Built an MVP, got paying customers, and hit the HN/PH front pages. How do I scale up?
Built an MVP, got paying customers, and hit the HN/PH front pages. How do I scale up?
I've been building Postmake (https://postmake.io), a directory of tools and resources aimed at solo founders and small-business owners. The directory is free, but I charge for submissions to maintain the project and keep the directory up to a certain quality. I've hit the HN front page a couple of times, and my PH launch was a success.
How do I proceed? The traffic hits were nice, but I'm looking for more "permanent" acquisition channels. The directory generates revenue through paid submissions and sponsorships, and I need a constant stream of traffic to sell those.
I've got a couple of "side projects" that help with visibility, like a compilation of open startups (https://postmake.io/open) that blew up, and these are great but suffer from the same problem – they're hit-oriented. I need some way to retain visitors and bring them back, and I'm not sure where to focus my efforts. I've got a newsletter that's growing steadily, but it'll be months before it drives any meaningful traffic. Should I try content marketing? Social media? Some form of community building?
I'd appreciate any ideas!
Nice website and a great idea.
Scale is going to depend on a number of things, but first we have to understand if your product has any bottle-necks.
Right off the bat, I'm wondering how you're going to contend with including a growing list of apps?
What are you going to do to help your viewers distinguish between them and understand relative value? Are you going to make recommendations?
What will prompt a company to want to be on the directory? If you take clutch.co as a sample of a business that's scaling very well. They have very specific criteria for reviews as well as several sponsorships for their top companies. They also do a ton of content.
Think from your customers perspective. What are you doing to help them make a faster decision, with less friction and more confidence? How do you capitalize on this?
Many directories will add entries, and then either do direct outreach or rely on companies to find the directory as it ranks in SEO, and then reach out and possibly pay for a better (more descriptive) and higher ranking position.
You will need to reach out to other apps.
You will need to start blogging and or better (Creating video content) helping people understand the relative difference between apps. Perhaps your pricing structure can include (blog review, video review, being added to the list, having a premium description).
Perhaps as your list grows, you can begin creating a 'certification' or 'badge' system, by which you run a series of tests, and take feedback from users in order to sell a badge of honour or certification of "startups ready" to the SAAS businesses.
Think Nintendo, seal of quality.
Thanks for weighing in Vladimir.
The motivation for the directory was always to promote discoverability for both businesses and users. For now, I'm trying to focus on delivering value to users / customers, which will hopefully pay off when it's time to start reaching out to businesses. I figure it's a lot easier to sell businesses on the idea when there's actual benefits or data I can show them.
My main problem is the content: what exactly should I focus on delivering to the customers? I tried keeping the directory's presentation as easy as possible to promote discoverability, but outside of that, I'm still not sure where to focus my attention. For example, if you look through the directory, you'll see that most listing pages are empty – they're basically just pages with a couple of outbound links. I'd like to change that, but I'm not sure how to go about that.
I'm bouncing around the idea that instead of coming up with the content myself, I'd instead make compilations of relevant resources, reviews, and advice from more experienced people or influencers in the industry, and adding these to the directory. There's a huge amount of information out there, and I think for most people the problem is with finding and sifting through all the noise to find the relevant material.
What do you think?
You're on the right track. I also love the idea of less information, less friction. The real question you ought to be asking is, who are my users?
You need to get specific about your niche(s) > create a few avatars.
Then you need to ask, what are the top 3 priorities for my users when choosing an app/software (in their respective) niche. So if it's SAAS startups, it may mean price competitiveness/ux/integrations.
Information is much more palatable in (3) takeaways and it will also allow you an easier way of say, scoring all of the options.
The point is, to make it easier for your audience to make a decision. I would highly recommend, adding their feedback, via a very simple survey so you know whether your recommendations (and hypothesis) aligns with their experience. This will help you make much better recommendations going forward.
Another interesting idea, as you've mentioned is allowing other people (influencers) or individuals who've used the software, from respectable companies to post a blurb and a small visual rating on their experience.
What do they love? What do they dislike?
At the end of the day software is also a personal choice, but you can do your part to weight things as simply as possible, capture and display peoples preferences.
Definitely not going to happen overnight :)
Hi Amr — first off, your site is well executed and attractive.
Second, some hopefully helpful observations:
So perhaps review your monetization strategy? (Disclosure: I'm developing an app that is vaguely in the same space.)
Thanks for the feedback, Eric.
This is actually one of the reasons I ask for payment to get listed on the directory. Asking for money upfront limits a lot of the noise, and even though this means some useful resources might be left out (open source projects are an example), I try to add these myself.
I tried focusing on the presentation from the get-go to help keep the directory as accessible to users as possible. The landing page's roadmap was well received, and I think it's a great way to present the content without it becoming too "noisy". The hope is that as the directory expands, so will the categories and tags, and I'll try to keep these as relevant as possible.
But like I said in other responses here, I'm still not sure how I'll expand on the directory to give users a reason to trust it.
That's exactly my question: how can I go about showing users that I'm trustworthy? Should I be coming up with this content myself, or do I "outsource" this trust by, for example, redirecting users to other places they can find useful?
I suspect this is a hidden mine for social networks, not yet fully appreciated by established businesses yet. In the case of Yelp and Spotify, I would love the ability to adjust restaurant ratings and collections of music on the basis of what a handful of people I've vetted think, rather than the aggregate views of the user base as a whole. There are many artists and restaurants that people like that I will not, but I also know that there are a few people who are able to consistently recommend artists and restaurants that I'll like. Something similar might be possible for software tools.
For me, advertising spend is mostly a negative signal. I doubt I will ever purchase an Oracle database license, even though Oracle have always put money into getting the word out, and they have (semi-) attractive ads. By contrast, I'll use Linux without a second thought, even though Linus Torvalds has never run an advertising campaign. I learned about Linux through word of mouth and sites like Slashdot.
I do appreciate the challenge you're tackling, which is to filter out the spam and the half-baked stuff. Perhaps the monetization strategy will accomplish that.
In my case, I'm making a bookmark tracker, where you can see your and other people's bookmarks within a rich topic hierarchy. The approach to this whole challenge that I will be pursuing will be to provide the ability to filter what you're seeing according to what select users have added, making it easy to change the filters as needed. One person might have a great eye for recipes but know little about business, and another person might have some great links to business articles and books but know little about recipes and cooking. So you'll be able to change what filters are in place pretty easily. In my case, I'll rely on crowd-sourcing links together with filtering on submissions of specific users. (Not sure this is relevant to your app.)
Love the website design - bookmarked for future use - thanks 🤘
Also - I can only sign up with Twitter? Maybe add more easy signups to this flow? I could just want to drop my email for future updates
EditMy bad - I have just seen the email collector below - page draws eyes to the twitter signup
Thanks! Initially, I was thinking I'd ask visitors to sign up to upvote products and leave reviews but have since turned my focus on the newsletter and its content. There are a ton of places users can get reviews, so I think I'm going to focus more on helping by providing relevant content, with things like the open startups page (postmake.io/open).
Amr, your website is very good - great source of resources for startups and SMBs - I can see why you got a lot of hits , and that is supported by HN & PH front page.
I guess along the way, you will have collected email addresses and through your FB & Twitter, you will see who is following/talking about you. So this is where you could start: sort all of these contacts (location, are they founders, do they have an idea, have they already built a product, etc...) . This will help segment your contacts. Then follow a validation framework : in each of your segment, contact say 20 of them, and survey /interview them. why did they sign up to postmake, what's good about it, if it didn't exist where else would they go for the same information, how could postmake be even more valuable to them? are there missing features/areas that they would really like to have? would they pay for it -
That is just initial discovery for each of your segment - It will help find out for each segment if there are recurring request/patterns and un-earth your customer pain points. This in turn will help you see where you can add value into your product that customers will be prepared to pay for. Here is a link to a helpful article following this framework https://www.productplan.com/lean-market-validation-10-ways-rapidly-test-startup-idea/ .
Thanks a lot Anne! I've been viewing my email newsletter as a black box of sorts, only thinking of what direction I should take it, but never thought about reaching out and asking for their feedback.
Appreciate your help!