After getting a paying customer, how do you scale that up?
My brother and I are starting a business (qualifIQ) that's still very early days. We've been lucky enough to get our first paying customer using a decidedly non-tech version of what we think the product will become.
I'm curious to hear your experience and strategies for turning one customer into many more, and finding the mythical product-market fit.
Here are some ideas by channel category:
Offline Ads - Put a flyer in co-working spaces with data-oritented companies
Social and Display Ads - Run a cheap social ad on, for example, Twitter targeting data-oriented companies.
viral marketing - Add a viral loop in your product. For example, when your next customer signs up, ask them to refer 5 people and get 14 days free.
public relations - Reach out to 5 media outlets that your early adopters visit and see if they'll write about your product.
search engine marketing - Do a targeted cheap ad on Bing to see how many hits you get. If the conversion is high, try it out on Google.
search engine optimization - Put up landing pages of each use case for your product. The key is to use language that your early adopters use to search for a product like yours.
content marketing - write two blog posts a week, publish on social media, and measure conversation to signups.
target blogs - find blogs that get a lot of traffic with your early adopters and ask if they can write a product review in exchange for something.
business development - Do a partnership with a company that is a complement to your product and can refer early adopters to your product.
offline events - Go to conferences where companies interested in your product and want to sign up.
speaking engagements - Find meetups you can talk at to speak to your early adopters about the problem your solving and share tips on how to solve them.
Wow, those are some great ideas. I really appreciate that. We're in the mode now where we're hitting every marketing channel we could think of, and you gave some great ideas.
I love the "test your ad on Bing before Google" strategy. There are also loads of co-working spaces in our area (NYC) so I'll definitely be paying some of those a visit to gauge interest.
Trying too many marketing strategies at once is a common mistake. You will spread yourself too thin and not be able to any channel really well and you will have a hard time tracking what actually produced good results.
It is best to narrow down your choices to a few and test maybe just 1-2 at a time. Then double down on the ones that work.
If 1h of work on strategy A leads to 10 customers, and 1h of strategy B leads to 5, you are losing out on customers for every hour you spend on B instead of A.
There is a great marketing framework called the bullseye framework that works like this. You can read about it in the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.
I actually just picked up that book a few days ago and started working through it! We're going to follow their Bullseye method for a little more structure to our marketing.
Thanks for the great recommendation!
I agree with, Christina. The ideas I posted are intended to get the traction juices going. You should pick ones that are promising to test and optimize the one channel that gives you the best bang for your buck.
@royceh to hear it! Just thought I mention that when you said "we are hitting every every marketing channel we could think of" Because I know @royceh was just giving you ideas, not saying do all of these at once. ;)
I don’t remember where I read it but I heard one approach was to identify 10 places where many people that match your target audience congregate. For example, certain sub-Reddit’s, github, forums, or for IRL stuff go to restaurants, libraries, malls etc. then try to get ten people to pay for your prototype service from each location.
You may or may not get ten from each but you will at least have a much better idea about what works and what doesn’t. From there you will have a much better direction as to how to scale it to a much larger audience.
Now that I think of it it was from a podcast called “the startup chat”. They sometimes have nuggets of good information. Watch out for their language though it can get a little rough.
That's great advice. I'll check out that podcast. Thanks!