Using Airtable and Gumroad as LeadGen
Back when I first had the idea for PriceWell, a fellow IH @Nakkeeran very kindly sent me a spreadsheet comparing SaaS companies pricing that he'd been working on. Here's what I've done with it.
The Goal
Leadgen, I want to use the spreadsheet to find people interested in SaaS pricing (who may be interested in using pricewell.io for their own SaaS). The idea was to create a side-product out of it. Free information with a link back to our website.
Step 1: Put it in Airtable
What side-product doesn't start with an Airtable. I was able to use the Airtable scripting tool for free during march to tidy up the data. I used Clearbit to collect logos, correct urls and descriptions for all the companies in the list and tidy up all the categories.
Step 2: Create a website
The next step was to turn the spreadsheet into a static website. I started coding the webpage myself using Gatsby. After about an hour I realised I was going to sink a significant amount of time into making it look and work great. So I used the no-code tool Softr to connect to the Airtable (Softr has a template for this already). Another hour later I had a fully functional website.
Step 3: Collect email addresses
Instead of a link to the PriceWell website, I decided to offer the data for download through Gumroad. I set a price of $20 for the data although I don't expect anyone to actually pay this amount. Instead I'm offering a promo code on Product Hunt to get the download for free. The $20 should act as an anchor, leading to more downloads because it is a great deal to get the data for free. Ultimately, we get the email address of someone who is interested in SaaS pricing (our target market).
Step 4: Profit
We haven't got there yet but once enough emails start coming in, I can offer educational content about SaaS pricing and nudge people towards PriceWell 🎉
What do you think of my strategy?
sounds like a decent plan / strategy... now it's time to execute.
Thanks. The PH launch was a bit of a flop because the algorithm avoids "directory" products (I confirmed this with PH support). The principal worked well though, I got a fair few downloads on gumroad and a couple of people created a PriceWell account already without me sending any emails.
keep going! this is the way.
Interesting concept. How's the cross site traffic performance so far? What would be a success looks like?
Traffic was low because the directory site wasn't featured on the homepage (PH doesn't feature directories anymore according to their support people). The traffic we did have was pretty good.
Landing Page - 60 visitors
Gumroad - 33 views (55%)
Purchases - 7 (21%)
How much was the Clearbit part? I'm thinking of trying it out.
I just used the free trial. I had trials on Clearbit, UpLead and BrandFetch. I had <400 companies to look up. The data from Clearbit was the best but BrandFetch was pretty good too.
Hey @matthew_reid thanks for the mention. Glad the spreadsheet was useful for PriceWell :)