How to gain traffic and sign-ups for an early-stage startup?
Hi Everyone,
I am working on a healthcare startup and need creative ways to reach people and get sign-ups.
I know many founders out there are also struggling to find potential customers.
Reaching the target audience without a big marketing budget is challenging. Does anyone know how to gain traffic for an early-stage startup?
Thank you !!
Any feedback you have is also much appreciated!
Ahaha, I just posted a list of websites to post your startup to gain your first users/signup.
Enjoy!
→ https://www.indiehackers.com/post/free-list-of-places-to-promote-your-product-ba6304368f
I would recommend you hire a different designer before doing any more marketing.
As it stands, the website's design does not communicate the requisite levels of trust I'd expect from a website in the medical industry. If I had encountered it in the wild (instead of via IH) I'd have thought it was a scam. That's obviously not what you want.
Looks like you have a two-sided marketplace that you are trying to create here. The first thing you want to do in a two-sided marketplace is figure out which side you need to buy in first. I believe this is healthcare providers for you.
With that in mind I'd focus 99% of my efforts trying to get the providers on board. This is going to be challenging. Healthcare sales is one of the hardest sales to make. This is why you see pharmaceutical reps driving around in Maseratis, because the job is so hard companies are willing to pay an enormous amount of money to these sales people.
You're not going to win this one by running a few facebook ads, or sending a few cold emails. You will really need to get offline and build deep relationships with medical providers. Once you have the relationship, you start showing them the value.
With COVID, many are not giving appointments to meet in person. That is why I'm focusing on email. I am trying to find online networking events to attend to build these relations. If you happen to know any, please do let me know.
There are a few thing you could do
Will do! Thank you. How do people discover startups on your site?
Some sites perform well w.r.t. SEO e.g. https://melbado.com/s/Nozomi and this cross-promotes other startups. And then to put some fuel in the fire I'm posting here, on Reddit, etc. Content marketing is only negligible, but I plan to grow it in the future as well.
Approach docs as someone looking to get advice and learn (gets them to read the email instead of marking spam and if they see a partnership they'll hit you up). Use MixMax to see who read your email (some docs are crazy busy due to covid) and followup in 2 days if they ghosted you. My first email got ghosted, but my second email got a response from everyone in the last batch of emails I sent.
I’m having trouble with this myself. It seems posting on sites like these is a good way to gauge interest and see if you have something that is worth spending some money for FB ads or something.
@Weberstephen I also try cold emailing and messaging my target audience. It's a longer and more challenging process, but if you have a small budget or just getting started, it a good way to generate interest.
Great suggestion! Where are you buying your email list?
I am not buying them anywhere right now. I am using https://hunter.io/ to get as many free ones as I can.
Nice to see more people in the medical space here on IH! We bootstrapped our traffic posting on social media and eventually grew to 22k/12k IG/twitter followers which was the main source of our traffic before SEO took hold. It took a lot of time investment however and depending on your company would be hard to do without being spammy.
Unfortunately you’re in a pretty tough market I would guess is expensive for paid advertising.. anything working for you now besides email? Wonder if targeted reddit ads (r/medicine r/pharmacy etc might be a lot cheaper than google/FB).
If you’re a doctor you should try pitching your company and story as an entrepreneur to some of the popular physician podcasts. Good for SEO and potential leads.
I am doing organic marketing for now, but I will try Reddit ads. Podcasts are a great idea! Thank you. I shared your site with a friend of mine who is in medical school, and she found it very useful. Are you targeting students, and how are you reaching out to doctors?
Appreciate the share! Our ideal target is the emergency physician doctor- know a little bit about everything but we have a lot of content that goes into specialist level depth in hepatology etc. We're really targeting bedside clinicians as an alternative to text-heavy reference resources.
I feel like so many docs are starting podcasts right now (and so many are trying to coach others on starting podcasts) it shouldn't be too hard to pitch yourself to some of the fledgling podcasts until your name is more established.
Check out the Physician innovation network, you can connect with physicians and other healthcare startups.
https://innovationmatch.ama-assn.org/
I worked at a healthcare startup. They are very hard.
That being said, who is your target? Who pays for the product?
You need to figure out how to get in front of those people.
What do they read? Where do they work? Who do they talk to?
Answer those questions, then use that to plan your activities.
Thank you! I am working on them. And you are right it is not easy to find who to talk to in the healthcare industry.
very difficult. Good luck!
I think you took on a huge project without realising.
First your putting too much stuff in on page (clean house, clean mind), each customer type should have its own page, each offer should have it own LP.
So IDK what markets your trying for, some have appointment scheduling services online..
I didn't see much prescription automation online unless like vitamins possibly.
Each of these offers would have its own things..
Like if this was a paid premium service which value's was high you could have started servicing paying customers by doing manual work in the back end until you can onboard service providers
For example calling them or faxing them...
Prescriptions again depending on many things but are possibly highly regulated and might have many requirements, some of which might not be digital friendly that you would need to satisfy before providers would even care to listen. Includes a lot of red tape documents, 3rd party certification etc that you would need to spend a lot of money upfront and on going for...
So what's your one focus?
Great suggestions! I will update my site to be more clear.