add a sitemap?
• The site itself is extremely well laid out and very easy to navigate. I was especially drawn to the asthetics - clean, easy to navigate, easy on the eyes, easy to read...I wouldn't change a single thing about the way the site looks.

Hope this was helpful to you in some way.

Pmox2018

Hi Rick!
I don't have any advice here, but I'm in a pretty similar boat to you. I've spent all my time learning how to make things and a lot less on actually connecting that to users.
So I'm really keen to see the responses you get.
:D

There is someone on here with a website that pairs up business/marketing people with builders/developers, I'll try to find it but I really love the idea, it matches people with different skill sets to help them help eachother succeed.

Hey Rick!

I have a couple thoughts for you to help you leverage your existing user base.

1. Get to know your customers better.

Hop on calls, send out surveys, find them in communities, follow them on Twitter, make note of what kind of businesses they are. The clearer your understanding of your customers, the better you will be able to come up with viable ways to find more people like them.

2. Incentivize sharing.

Affiliate programs aren’t for everyone, but they can be a viable growth strategy. Especially considering the size of your user base, implementing an affiliate program could be a long-term strategy that also pays off in the short-term. Offer to do a webinar with affiliates, create collateral, and make your affiliates your biggest advocates.

3. Blogging.

This might not seem very helpful but considering you have an SEO tool, you could do some keyword research and competitive research to figure out if or what the information gap is and how you can fill it. Focus on writing in-depth, helpful content. Ask your customers if you can ask them about their experience with your tool and the results they’ve gotten from it and then write up a story about what they achieved using your tool.

Hope that’s helpful!

I just wrote about doing more marketing. Taken from there:

"Try to see marketing as a tool to help your (prospect) customers. That does make all the difference, right? How can you help them? For instance: create an article they can learn from, create a handy little tool they can use, or tell them about your product that will save them time.

That last one is marketing/sales too, but by framing it as “helping them save time (or money!)”, it is easier to do. After all, your product does help them save time and money, doesn't it?"

Also feel free to mail—happy to help! ✌️

Hey Rick. I won't evaluate the site as others have done a great job. But your question was "I'm a builder, not a seller"....and first of all, just know that you don't have to be both. It does not mean you will fail. What I do is think of it this way: You need to get get people around you or working with you that have the skills you lack. Does that mean you have to pay them? No....if you can find people that have marketing and sales skills and show them your progress and share the vision and show what you are doing, then they could choose to help for a great arrangement. What's most important is that you have a vision and are able to articulate that to potential "business partners". Builders and sellers can be the same person but in many cases they aren't because we all have our own special set of skills and some people try to be both by reading an article but the reality is.....just find good people that compliment you and let them apply their knowledge while you build. :)

To answer your question in short: you won't grow only as a builder. You need to be able to communicate and sell your product.

That's hard, that's tough, it takes time. It's difficult to automate. But you could have the best service of the world, you won't score if nobody uses it.

I don't have any suggestion, But good resource I can recommend to learn marketing and customer acquisition is everyonehatesmarketers podcast. The will get to hear practical step by step methods that you can apply in your business. Good episode to start with is https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/how-to-send-emails-with-high-open-rates/

The great thing about making a B2B products is that it'll be clear which companies are in your target group. Now go find them on LinkedIn or wherever and cold e-mail them.

Hi Rick, congrats on the success so far!

It's hard to give you specific advice for your situation without knowing more about exactly 'where you are'.

Here are a few things you probably want to think about though:

• Extroverts don't necessarily make better salespeople. All you need is to have a genuine interest in understanding and solving a particular problem for your customers. Where most technical founders go wrong is that they try and 'sell' a prescriptive solution to the customer, instead of actually focussing on the problem as perceived by the customer and making sure the product meets those needs.
• Direct sales is great because as a solo founder you can afford to do things that don't scale. You don't need to compete with the big dogs on Adwords, because you don't need to make enough revenue to support a bloated team. Play to your strengths.
• Have a long, honest think about whether your current challenge is due to you not knowing 'how to sell', 'which channels to use', or perhaps 'what my customers really want.' If you really understand your customers, then points one and two are normally pretty obvious to you (even without sales/marketing experience).

However, despite having 1750 users, it doesn't feel like it has really taken off. To live off this product, I need more visitors, and eventually more paying customers.

• That seems a bit off. If you're providing value to 1750 people, there must be some additional value you can provide to a subset of them relatively easily and which they are willing to pay for. To paraphrase Paul Graham, it's better to make something a few people love, than a lot of people like.

• If you need more actionable advice, I've started running a weekly email blast for founders in your position (technical, struggling to build a profitable business). Every week there's a 5min actionable article, with examples, which should help you grow. It's free at FiveMinuteFounder.com

Good luck!

Wow, I can't believe all the comments on this post. There are so many valuable lessons in it, I think I need to just sit down and write everything down:-)

Amazing to see the power of this community, thanks all!

Same here. Meaning I can't tell you what to do and claim it will work. I'll share what I'm doing.

I was a 100% developer. Now I'm trying to push that number down to 30%. Should have started that way, but there's no turning back now and I still believe my product can succeed.

You are a builder, but you weren't born one. It's a skill you've acquired. It's the same for sales and marketing. Sure, some people are naturals, but if you're capable enough to build a non-trivial product, you are capable of figuring out marketing as well.

It will take you time. We builders tend to underestimate all non-builder professions, and we're often wrong. It is a tough, crowded profession requiring grit and creativity. It might take you half a year to learn the basics, and it's changing all the time. I think you're already doing that since you mentioned you read books on marketing.

I don't know your product nor your audience, but I'd say you should probably blog more. You have a few posts, you should try doing them more frequently. And bigger. Much bigger. Try do a few 5.000 word ultimate guides. It has helped me understand my product and my niche a lot, and I suggest you try the same. Also, you might be doing this already, but you should talk to your existing customers. 1750 is quite a solid number, I'm sure they'll eagerly answer how to provide more value to them and what would they be willing to pay.

In the end, you could always consider getting another person to do this for you. Personally I wanted to learn all these things myself and be a one-man team, but there's a lot of work, and times are moving fast... Still, after you add marketing to your skill set, you'll be better suited to grow your product better, or start your next one with a more customer-oriented approach instead of just mindlessly adding features. That's what I wish for myself at least.

Good luck.

Just a thought - maybe you also need a pricing option for sole founders who have just 1 website and €29/mo for them seems to be too much to spend for single tool? Like €9/mo for single website? Otherwise it seems that you're targeting to small business/agencies only and in that way you have to think more of what they need and how to adjust your copyright to them. Or maybe your traffic isn't converting because majority of your visitors just don't have 5 sites and it's expensive for them to spend €29/mo just for 1?

P.S. Love clean design/UI

An easy way to get traffic is to create free seo tools. Make some of your site's features into small tools and make them public and then share it reddit and facebook groups, Quora and other communities. You will get a lot of traffic this way. Paid advertising would also work, if you have the budget. Most SEO services out there does it. They upsell their products. Here is what you should do:

Create free tools for each services:

1. Search Engine Optimization: Meta descriptions and Page title Analizer.
2. Happier visitors: Open Graph and Favicon Checker.
3. Technical awesomeness: Header Errors, Language settings checker.

These tools page should say something, like "Get the full Report and let us Fix it for you" or something like that. and list the other tools that are paywalled and show CTA Button to upgrade.

Hope that helped.
Let me know if you have further questions

Lots of great feedback on here already. I'll add my voice to the theme of exploring your existing (paying) customers. When I checked out the site, I had the same question - who is the target customer? Probably not a small business website owner. I'd look at the websites of each customer, and see if you can find a niche that several fall into, and expand there. Nathan Barry has written an excellent post on hyper-focusing on one niche (http://nathanbarry.com/30k/ and possibly here on IH).

One more comment - I'd probably remove the row of vague graphics below the trial account setup - they really don't communicate anything, and they push your value propositions down the page. OK, one more - do you have (or can you get) some testimonials?

Hey,

Many developers struggle with this same issue. We can build awesome products, but often lack the time/skills/motivation necessary to properly sell and market a successful business. After all, development work is hard enough without pilling on a full-time sales and marketing role on top of it!

I've actually run into so many developers in this situation (myself included) that I decided to build a solution. Enter http://www.githustle.com . We connect developers with projects / products to people willing to help sell/market them.

You simply post your project for an interested sales/marketer to discover. Once you find a great match, you can split the profit, disperse equity, or just do it for fun! The site itself is free to use, feel free to check it out!

p.s. We also offer "hidden menu" services where we work with you to help validate your business model, discover your target customer segments, analyze user engagement, perform user outreach, assess product differentiation, optimize revenue strategies, and many other foundations for a sustainable business. More often than not these "mass marketing" techniques will succeed in getting some eyes on your site, but won't produce a sustainable business. Let alone a viable revenue strategy or product differentiation. This is where we can help. PM me if you're interested learning more!

Hey! Firstly, great looking site. It has a clean, straightforward design language that inspires confidence (which is a good thing when you're trying to woo customers). A few thoughts, and I'll try not to cover ground other people have already:

• As others have said, you can augment your non-builder skills by outsourcing. However, as a builder, you also have some tricks up your sleeve that someone who isn't a builder wouldn't have readily available: you know how to set up A/B tests faster than someone non-technical; you know how to track conversion funnel metrics; you have the chops to install a user intercept tool (like Ethnio), etc. etc. Being technical has its benefits, so use them!

• I think you have a potential goldmine with the SEO Academy. High quality, easy to understand content for something relatively complex like SEO is hugely valuable, and could act as the magnet for pulling in interested users - who you can then convert by offering them your product.

• On a similar note, I feel like the Blog and Academy might be confusing and/or cannibalizing one another. My hunch would be to optimize your blog content so that it supplements the Academy stuff, and even consider combining them. This will make it easier to direct conversions as well.

• Cross-post everything you write on Medium. It's a great source of eyeballs, and with attribution tracking it won't mess up your SEO game.

• One last thought on the homepage messaging: "Check your site" is pretty vague, and doesn't necessarily speak to specific user problems. I would run multiple messaging A/B tests (if you're not already), and maybe get help from a copywriter as others have suggested. Then, if you spend a tiny bit on AdWords, Facebook, etc. , you can optimize the messaging for your target audience pretty quickly.

Best of luck!

I really like how clear the setup is :) Use of colors and whitespace works very well. But, I wan't clear on what the website did from information above the fold, you might want to test some more headlines there. Also, as soon as I landed on your pricing page, I thought it was for agencies as smallest plan also has 5 websites in it. If most of your current paying customers are agencies, then it makes sense. Also, if you have whitelable + email template option for email notifications for agencies, I would surely highlight that. Hope this is helpful.

Man 1650 customers is really a lot if you know how to convert them tointo paying.I suggest you remove the free trial altogether because real customers are going to pay anyway.

How did you gain the users?Ads?Or word of mouth?

Congratulations!

Currently going through the same growth issue. We're at 59 monthly paying users, but I'm really trying to figure out what's going to get us to 100+ paying users and eventually have a system in place to sustain that kind of growth.

I also just went through Traction which was a really great read - are you currently testing multiple traction channels?