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7 Comments

How can I communicate my hard work

Hi! I'm building www.BuyLocalized.com, a browser extension that works like a Made in USA filter for Amazon.

We work really hard on it, and I'm having a hard time communicating that to people who come to the website. Most people I speak to about it assume that it's a 1 man show, whereas in reality there are 4 founders and we put in around 200 hours a week. That's because all our entries, 330,000 currently, have a component of manual research to them. We are calling/emailing dozens of companies a day, searching for signs they are lying to us, contacting them again when there is something we don't understand, all in an effort to be correct in how we tag them as 95%+ of the time.

The problem is you wouldn't know any of that from going to our website. Everyone assumes we datamine and screen scrape exclusively, or something like that, and I don't feel we get anywhere near the credit our hard work deserves.

How would you guys suggest I tell the world about this through content and my website? I was doing a weekly operations blog post in the past, it had almost no weekly readers though. We also did articles on specific companies we found interesting, but our users didn't like those either. We get a lot of success showing off our company through infographics, but that is more our company and not all the hard work we do (though that has given me the idea to make an infographic based on how much work we do).

Thanks for any feedback!

  1. 4

    I think you are probably heading in the right direction, but need to experiment more.

    Focus in on titles, make them super interesting to click on.

    'Week 18 – New Blog Format' is not very interesting. Why should a user care about this?

    'American sourced Herbs and Spices' isn't very enticing either. Maybe reduce it down to 'The difference between American and Chinese grown garlic' or 'American garlic is on average x% bigger'. (Those titles could be improved, just suggestions off the top of my head). And make it more educational. Image of the garlic to pull people in and maybe make it more shareable on social media.

    And then also think about how you can reuse the content you make and cross post to FB and Twitter.

    I hope that helps.

  2. 3

    I have to agree with @andrewgassen. Sadly, users don’t care how hard you work, or how much blood sweat and tears you put into your product. They only care about the value you can provide them. So I think you should focus your efforts there. Show your potential users what BuyLocalized can do for them, and what value you can provide them.

  3. 3

    Dude, no one cares. No one cares how hard or how little you work.
    They care about the value they receive.
    If one person uses efficient machines and he's cost is 0.001$ and the other does manual work that cost 10$ but the customer gets the same thing, he doesn't care. He shouldn't care. You might get some personal pity once in a while, but that's not a goal to chase.

    On the other hand if you have a reason to be a premium product, like a 5 star Michelen restaurant vs McDonald's, he should be able to tell the difference in many ways but most importantly in the product, service and total experience.

    Maybe you should refocus to a niche that would care like big B2B buyers, where the deals are large extra quality validation would be considered cheap and worthwhile.

  4. 2

    I'm going to sound very blunt, but this is coming from a place of wanting to help: As a consumer, I don't really care how hard you work...I care that I'm buying great products from local companies.

    How are you measuring success? How do you make money? To me, it feels like there's a lack of alignment between how you measure success and how your users get value. I'd love to chat more about this and apologize if this sounds aggressive...it definitely is not intended to be.

  5. 1

    I think you should continue to create content around your product and service like you are already doing, but I think you can also share insights about your work along the way. Some of the comments mention how people don't care how hard you work, which is true to an extent, but if you show people some of of your processes or how you screen certain sellers , they could learn how to apply similar processes to their own businesses. There is value in so much of that hard work you are doing, so you may as well turn it into some content and share it with others. You'd be surprised how many people will find value in 'how' you do the work you're doing. When you show people how you go about it, rather than just saying 'we work 200 hours per week', I think you'll find you can build an audience around yourself and your brand.

    This is what I have been doing with my own work and sharing as I learn with building Startup Sanctuary.

  6. 1

    I would like to thank you guys for all the feedback, and you are right.

    If I could go back and change this post, I would. I certainly agree that users care about the end product, and people generally like ours. I made this post because, for one people come to our site and underestimate the scope of what we are doing, and that leads them to have expectations about our product that we can't currently deliver on. We are the best solution to this problem that exists, but because of all the money it costs to research we don't deliver on the level that a lot of our users would like us to. We don't even charge yet either, and I'm holding off on pouring more resources into this until we start charging (next month) and see how people vote with their wallets. Ideally our users would be more in alignment with us over our process, but ya it doesn't really matter.

    I get frustrated when a lot of people I talk to assumes it's just me doing this as a side project, but that's my problem. :P

  7. 1

    It's unlikely that non-makers will care about that side of your business. If you'd like to use your hard-work as a marketing opportunity then focus 100% on sharing that experience on Indie Hackers and within other startup communities. Some percent of those people may go on to be users.

    There's probably much better uses of your time though. I'd focus on getting write-ups in small blogs or media outlets. Once you get a couple you can go to larger outlets and link them to press you've already gotten. Keep doing that and move up the chain. Your product is relevant to current discussions around China, so it seems possible to eventually get some significant press.

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