Launched platform 6 months ago, just hit $5K MRR. How should I grow from here?
I launched a platform 6 months ago and just hit $5K MRR, mostly through sheer force of cold outreach and sales prospecting. The product is a very niche Freelancers Marketplace, so we connect companies with Freelancers and then generate recurring revenue for the lifecycle of that project (similar to Upwork but extremely specialized).
Organic traffic is rather low and most of the site visitors, company sign ups, and active customers have come from me (I'm a solo founder) manually identifying the contacts and prospecting them - extremely high touch process and a bit of a numbers game.
I've started implementing some of the Marketing foundation - bi-weekly blog post, Twitter posts, LinkedIn posts, nurturing qualified leads in MailChimp - but it's an unstructured process and I'm trying to figure out the best area to focus, since I feel like I'm throwing darts at random and none of it is really yielding much of a result.
How should I properly experiment with various Marketing efforts and identify the area to double down?
Advertise your content, buddy! In fact, probably get a marketing partner/expert to guide you through this.
We've run some LinkedIn Ads with mediocre success and there just aren't a ton of other places that reach our very narrow audience.
Was easier knowning the niche and/or site...
So that niche, is there a place these people frequent?
Is there obvious free value you can provide them like content or other like promotions, discounts, research?...
What works for you today, take account of what's in you personal process or have it all recorded and a 3rd person having a lot to extract the essence
Can you raise prices to make it worthwhile for a 2nd you?
It's been a struggle to identify free value that resonates - our niche is Salesforce so there's a lot of technical content and groups about the platform out there but its a struggle to contribute to that type of conversation given my skill set - mostly what's working is a very manual outbound sales process, which I suspect can get us to $15K or so in MRR but it's going to be difficult to scale organically beyond there and I don't want to just hire Sales reps as the only incremental growth path.
If your brokering saleforce development your mostly selling trust, in you and your vendors and the system you put in place to deliver needed services in a balanced quality/price way.
Trust is easiest by human connection which is where your finding it working ... (and for such things sales people are a common path)
You can promote word to mouth if you focus on client niches, so that target people normally talk to each other and you might incentivise them further with some promotions.
You can work on transparency, testimonials, case studies, interviews, create some youtube content on how your helping extend salesforce, things that can be done, are common/interesting...
Build some free extension aimed at popularity with some usefulness to get the name out.. (can also monetise that with a premium versions and focusing more of that moves you from services to products...)
Yeah; all good points! Appreciate the thoughts here.