Launching is all good, but once you've done that, how do you get customers?

[chris hulbert]

Hi all,
After being inspired by David Hansson's talk about the fortune 5
million (http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-
hansson-at-startup-school-08), i've just launched my latest mini-
startup: quickrosters.com
The idea is that small businesses would use this to simplify the
process of creating rosters, visualising a day's staffing, and
allowing staff to check their shifts from home via their mobile or
internet, all using a subscription model.
Now i've launched, i'm beginning to realise what he meant when one of
the guys here told me '20% of the work is creating the site, 80% is
the rest'.
I'm scratching my head wondering how to attract customers. Currently
i'm using adwords which so far hasn't gotten very far.
Any ideas? Or should i stick with adwords and just be patient?

[Suhit Anantula]

Hi Chris:

David Hansson is good and their whole philosophy makes sense.

I am pretty much in the same situation.

One thing that we are trying to do is to do multiple things.

One, get a blog. Start writing about the issues facing your customers. And how it overcome it. One of the ways will be your solution but do not get too bogged down by that. Try to provide info and support.

If you understand Hindu/Buddhist philosophy, I would say its all Karma.

Two, yes, adwords could be a way to go. We will be starting that soon. I am no expert but sure think that is the way to go.

One another way for you would be to partner with some complementary service.

You could also think of affiliates but that would make sense after you build some momentum.

And lastly, plain old networking and selling. Contact customers directly!

If you have not read, check out Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae. Good stuff there especially the differentiation between old marketing and new marketing.

Cheers,
Suhit

--
Suhit Anantula

+61 (0) 433 681 501
www.technovus.com.au
www.twitter.com/technovus

www.worldisgreen.com
Yahoo/MSN/Skype ID  : suhit_a
www.linkedin.com/in/worldisgreen
www.twitter.com/worldisgreen

"The only way to predict the future is to create it" - Drucker

[Elias Bizannes]

Step one: Ask who's your target market?

Step two: Develop a strategy to entice your target market

Step three: Approach your target market

My responses

Step one: Hospitality staff. Always changing, always on the go, heavy reliance on rosters where the most advanced rosters tend to be running on DOS systems if that.

Step two: Offer them a freemium model. Ideas can be value add they pay a price (ie, mobile version, syncronisation with peoples mobiles); free 90 days (enough to get them dependent on it); free for five employees (pay for more)
Step three: Go door knocking. Every damn restaurant, pub and bar that exists should at least have your business card.

--
Elias Bizannes
http://liako.biz

[Elias Bizannes]

And allow people the ability to import/export their data via excel. Easier customer acquisition.

You need to approach people and develop a one on one relationship with them.So for example, you talk to the proprietor of The Oaks in Neutral Bay Sydney, and you tell him - "I'm willing to work with you for free to develop this tool to suit you. In return for you helping me out develop this product, I am willing to give you a special deal of discounted use for the life time of this product". Say that to the next 1000 proprietors, and even if only 5 end up doing, that's five more customers than you would have got sitting at home wondering how to get them.

Make the price higher and not free. People will assess the value of your service based on the price. Instead, allow people free use for a period. Same benefit of customer acquisition.

Don't rely on a blog; rely on human to human interaction to build the relationship.

[Michael Specht]

Chris,

I'm sure some of the other guys can give you tips on the whole marketing of
the startup thing, eg see Elias's tips.

But from a industry perspective a few ideas:-
* Have you spoken with payroll vendors to get a partnership able to move
roster data into the system for pay processing, this way small biz owners
can streamline their payroll processing.
* There are several HR & Payroll industry groups you could approach for
leads.
* As it is designed for small biz, by looking at it, what about approaching
the local chamber of commerce to see if you can get them to endorse it.
* Get a blog, and write, write, write about the issues you are solving.

From a product point of view, the UI needs and update, the site should
automatically recognise mobile devices, it didn't with my Treo.

Rgds
Michael

Michael Specht
Principal Consultant

Phone: +61 3 9017 1865 | Mobile: 0418 212 041 | Skype: mspecht
Email: mic...@inspecht.com.au Web: inspecht.com.au

[Michael Harries]

I like the idea of finding partners/allies in your target market - this will also drive you to adjust the product to address any real world customer issues you may have missed.

Once this is in place, I suggest drawing from Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the Chasm, etc). In particular, is there a relatively small subset of your target market with very strong needs and where where you could plausibly get great coverage? Hit that one group hard - lots of person to person contact if necessary - so that you can gain market validation, etc, etc before moving more broadly.

Michel

--
__
Michael Harries

[chris hulbert]

Thanks for all the tips guys, i'll have a think about them all and
figure out which ones are possible given my situation. I especially
like the idea of siding with potential customers, offering
customisation for free, is the idea there that you would hope that
they would become an advocate of the system to their friends who would
become the first paying customers?

On Oct 17, 11:44 am, "Michael Harries" <michaelharr...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Bart Jellema]

Hi Chris,

- Do some Press Releases
- Find parterships that make sense and are beneficial for both you and
the partner
- Come out and go to lots of events... the advice you'll receive will
be invaluable
- Give your site the Web 2.0 makeover - it needs a bit more of a
professional look. See http://www.goodbarry.com/ for a good example.
- Get some customers, one at a time, by recruiting them personally
from people you know or people they know...
- SEO - you might want to outsource this. For outsourcing, check out
odesk.com
- Write some articles - submit to article directories etc
- Submit to directories
- Start a blog and write about the issues you're solving.
- Affiliate program?
- You might want to consider to give away the first 100 accounts. That
way you get some valuable early feedback.

Good luck!

Bart

[Richard Giles]

That's the age old question Chris.

This is exactly the point where your business needs to start thinking
just like any traditional business: What's in it for the customer?
What pain is my potential customers feeling that I can address? What
differentiates me from the competition?

Essentially these are traditional sales questions. And yes, this is
the single most difficult part of startup-dom.

Have you got a business plan?

I'd be more than happy to chat more if you like. Do a bit of
brainstorming with you to work out the next steps. Feel free to flick
me an email.

Rich

[Geoff McQueen]

Chris,

My suggestion is to listen to Steve Blank's presentation at http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html - he speaks specifically about this. He's been starting and building (from a VP Marketing perspective) companies for 30 years. He identifies the difference between tech companies that succeed and those that don't - a ratio of more than 1000:1 in his estimation - as them ignoring customer development.

As proposed by Steve, it's more than sales and marketing: it takes the concept of hypothesise, test, refine, repeat used in product development and applies it to real world customer needs. He says, odds are, everything you think you know about markets is nothing more than a guess from your own (limited) perspective. Founders, especially engineers, need to leave the comfort of their office/dorm/desk and test the hypothesis on real customer who agree that "yes, this is a problem, something important enough I'd pay for it, or, if I didn't know it was a problem, you could educate me that it is", so to take the hypothesis and see if there are customers outside the building, no slides, no pitch - listening.

Anyway, I won't spoil any more of the surprise, other than that Steve thinks that there's no such thing as a successful CEO who can't sell their own product/service.

One of the best podcasts I've ever listen to. I especially loved the bit where the talked about breaking the arms of Entrepreneurs who wanted to make a splash by launching on TechCrunch like I was thinking of doing no more than a week ago ;-)

Not to be missed. I'm going to see if he'll let me buy him a beer when I'm in Palo Alto in a couple of weeks.

Geoff

-----Original Message-----
From: silicon-bea...@googlegroups.com [mailto:silicon-bea...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Richard Giles
Sent: Saturday, 18 October 2008 1:47 AM
To: Silicon Beach Australia

[Geoff McQueen]

Also, if you're going to count on SMS, you've got a couple of choices:

AU Based: Redcoal is one I've used before. APIs as well as simple sending. Able to modify the "from" of an SMS message too to match the client's business. I've heard good things about 5th Finger too.

International: a decent amount cheaper. Issues are deliverability onto AU networks. I've had a tip that South Africa is a good spot to look - they have 1st world mobile infrastructure, but their currency is something like 1/7th of ours on a purchasing-power-parity basis. Since *most* 1st world tecos have adopted the highway robbery price of 20c/message in local currency terms, going to somewhere with a weak exchange rate but good international linkages could be cost effective.

If you decide to go international, grab your mates, write down which carrier they're with, and also whether they've ported their number from another carrier. Try and get yourself as a complete a test set as you can: Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, 3, and then look at people who've ported between. Then test your preferred gateway's ability to deliver a message to each handset. Also test normal messages that come from a gateway number, as well as messages that come from a specific word/phrase (and which can't be replied to). Only consider those who actually work across all these perms and combs if you want to offer a paid SMS service that needs to actually deliver.

Geoff



-----Original Message-----
From: silicon-bea...@googlegroups.com [mailto:silicon-bea...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bart Jellema
Sent: Saturday, 18 October 2008 12:12 AM
To: Silicon Beach Australia
Subject: [SiliconBeach] Re: Launching is all good, but once you've done that, how do you get customers?

[Michael Specht]

Sms go wit clickatel from South Africa. Easy setup & API's with prices starting at 6c/message.

[silky]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Michael Specht <msp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sms go wit clickatel from South Africa. Easy setup & API's with prices starting at 6c/message.

clickatel are notoriously unreliable.

--
noon silky
http://skillsforvilla.tumblr.com/
http://www.themonkeynet.com/armada/

[Geoff McQueen]

Nice tip Mick - I'll check them out (since we do sporadic SMS stuff ourselves). Thanks.

Geoff

PS - another beer of appreciation coming your way, Elias, for setting this thing up...

[Mick Liubinskas]

Some great advice here from everyone. My only additional 2c is to make
sure you're product is creating the core value you want it to create.
It's solving that big pain point that Richard mentioned. If that value
isn't significantly higher than what they can get elsewhere or from
staying where they are, it doesn't matter how much promotion you do or
how web 2.0 your site is. Stay focused on that until people are
prepared to walk over broken glass to get it.

After you've done that, and normally while you're doing it too, my
points to add to everyone elses are;
* Blog, but make sure you are contributing in forums and other peoples
blogs 5 times as much as you blog. Right now everyone is out there,
not on your site, so go and connect.
* Distribution is vital. No major success story made it without
efficient and complementary distribution.
* Test, test, test. Don't throw your whole budget on one campaign. The
beauty if the web is that trials can be cheap. Make sure you're
tracking how they use the tool and also have plenty of ways that they
can tell you how you suck and what they love.

Good stuff.

Mick

P.S. I thought I was the Silicon Beach Mick?


On Oct 18, 12:54 pm, Geoff McQueen <geoff.mcqu...@internetrix.com.au>
wrote:

> professional look. Seehttp://www.goodbarry.com/for a good example.

[Elias Bizannes]

Ginger Mick you are. Perhaps Sydney siliconlifesaver in red cossies

Sent from my iPhone

[Mark Neely]

Chris,

>
Thanks for all the tips guys, i'll have a think about them all and figure
out which ones are possible given my situation. I especially like the idea
of siding with potential customers, offering customisation for free, is the
idea there that you would hope that they would become an advocate of the
system to their friends who would become the first paying customers?
>

The idea of partnering with early-adopter customers is that they can help
you refine your product/technology to meet exact market requirements. While
you and your team can have a good idea of the 'pain' experienced by the
market you are targetting, and while research/interviews with potential
customers is a source of great insights, there is nothing like working with
a customer trying to implement your solution (in alpha/beta) to put your
team at the coal face and see the realities of a day in the life of your
customer. As Geoffrey Moore suggests, your early customers only really want
an 80% finished product - they will want to work with you in nailing the
remaining 20%.

As you've alluded to, once you have partnered with them to implement +
refine the product, they become natural advocates and important reference
sites for future customers. They are also a great source of data about the
'value' created by your solution, which is invaluable when devising your
pricing model.

Regards,

Mark

-----
Mark Neely
Master Strategist
Infolution Pty Ltd
'Beyond Strategy. Leading Change'

e: m...@infolution.com.au
m: +61 (0)412 0417 29
skype: mark.neely

Read my blogs --> www.infolution.com.au
www.neelyready.com
Connect on LinkedIn --> www.linkedin.com/in/markneely

[Richard Giles]

An extension of what I said here in a blog post about it:

http://richardgiles.com/2008/10/20/marketing-101-for-web-startups/