F*** niche markets. Let's focus on acquisition sources.
I think you're all familiar with Brian Balfour article with how Product-Market fit is NOT enough: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enough . I've been reading posts on people who said they've gone through all IndieHackers interviews, but nobody focused on what the people interviewed mentioned about traffic/acquisition sources, which worked, and which didn't.
I've gone through 4 pages of interviews so far and noted 88 different acquisition tactics in the interviews, from the ones that appear often like email outreach, content marketing, to less common ones like "posting a picture of a watch on Instagram every day, getting 131 leads".
My goal is to go through all the interviews, and note what worked/didn't work for getting traffic/sign-ups/buyers. For example, regarding AdWords, from 80+ interviews, 8 people mentioned it didn't work for them, 1 did. And they had a pretty comprehensive guide on how they persisted and what things people should be careful of.
It may take me a while to go through everything, but once I do, I want to do something with this info, maybe pubish an e-book with the findings. Something like a mini "Traction" book, just with WAY more examples, quotes? Would anyone be interested in this? Also, any other ideas/suggestions would be welcome.
Sounds like a great idea! Sharing your findings on the forum or via an article would be super cool, as would turning it into an e-book with more details and information. Or maybe some sort of interactive website/utility similar to GoodUI.
The problem is that what worked for someone else may not work for you, and what worked for you may not work for someone else.
Determining what worked for someone else helps you in what way? The only thing I can think of is if that person has a VERY similar business, in which case you can replicate.
What’s more helpful is learning HOW those people found what worked for them? Did they set aside budget and go on a spending spree? Did they only focus on free acquisition methods? Did they use a growth framework? How long did they try something before giving up?
It’s more about why something worked rather than what. It all goes back to the customer.
Customer-centric marketing > channel-centric marketing
Determining what worked for someone else helps you in what way? >> My goal is to see what worked (and more importantly, didn't work, since people tell that as well in their interviews) for over 150 in-depth interviews. Then compare that data, and draw conclusions. I'm already seeing patterns, for example, for cold emailing, a factor that heavily contributes to its success is saturation. Companies in industries where everyone and their mother knows about cold emailing were having less results than someone targeting antique shops. Also, the perceived credibility (one company just added a personal video to their lander and suddenly people started to answer) / the messaging angle (asking directly vs. offering something, like an interview to get featured, and then asking) has a huge impact as well.
I totally agree that determined what worked for SOMEONE ELSE (assuming that SOMEONE ELSE = 1 person) is kind of useless. But determining what worked (and didn't work) for 150+ PEOPLE and COMPARING and categorizing that data to draw conclusion, that could give some useful insights.
I didn’t say that either.
My only thought is that in addition to your analysis of WHAT worked, note WHY it worked for their business and how they went about it. Context is crucial to understanding what worked. That would be useful info IMO.
Read Asia’s post on growth hacking posts —> http://www.demandmaven.io/how-read-growth-hacking-enlightened-reader/
“without the proper understanding of marketing, growth, what it takes to hit traction, and even the market you’re in, reading those growth posts without context might actually be hurting your business.”
Of course. I am taking every information possible, the entire quote. And if there's anything regarding why they thought it worked. Context is crucial. I don't mean to make a big list post with bullet points like:
What worked:
Adwords
SEO
What would be beyond useless.
Great shout on Brain Balfour, he shares some of the best content about marketing and growth I've ever come across, but hardly gets a mention.
I agree you are on the right track, but I would encourage fellow Indie Hackers to be a cautious with this approach.
I agree it makes sense to look for the cheapest / most effective sources of traffic early on. I'm a firm believer that the game we are playing is:
So find customers and then sell them what they want.
Having said that, I think there are 2 major challenges with this approach:
This means you run the risk of being left high and dry. The main causes being saturation or (particularly for social channels) algorithm changes. (I think Andrew Chen talks about this - "Law of shitty click-throughs")
Getting this mix right often takes investment in cash & time. 90% of people who say "PPC doesn't work" often don't understand unit economics, have a free product and are scared of spending more than a couple 100 dollars.
Bonus - I've worked with several teams across many industries. What people say they are doing publicly about using channels is often upto 30% of what actually drives the impact.
Regarding your first point, I agree. So far I see a direct correlation by how well a channel is known and the % of people reporting that channel as "ineffective". So I think that people hide this stuff, often on purpose, which leads to your second point.
The problem is, that, the only viable resource I've seen on channel focusing is 1 book lol..Traction. And it isn't filled with many examples. Yet, numerous people mention it in interviews, like a book that really helped their startup take-off. It's really a pity...
Well maybe you can do 'Traction in Action'
Hey @dare0505 three things about these sources:
Every industry is different and has different competition (i.e. try getting any SEO for traffic around horse racing, its incredibly competitive)
Lots of bootstrappers are jack of all trades - just because they failed in a niche with SEO doesn't mean that an expert couldn't thrive there
These things are dynamic - I did Brian's course and one of the best things I learned was that these channels work in cycles. i.e. Slack integrations used to be a great acquisition/growth channel but now they are starting to cut things off more and more like Facebook has done.
I'd read the ebook regardless!
IMO... You’d have to establish trust. It’s easy for people to post figures. However If I’m making business decisions I’d have to first believe that you’re a capable researcher and that you’re business-oriented before I could feel like I could trust your research findings. Maybe you run your own profitable business and come from a research background?
If you were able to establish trust as a business-oriented researcher, then if you were to publish a book I would be willing to pay for the book.. if I saw it as containing answers to questions that I may have (such as “what marketing strategies work best for b2b?”). Also give me data visualizations. Heck maybe publish your data vizualizations and sell the book that goes more in depth.
Maybe begin with collecting a list of “FAQ’s” about SAAS business from your audience (such as “what are some practical strategies for marketing a saas business in 2018?”). And then get answers to those questions specifically from analyzing the interviews of profitable businesses who have implemented them, the pitfalls, etc.
I'm not sure if you understood my post. I am not trying to run complex statistical models or anything. I'm trying to write a Traction-type of book which will outline/categorize the acquisition tactics outlined in the 100+ IndieHackers interviews, categorize the common ones.
sorry if there was any confusion, I wasn’t really asking for complex statistical models...
What you are doing is synthesis and analysis. You’re taking data from a bunch of different sources and compiling a report. Outlining and categorizing. I get that.
People generally don’t take a report seriously until they feel like it’s coming from a source they can trust. When Harvard Business Review drops a blog post, people take it seriously even if all that it does is outline and categorize (“The top 7 types of new businesses of 2018!”), without doing complex statistics / maths. It’s automatic.
You’re going to have to give people that reason to trust/accept your report as well. Maybe it’s in how it’s designed (infographics seem to do well), maybe you go into detail as to how you assembled the data, maybe it’s a book and it’s published by a well-known publisher, maybe it’s self-published but you’ve launched a successful startup yourself, etc. Something has to make people get past the whole “why should I trust this report?” before investing their time and money in it. I’m dropping my two cents just as a friendly reminder to give that trust-winning part some real-estate.
Not trying to offend. Just speaking from my truth.
No worries man. I got what you're saying. The report is going to 80% direct quotes from IndieHackers interviews. For example, this is from the PayFunnels interview:
" I reached out to Sam Ovens, who also had a course to train up consultants on how to land clients. We worked out a deal where he would recommend all his customers use Payfunnels and in return I gave his customers a steep discount (60% off). Because I lowered the price for his customers, I didn't give him any referral fee, but if I hadn't lowered the price, a 30-40% ongoing commission is what I would have been willing to pay. This is a standard commission rate. Sam sends us lots of customers every month."
I think it's pretty straightforward. You can go to the interview and immediately locate this quote to validate it comes from there.
Now, regarding my part (and the fun part):
Payfunnels is a SaaS providing invoicing for freelancers. Their acquisition model was, partner up with a course provider, and provide the course provider something relevant and of value.
I may find that there were total 10 interviews that mentioned this worked as an acquisition tactic, and 3 didn't. 10 were into B2B and all 3 were into B2C, for example. And I'll just say that I observed this. Short observations like those. Nothing fancy.
Let me know your thoughts.
This is compelling. I’d want to read it. Can I sign up to be notified when it’s ready?
I also read through most of the interviews on IH, I learn plenty from each. But I think it would be great to have a book style summary as a reference point.
Note** - I would pay for this in e-book format. $20, $25. I'm certain thousands of others might too.
Criteria:
It must be well designed, written & edited.
No confirmation biases. Just the raw facts, even an update X-months post interview.
I think this is a great idea for a product. I'm sure it'll be plenty of work though and surely you'd want @csallen & @channingallen permission to do this with their content.
But yeah, I'd pay for this. And I have a feeling many other of our peeps (indie hackers) on this forum would as well if it was done right.
Who knows, maybe a product you can sell on the IH platform giving a cut to IH.
I just had my morning coffee. (+1 for an IH marketplace of highly curated and inspected products before being allowed to sell.) ☺️
Trying to do exactly what you're saying. Just to clarify, what do you mean by "confirmation bias"? I'll be trying to do some observations, for example if for an acquisition tactic like "partnership via reciprocity", where say you do a webinar with the guy, and he gets your offer to his email list, 5 people did that and it worked, and 3 didn't but it didn't work, and the 5 that made it work were B2B and the 3 that didn't make it work were B2C, I might mention it's an interesting pattern and that it may have something to do with it. I'll be also analyzing and comparing all the interview quotes that outlines this tactic to discover common things among those who said it work and didn't work. This should be 20% of the book though, 80% is expected to be direct quotes.
Let me know your thoughts.
Confirmation bias as in you’re going into your research expecting something to be true. Then you “ironically” find all the facts support your initial hypothesis.
Hmm, go look at the design of a gyrosco.pe annual review, I think that’s got a good concept to model for info.
Please, go ahead.
You should go through the Mixergy interviews: https://mixergy.com/interviews/
They have text transcripts. Maybe you can do some search wizardry to extract acquisition sources.
Hey @Darko, awesome idea! I realize that it isn't your primary focus, however you touch on a point that is so overlooked in the tech world (and elsewhere too, to be frank) that it actually blows my mind. There is so much success bias and hype out there these days... You've probably noticed that founders mostly brag about what has worked for them, what were their success drivers, what triggered traction etc. But there's so few info about what DOESN'T WORK!
If a person wants to learn from fellow entrepreneurs he/she needs to analyze their success drivers an equal amount of time as their failures. The problem is there's not much failures described out there (just look at the startup funeral movement - it's so small you won't find stories about 99% companies that failed). And that's understandable, nobody likes to brag about failure.
I've been working in the field of competitive benchmarking for some time and you can't imagine how little information is published about what doesn't work. If I need best case benchmarks I have no problem of finding them, on the contrary wish me good luck if I need to recommend how not to do a planned business project or which execution method has a significantly worse performance.
So, if I may humbly suggest a thing to consider in your work: put in an equal effort into discussing positive and negative findings - literally, try to balance it 50-50. I'm sure this will make it an even more interesting lecture.
You gave me a good idea, actually. I may follow with some people who posted acquisition sources, asking to tell me what didn't work, so I can include that as well and get a good balance.
Roughly 1 in 3/4 interviews also says what DID NOT work regarding acquisition, which helped a lot. Thus, no need for a site like "Failory" for acquisition sources, because people include that in their interviews anyway.
Actually... now that I'm looking at the content on the site you linked to it would be wicked if you analysed it all using that model. I've seen so many times in interviews some people say 'paid ads is the only thing that worked for us' and others say 'i tried paid ads and just wasted thousands of dollars'. It finally starts to make a little bit of sense when looked at through this framework. I'd love to see a big anaylsis of this.
INFOGRAPHIC!!! That would be epic. A deeper dive would be fantastic too.