Customer Acquisition Cost: The Key To Unlocking Growth 🔑
Customer Acquisition Cost: The Key To Unlocking Growth 🔑
Discuss this article or ask me any questions you may have.
Customer Acquisition Cost: The Key To Unlocking Growth 🔑
Discuss this article or ask me any questions you may have.
I'm writing a post right now on "making something people want," which is an obvious way to lower customer acquisition cost that often goes overlooked. You hit on it very strongly with your plan for converting more trial users to paid subscribers by improving the product itself.
I wonder how much businesses want to access to your community of freelance developers vs using other options to hire. What are they doing instead of using CodeForCash, and what makes those options attractive?
Hiring fulltime employee/Hiring a contract-to-fulltime employee: Building a team. Acquiring co's pay multiples based on # talented SWEs.
Hiring an agency: Project management. Agency handles the hiring for you.
Hiring a temporary worker: Reduces overhead costs.
The problem with using freelancers...
Not building a permanent team.
Hiring can be as slow as hiring an FTE or temp staff. (This is more or less solved with Code For Cash... we have solved this problem).
No project management.
Freelancers on sites like Upwork and Freelancer are perceived as unable to speak the native language and lacking strong critical thinking skills.
No guarantee that you will get what you initially wanted.
My running hypothesis for this is that there is a better way to manage software projects that involves using a specification. And having programmers, familiar with the limitations and possibilities of tech, write the specifications. And this will lead to more accurate software development. This stems from ideas in risk management in software engineering.
So, in a perfect world, companies using Code For Cash would get:
As a manager, I would pay for a service that provides that.
But not everybody is me. I'm in the process of scheduling 20 interviews with hiring managers, so I will have some additional information soon.
Interesting. I wonder how much mileage you could get out of marketing yourself as the opposition to some of these concerns, Like "Upwork, but for quality developers only." Then again, that's been tried a zillion times. Maybe there's something fundamentally unsound about it. Maybe it only works for a very specific niche of projects or industries?
Another option — and this is more of a full pivot — would be to just give in and focus on FTE positions. It's such a huge market and there are so many niches and unique approaches. There's plenty of money to be made. I could imagine a community of aspiring FTEs being very successful, depending on what it's based around. Maybe devs helping each other with interview prep? Or maybe just front-end devs or React devs?
Hmm. Sometimes better to start with something boring and profitable, then use that to support more risky/unique/fun endeavors.
Just some random brainstorming here.
Toptal aims for the top 3% of the market. I'm not interested in competing with them. It doesn't take top-of-the-market talent to build a high quality, profitable business. If you don't have elite-caliber people (and there's a limited amount in existence!), you have to rely on high quality business processes. And there, I think, is our opportunity.
I will pivot once we stop growing. Until then, I am gunning for a piece of the $500M freelance programming market.
Totally. I've actually used the profits from Code For Cash/my consulting biz to bootstrap risky/unique/fun/experimental endeavors, like a SaaSaaS (you pay us to write software, but instead of paying a flat fee, you pay per-execution). There's such a thrill in launching new things and you can learn more about your original market in the process. It's too risky not to allocate some budget to risky things... maybe 20% is too much, but at least 5%!
Thanks to Courtland for the edits!
Any time 👍