My understanding of content marketing is that you write great organic content and this organically drives eyeballs to your product or service.
This comes over as a needy and desperate advertisement to me. How many times did you pitch during this... like 6?
4
Also it's the fourth "article" from the same author like this in the past 2 weeks... but IH is pretty spam friendly. I guess I should just accept it and start playing the game on offer :/
4
@pedrocortes With any sort of marketing/sales, you need to be careful not to overplay your hand and exhaust your welcome on your best channels.
This is something I ran into with Indie Hackers myself early on, as I (successfully) attempted to get a story to the top of Hacker News on a weekly basis, which was too much for the mods there, who have since put me on a once-a-month-at-maximum limit.
One of the inherent limitations of a forum is that only so many threads can make it to the top. If it's the same ones too often, people will get annoyed.
Sorry, I didn't notice I was doing that since I was getting mostly positive comments (+ some emails) until now.
I'm just trying to deliver something valuable and make it as consistent as possible, which is a lot of work. If I don't use a proper process (atm I do it weekly) I couldn't get it done.
As the co-founder of IH, what do you think I should do?
Maybe play around with the days and frequency when publishing?
Come up with other sub-topics around the landing pages?
Do more posts and fewer articles?
Thanks again for the comment and the advice, cheers! :)
2
I'd say you should take the comments in this thread to heart. Once a week is too often, and people are getting burned out. This gets multiplied even further by the fact that these aren't just selfless tips, they're marketing, which everyone here is experienced enough to be highly attuned to. It's okay to do very rarely, but once a week is too often. Even once a month may be pushing it.
Nobody wants IH to be a dedicated marketing channel. The best posts are open discussions among the community, followed by genuine requests for help, and sharing helpful tips and stories. Marketing posts come in dead last, unfortunately, and are only somewhat offset by the fact that you're sharing helpful tips at the same time.
IMO you should find other channels for growth and reduce the frequency of your marketing on IH. If you think of this primarily as a growth channel, your incentives will clash with the actual desires of people in the community, and you will become unable to understand their perspective, because you will have ceased to be a member of the community and instead adopted the role of treating the community as your audience. And I don't want that, because you are otherwise a great member of the community. :-D
1
Hey Courtland,
Thanks and that makes total sense!
I never intended IH to be a marketing channel, I basically only/mostly use Medium as a marketing channel to syndicate my content there.
All I try to do with my articles is to explain how people could do a certain thing around Landing pages (since is such a hot topic) regardless if they need/want to hire me since all the info is there for free.
Since I got great feedback on them and built a ton of mutually beneficial relationships on IH because of them,I naturally (and probably naively), shared more :P
Basically, lesson learned! I will keep writing content weekly but share it on IH less frequently and with the CTA/link removed.
Hope everyone is happy with that and still gets value from future content!
Cheers and keep up the awesome work :)
1
👍👍
1
The best marketing isn't marketing. It's just insane generous free value. A level of help that other's might charge for.
Look at patio11's Stripe guides or Intercom's books.
Someone calling something spam or marketing is a tell-tale sign that you missed the mark.
That's totally OK which is so great about Indie Hackers. Most communities would jump down your throat, shadowban, or ban outright. Instead here, people come to your aid to give you advice and help you get better. So awesome and why I like this community.
Receive the feedback and rework your content to be 100% about helping the community. If you do that well people will reach out. If people don't reach out either pivot the audience or pivot your message to be more useful. Quality is much more important than quantity.
1
Hey Harry,
I totally get your point, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Basically, I try to write my articles in a way that everyone can use the info 100% for free and they would only need to contact me if they don't want to bother doing it themselves (at least that was the intention). I even lost a call with a lead last week because he implemented my free email course and was able to do it himself 😅
I guess this last one sounded (unintentionally) too promotional but lesson learned! I will just take it back a bit and keep going!
Glad I got the feedback otherwise I wouldn't know this was how people were feeling. You fail and you learn, right? :)
Cheers and thanks for the comment!
1
Awesome Pedro, love your positivity and your willingness to receive constructive feedback. Hope you and your business are doing well.
1
Allways haha! Hope you are well too, like your new strategy on the landing page, would love to know how it's performing in case you need a couple more suggestions/ideas :)
Just send an email with how it's performing and I will leave some feedback!
Keep in touch Harry :)
PS: Calendly is broken!!!
1
Calendly is fixed. Thanks Pedro!
It’s performing well. I’m at five figures of MRR and have a healthy pipeline. Shifting my focus to outbound prospecting via LinkedIn.
1
That's great Harry, congrats!
Let me know when you shift the focus would love to follow the journey and send some feedback via email if needed ;)
Keep in touch!
1
I'm possibly a bit more on the naive side when it comes to these things and am just an active forum user, but most of the discussions I start don't even link to my site. I'm either actively trying to help people (e.g. submitting content from Dan Norris that I found helpful) or asking questions (e.g. How do you handle incoming emails to your web app?).
If nearly everything you post looks like an attempt to drive people to your site, some of us will start to notice. But if you genuinely help in some way, people notice that, too.
It's a spectrum. Some people are complete spammers, some are quasi-spammy, some put popups everywhere begging for your email like Neil Patel, some are like noisy self-promoters with some useful content like Tim Ferriss, some are very tastefully marketing-focused like Laura Roeder and others like Jeffrey Way are almost entirely devoted to creating value, under charge and struggle to even bring themselves to do a Black Friday promotion.
Everyone I mentioned has been very successful and different people get annoyed at different points in the spectrum. I suspect my tendency is not quite the same as the rest of the forum though, so I'm trying to adapt a bit as well.
2
Hey man, thanks for explaining your thoughts a bit further and like you I might have different tendencies :P
Like I said in the comments above... that wasn't my intention, I want everyone to benefit from the info for free, if they don't need me and/or want to do it themselves I gave them the info to do it for free.
Yes, I agree there is a huge spectrum! Since I constantly try to breakdown a lot of Landing pages and funnels to learn more (use for client work, to write articles and so on...) and might be a bit more "numb" to these things than usual.
I only link my website on my articles tho and I think doing it as a post in the forum is just too spammy. I only did that when I launched my MVP to get some feedback on the service I had linked above. All my other posts were just questions and providing feedback on Landing pages, you can even go on my activity to see that ;)
I guess this one sounded a bit too promotional so I will bring it back a bit next time, just a learning experience!
Glad I could see more of your perspective and be able to apply it to future articles!
Again, thanks for the feedback. Cheers!
1
Yeah, it's definitely an art! I'm looking forward to see how your articles progress.
1
Thanks man, I'll keep you posted 👊
1
Yeah that's true, I tried to link it more because I analyzed my funnel again yesterday and not enough people were checking the website (only around 7% even if with a free email course).
That's just not effective enough even if were to write 2 a week, so I am trying/learning to link it better. Maybe it didn't come off smooth enough but I know there's is still value in the article and that I will become better over time ;)
Cheers and thanks for the comment!
2
There was a huge need for payment processing Pre-stripe! I don't really think it was about the design at that point, though of course it made sense to invest in it later.
2
Yes, 100%! Thanks for the comment ;)
My point was about how some IH try to do a similar page to stripe's MVP but they don't have the network to get qualified signups to that a simple page wouldn't work now.
This article hopefully explains how they can use their own landing page with a proper process to get those leads, to avoid the "if I build it, they will come" mindset.
Hope that made sense, cheers!
2
I don't think Stripe used a 1-liner + input field as their landing page. According to wikipedia, they launched in September 2011, and by then their landing page looked a lot different (see Wayback Machine).
So, I think your article starts off on the wrong foot :-). Other than that, great stuff!
1
Thanks man!
Yeah I had a couple of issues with that...
I saw an interview saying the idea came in 2010 and launched in 2011 but sometimes it's hard to tell, if you google it, it says 2010.
Also for some reason, the Wayback machine always switched back to August 2011 whenever I tried to go further so I never got to see past that :P
I am not too worried about it since the article is a talking about the MVP page and not really the "official" launch.
Thanks for the comment, cheers!
2
Wikipedia says Sept. 2011 :-) Here's a screenshot of what their page looked like then: https://snag.gy/I6LANy.jpg
I know your article still has value but I'm just letting you know because:
You're essentially saying Stripe did it wrong while their true landing page may actually do everything right.
It seems false, and while I know this sounds a bit harsh, you're essentially spreading lies.
I have seen multiple posts where you try to use IH as a way to gain traction/buyers on your site. Not sure what the IH policy is about that but I do think you can do better than this. It starts with a valuable article that contains truths and is well-researched.
1
Hey man, thanks for doing the research and I'm glad you still found value here my only point is that's not the page I am wanted to talk about in the article (it's at a later stage).
The page you shared is when they launched. I am discussing the page they had before the launch that was purely meant to capture email addresses.
What made you think I was saying Stripe did it wrong? Any particular section that might be causing that misunderstanding? That's not the case so I would like to fix it :P
My point was that Stripe did it exactly how they should have done it but it's not very replicable for this community since most Indie Hackers don't get into the YC program or don't have a way to use their network to get their first customers.
The goal was to explain how they can find their target customers, use a landing page to explain the concept and capture the leads and based on that info try to nail down the Product-Market-Fit over time. I see too many people focusing on creating a simple form without a proper strategy to promote it and expecting them to signup barely understanding what it does, in an increasingly skeptical world that's harder to do.
Hope that made sense, cheers :)
1
I think it proves that your landing page is only as good as the strategy behind it. Stripe had a simple page but their acquisition strategy was on point. Compared with the hundreds that spend time on money on every single pixel of their page only for it not to even matter.
To answer your title (which is a bit clickbaity ;)), Stripe would have totally worked in 2018 if the market need and their strategy were in the same spot.
0
Yep, that was the point of the article ;)
Stripe didn't need it at the time but if they did a Landing page with the right strategy (as explained further in the article) can still get leads and validate the product.
My understanding of content marketing is that you write great organic content and this organically drives eyeballs to your product or service.
This comes over as a needy and desperate advertisement to me. How many times did you pitch during this... like 6?
Also it's the fourth "article" from the same author like this in the past 2 weeks... but IH is pretty spam friendly. I guess I should just accept it and start playing the game on offer :/
@pedrocortes With any sort of marketing/sales, you need to be careful not to overplay your hand and exhaust your welcome on your best channels.
This is something I ran into with Indie Hackers myself early on, as I (successfully) attempted to get a story to the top of Hacker News on a weekly basis, which was too much for the mods there, who have since put me on a once-a-month-at-maximum limit.
One of the inherent limitations of a forum is that only so many threads can make it to the top. If it's the same ones too often, people will get annoyed.
Hey @csallen,
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience!
Sorry, I didn't notice I was doing that since I was getting mostly positive comments (+ some emails) until now.
I'm just trying to deliver something valuable and make it as consistent as possible, which is a lot of work. If I don't use a proper process (atm I do it weekly) I couldn't get it done.
As the co-founder of IH, what do you think I should do?
Maybe play around with the days and frequency when publishing?
Come up with other sub-topics around the landing pages?
Do more posts and fewer articles?
Thanks again for the comment and the advice, cheers! :)
I'd say you should take the comments in this thread to heart. Once a week is too often, and people are getting burned out. This gets multiplied even further by the fact that these aren't just selfless tips, they're marketing, which everyone here is experienced enough to be highly attuned to. It's okay to do very rarely, but once a week is too often. Even once a month may be pushing it.
Nobody wants IH to be a dedicated marketing channel. The best posts are open discussions among the community, followed by genuine requests for help, and sharing helpful tips and stories. Marketing posts come in dead last, unfortunately, and are only somewhat offset by the fact that you're sharing helpful tips at the same time.
IMO you should find other channels for growth and reduce the frequency of your marketing on IH. If you think of this primarily as a growth channel, your incentives will clash with the actual desires of people in the community, and you will become unable to understand their perspective, because you will have ceased to be a member of the community and instead adopted the role of treating the community as your audience. And I don't want that, because you are otherwise a great member of the community. :-D
Hey Courtland,
Thanks and that makes total sense!
I never intended IH to be a marketing channel, I basically only/mostly use Medium as a marketing channel to syndicate my content there.
All I try to do with my articles is to explain how people could do a certain thing around Landing pages (since is such a hot topic) regardless if they need/want to hire me since all the info is there for free.
Since I got great feedback on them and built a ton of mutually beneficial relationships on IH because of them,I naturally (and probably naively), shared more :P
Basically, lesson learned! I will keep writing content weekly but share it on IH less frequently and with the CTA/link removed.
Hope everyone is happy with that and still gets value from future content!
Cheers and keep up the awesome work :)
👍👍
The best marketing isn't marketing. It's just insane generous free value. A level of help that other's might charge for.
Look at patio11's Stripe guides or Intercom's books.
Someone calling something spam or marketing is a tell-tale sign that you missed the mark.
That's totally OK which is so great about Indie Hackers. Most communities would jump down your throat, shadowban, or ban outright. Instead here, people come to your aid to give you advice and help you get better. So awesome and why I like this community.
Receive the feedback and rework your content to be 100% about helping the community. If you do that well people will reach out. If people don't reach out either pivot the audience or pivot your message to be more useful. Quality is much more important than quantity.
Hey Harry,
I totally get your point, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Basically, I try to write my articles in a way that everyone can use the info 100% for free and they would only need to contact me if they don't want to bother doing it themselves (at least that was the intention). I even lost a call with a lead last week because he implemented my free email course and was able to do it himself 😅
I guess this last one sounded (unintentionally) too promotional but lesson learned! I will just take it back a bit and keep going!
Glad I got the feedback otherwise I wouldn't know this was how people were feeling. You fail and you learn, right? :)
Cheers and thanks for the comment!
Awesome Pedro, love your positivity and your willingness to receive constructive feedback. Hope you and your business are doing well.
Allways haha! Hope you are well too, like your new strategy on the landing page, would love to know how it's performing in case you need a couple more suggestions/ideas :)
Just send an email with how it's performing and I will leave some feedback!
Keep in touch Harry :)
PS: Calendly is broken!!!
Calendly is fixed. Thanks Pedro!
It’s performing well. I’m at five figures of MRR and have a healthy pipeline. Shifting my focus to outbound prospecting via LinkedIn.
That's great Harry, congrats!
Let me know when you shift the focus would love to follow the journey and send some feedback via email if needed ;)
Keep in touch!
I'm possibly a bit more on the naive side when it comes to these things and am just an active forum user, but most of the discussions I start don't even link to my site. I'm either actively trying to help people (e.g. submitting content from Dan Norris that I found helpful) or asking questions (e.g. How do you handle incoming emails to your web app?).
If nearly everything you post looks like an attempt to drive people to your site, some of us will start to notice. But if you genuinely help in some way, people notice that, too.
It's a spectrum. Some people are complete spammers, some are quasi-spammy, some put popups everywhere begging for your email like Neil Patel, some are like noisy self-promoters with some useful content like Tim Ferriss, some are very tastefully marketing-focused like Laura Roeder and others like Jeffrey Way are almost entirely devoted to creating value, under charge and struggle to even bring themselves to do a Black Friday promotion.
Everyone I mentioned has been very successful and different people get annoyed at different points in the spectrum. I suspect my tendency is not quite the same as the rest of the forum though, so I'm trying to adapt a bit as well.
Hey man, thanks for explaining your thoughts a bit further and like you I might have different tendencies :P
Like I said in the comments above... that wasn't my intention, I want everyone to benefit from the info for free, if they don't need me and/or want to do it themselves I gave them the info to do it for free.
Yes, I agree there is a huge spectrum! Since I constantly try to breakdown a lot of Landing pages and funnels to learn more (use for client work, to write articles and so on...) and might be a bit more "numb" to these things than usual.
I only link my website on my articles tho and I think doing it as a post in the forum is just too spammy. I only did that when I launched my MVP to get some feedback on the service I had linked above. All my other posts were just questions and providing feedback on Landing pages, you can even go on my activity to see that ;)
I guess this one sounded a bit too promotional so I will bring it back a bit next time, just a learning experience!
Glad I could see more of your perspective and be able to apply it to future articles!
Again, thanks for the feedback. Cheers!
Yeah, it's definitely an art! I'm looking forward to see how your articles progress.
Thanks man, I'll keep you posted 👊
Yeah that's true, I tried to link it more because I analyzed my funnel again yesterday and not enough people were checking the website (only around 7% even if with a free email course).
That's just not effective enough even if were to write 2 a week, so I am trying/learning to link it better. Maybe it didn't come off smooth enough but I know there's is still value in the article and that I will become better over time ;)
Cheers and thanks for the comment!
There was a huge need for payment processing Pre-stripe! I don't really think it was about the design at that point, though of course it made sense to invest in it later.
Yes, 100%! Thanks for the comment ;)
My point was about how some IH try to do a similar page to stripe's MVP but they don't have the network to get qualified signups to that a simple page wouldn't work now.
This article hopefully explains how they can use their own landing page with a proper process to get those leads, to avoid the "if I build it, they will come" mindset.
Hope that made sense, cheers!
I don't think Stripe used a 1-liner + input field as their landing page. According to wikipedia, they launched in September 2011, and by then their landing page looked a lot different (see Wayback Machine).
So, I think your article starts off on the wrong foot :-). Other than that, great stuff!
Thanks man!
Yeah I had a couple of issues with that...
I saw an interview saying the idea came in 2010 and launched in 2011 but sometimes it's hard to tell, if you google it, it says 2010.
Also for some reason, the Wayback machine always switched back to August 2011 whenever I tried to go further so I never got to see past that :P
I am not too worried about it since the article is a talking about the MVP page and not really the "official" launch.
Thanks for the comment, cheers!
Wikipedia says Sept. 2011 :-) Here's a screenshot of what their page looked like then: https://snag.gy/I6LANy.jpg
I know your article still has value but I'm just letting you know because:
You're essentially saying Stripe did it wrong while their true landing page may actually do everything right.
It seems false, and while I know this sounds a bit harsh, you're essentially spreading lies.
I have seen multiple posts where you try to use IH as a way to gain traction/buyers on your site. Not sure what the IH policy is about that but I do think you can do better than this. It starts with a valuable article that contains truths and is well-researched.
Hey man, thanks for doing the research and I'm glad you still found value here my only point is that's not the page I am wanted to talk about in the article (it's at a later stage).
The page you shared is when they launched. I am discussing the page they had before the launch that was purely meant to capture email addresses.
What made you think I was saying Stripe did it wrong? Any particular section that might be causing that misunderstanding? That's not the case so I would like to fix it :P
My point was that Stripe did it exactly how they should have done it but it's not very replicable for this community since most Indie Hackers don't get into the YC program or don't have a way to use their network to get their first customers.
The goal was to explain how they can find their target customers, use a landing page to explain the concept and capture the leads and based on that info try to nail down the Product-Market-Fit over time. I see too many people focusing on creating a simple form without a proper strategy to promote it and expecting them to signup barely understanding what it does, in an increasingly skeptical world that's harder to do.
Hope that made sense, cheers :)
I think it proves that your landing page is only as good as the strategy behind it. Stripe had a simple page but their acquisition strategy was on point. Compared with the hundreds that spend time on money on every single pixel of their page only for it not to even matter.
To answer your title (which is a bit clickbaity ;)), Stripe would have totally worked in 2018 if the market need and their strategy were in the same spot.
Yep, that was the point of the article ;)
Stripe didn't need it at the time but if they did a Landing page with the right strategy (as explained further in the article) can still get leads and validate the product.
Thanks for the comment Steven, cheers!