ExplainMyProduct

The good news is that I am up to $150/month in revenue. While these are "one-off" purchases, they are mostly coming from the same 2-3 repeat customers. So I am delivering value and keeping clients happy.

The bad news is that my cold email outreach campaigns have not been working, and I think it's because I'm asking recipients to review another site as well.

Because this Review --> Get Reviewed feedback loop was so highly embedded into the site mechanics, I've been hesitant to remove that limitation. But since I wasn't getting anywhere with my email campaigns, I decided keeping the feedback loop going is ultimately less important than the primary goal here: Which is getting feedback into the hands of those who want it.

So I've whipped up a simple page where anyone can submit their site directly and start getting feedback in a few days: http://explainmyproduct.com/submit

Since releasing this chane, I've already seen much better engagement with my email campaign. Here's hoping I can get this funnel working!

I just added a new feature which I hope will, over time, bring in some long-tail SEO.

Starting now, every time someone leaves feedback on a site, I am publishing the review on a new page for the world to see.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w69qmempt6m808/Screen Shot 2020-08-23 at 9.57.00 pm.png?dl=0

My thinking is that these pages will begin to rank for terms such as "review of [site.com]", or "[site.com] reviews." I figure that while these terms may not get a ton of search traffic, they also won't be terribly difficult to rank for, since the sites that are submitted on ExplainMyProduct are often new, and don't have much surrounding web presence to begin with.

However, I'm a bit worried about the ethics of this. After all, we never actually tell the person leaving feedback their review will be published. Even though all reviews are anonymous, there's something that just feels a bit "off" about the strategy.

What do you think? Good idea that needs some tweaking? How would you tweak this feature? Let me know!

So, ExplainMyProduct is currently getting about a sale per week. Not great, not terrible.

Here's where I'm at...

My writers are doing a great job. I've got a few happy repeat customers - one design consultant and one small agency - and a fairly steady stream of new customers. Everyone who buys a package is happy, and most importantly we are delivering great value to everyone. Awesome.

The problem is marketing.

I had this idea to reach out to companies who had recently launched on Product Hunt. But instead of reaching out to them immediately after launching (when they are BOMBARDED with requests from idiots like me), I decided to email them 3-4 months after launching. Once they've had time to digest and re-assess things a bit.

To do this outreach, I hired a data scraper to find the email addresses of every single PH maker who launched 3 months ago, and tried doing an outbound email marketing campaign, where I inserted actual feedback on their site into the outreach email. It got off to a good start, but didn't really work too well.

I haven't yet found a marketing approach that has stuck. So my next steps were as follows:

• I hired one of my writers (the great @OmeySalvi) to write a few reviews per week on existing submitted sites, in order to keep leads warm
• I redesigned the site. Made a new logo and put a focus on SEO-driven copywriting. I did keyword research with SEMrush, and optimized the Homepage & Buy Feedback page for organic traffic; paying close attention to keywords and H2's.
• Finally, I added a new package called the Deep Dive. This is a 30-minute video walkthrough of your entire site, with more insightful commentary than you know what to do with.

I'm hoping this SEO starts paying off within the next 6 months, but I think it's the only way to get traction without paying for it in dollars or time.

It's still ultimately a very simple site, with a very simple value prop. Have a look and let me know what you think!

The biggest struggle with any marketplace startup is balancing the gap between supply & demand. Solving the "chicken & egg" catch-22 is the reason most marketplaces don't succeed.

I had been thinking about exactly this problem when I purchased the site from Yash. In one of his posts, @csallen had made a really interesting comment.

"Another thought: What you have is a marketplace connecting feedback givers and receivers, and the canonical strategy for growing a marketplace is to prop up one side of it yourself. In your shoes, I'd prop up the feedback-giving side. Perhaps hire some professional feedback givers to always be present with high-quality feedback. That would make your site much faster and more reliable for people requesting feedback."

Bingo. I agree with this as well, and think you absolutely have to fill the supply to ensure you can meet any level of demand - no matter how small. For this project, that means hiring paid reviewers.

I have been getting a few clicks to my "Become a Paid Reviewer" call-to-action, but let's face it - my traffic is peanuts right now, and with even a 1% conversion rate this will take AGES to set up. So I need to fill the gap another way.

I already work with a team of content writers from my other projects. So over the past few days I've been doing some re-training with these folks so they can give robust, helpful, unbiased feedback.

Since my first sale I've been SCRAMBLING to get these writers online. Wish me luck. And let me know if you want to become a paid reviewer!

After a few weeks of work, I sent my first email campaign, and got my first paying customer.

Here's how I did it:

• First, I hired my data scraper to find the email address of every maker who launched on ProductHunt in the past week. This yielded about 200 email addresses/companies.
• Next, I hired one my content writers to write a very short review for each of these sites. The idea was to email these makers with an actual snipper of the review right in the cold email.
• Finally, I emailed each maker manually (no CRM used).

This "tease" worked quite well! Clickthroughs were 52%, which is bonkers high.

And today after 4 days, I made my first sale! Boom!

When Yash first designed the site, he had an idea around paid promotions:

"I'm considering a future option for paid promotion offering a website owner a guaranteed amount of feedback in a short amount of time, but haven't really thought about the mechanics of that and I don't want to delay launching to figure this out."

As much as I like this idea, I think it was flawed in that it required a constant stream of new reviews coming in. This is fine after a ProductHunt launch, but after that dies down, how do you source new reviews to satisfy the demand?

To solve this, I decided to contract out some of the review writing with some quality tech content writers I work with. This should both smooth out the lumpiness in the incoming reviews, and ensure if someone pays for reviews, they can get them within a reasonable timeframe.

Additionally, when Yash submitted EMP here at IndieHackers, he received some very interesting feedback from @csallen

"For example, perhaps you need to decouple giving and receiving feedback. Bartering/trading systems have a certain appeal that really resonates with people, but in theory, they're a step backwards. Human societies moved from trading to currency because money is fungible, and thus allows for more fluidity. Perhaps instead of trading feedback for feedback, people should be allowed to pay money to receive feedback and make money to give feedback. In fact, I believe that's how the biggest player in this space works (UserTesting.com)."

I agree 100% with Courtland. All users can now pay for feedback straightaway. I also introduced "Become a Paid Reviewer" to get more feedback writers on the site.

I found this site on 1kprojects. The owner, Yash, seemed like an extremely nice guy - a fellow maker with a few cool side projects. He built this site over a weekend, and "built it to sell."

After playing around with the site a bit, I realized I really liked the concept, though I felt the business model could be tweaked a bit, it had a validated concept and great legs.

Yash launched on ProductHunt in October 2019. He wanted to create a virtuous community, where in order to get feedback on your product or website, you had to give another person feedback on theirs. This was a core feature requirement that Yash & I think will ensure the long-term feedback loop & success of this product. Here's the original post on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/explain-my-product

I reached out to Yash and we had a great chat about vision & tactics. We also got along really well. After going over some details, I made Yash an offer, which he accepted. Done deal!

Purchase Details:

• Offer: Between $750 - $1,000 USD + closing costs

• Assets Included:

  • Domain explainmyproduct.com
  • Hosting on AWS (transfer)
  • Email account
  • Sendgrid account
  • Database of existing users

• Assets Not Included:

  • Stripe Account

• Work to be Completed Prior to Sale:

  • Add Google Analytics
  • Add logo (buyer will provide)
  • Re-jigger the messaging & copy
  • Link 'Want More Feedback' to Payments Page
  • Email design changes
  • Some price changes