Starting a business to quit my job - A thread inspired by lemons884
- Thread starter Makavelimob
- Start date
lead - i came up with ideas , hired a coder to make it happen. Ive known the guy a while he hooked me up with a deal. But be careful while hiring. Emp - I love the shit ton of advice im getting. Its in the process of getting added - new graphics are almost done and im putting a new sales page that lets users buy NOW! . In two weeks itll be done bc thats when my coder can fix up the payment process.
Funny idea, but it would just be burning money. Think about the audience you reach with your actions and the market for your product. Is Joe Schmoe on the street likely to buy your product? Probably not. So why reach out to him?
Would college kids with an interest in social media? Maybe. Businesses? Maybe.
Identify a few (2-4) markets that would be the ideal purchaser for the product - who can you envision giving you money. Then slice that down. Drill down until you can tell me 'well I think [barbershops] would purchase this. Then go to 10 [barbershops] and see if they want to buy. Just be showing your product and your sales page to potential customers, you will get a lot more feedback. If a customer (not a forum of IMs) is turned off by something, change it.
What's the goal of your site? Immediate sales? Building a contact list? Getting user feedback by offering your product for free to build a better Product 2.0 that you charge for?
Look at how 37 signals lays out their pricing page. I'm not saying 'hey, copy their layout, der her,' but I'm saying when a customer is interested in registering / buying / signing up for your product, looking at information, or doing ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING on your site, they should have the opportunity to IMMEDIATELY on that page purchase the product.
Don't want on your coder. Register a paypal account and slap together a 'hey, buy now' button. Have the button link to paypal for the time being so you can see how many people are interested in buying.
Kaisdavis- Great post. Thanks - I have a few twitter accounts with over 1,000 followers (about tv shows). When the website first launched, I tried to market to them to see what type of following I would receive. A few bites but nothing much, bounce rate was really high. I figured that would be the case. Since then, I have been targetting towards the social media crowd via twitter, blog commenting, forums (only really this thread) ... my bounce rate has dropped about 10% and have increase users by about 20 in the last few days. I do plan on marketing this towards social media users, bloggers, small businesses etc.
Goal of the website: A combo of everything stated. Sales do not have to be immediate. The main goal would be to develop a strong user base of free and premium users. Monetize the free user base while receiving money for the premium users. Every few months or so add some new tools and create better software as time goes on. Pretty much create a kick ass twitter management site.
Sales page - in the process of being created. Actually with using basecamp as a model for it even. With addition to a nice chart of the plans there will be a buy now button, screenshots and testimonials. New screencast on main page is in the works.
As for wanting on my coder- Its alittle more complicated then setting up the buy now button... when a user registers for free and then upgrades, their account will automatically switch over to premium. With the buy now, it needs to be configured that their account will automatically go to the premium account. I am sure I could figure it out but as of now my time is pretty limited to weekends. Fortunately, my job is letting up alittle bit in january so I will have more time to get a better idea of how the payments work on the backend.
Goal of the website: A combo of everything stated. Sales do not have to be immediate. The main goal would be to develop a strong user base of free and premium users. Monetize the free user base while receiving money for the premium users. Every few months or so add some new tools and create better software as time goes on. Pretty much create a kick ass twitter management site.
Sales page - in the process of being created. Actually with using basecamp as a model for it even. With addition to a nice chart of the plans there will be a buy now button, screenshots and testimonials. New screencast on main page is in the works.
As for wanting on my coder- Its alittle more complicated then setting up the buy now button... when a user registers for free and then upgrades, their account will automatically switch over to premium. With the buy now, it needs to be configured that their account will automatically go to the premium account. I am sure I could figure it out but as of now my time is pretty limited to weekends. Fortunately, my job is letting up alittle bit in january so I will have more time to get a better idea of how the payments work on the backend.
Hey anyone who has used Twettos tools want to provide a testimonial for our sales page? Just PM me .. thanks!