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Ask HN: Would you pay for a service that gets you your first 100 users?

20 points by pixelfeeder ↗ HN
Curious if this is a real problem for people and how much you would pay for a service that does the following:

- Create a custom landingpage to help pre-launch your startup idea

- Create custom branding for credibility, including a logo, color palette etc. (instead of using unbounce or a generic landing page builder)

- Improve/write the copy for a higher conversion rate and better messaging

- Promises to get you at least 100 people to sign up to your pre-launch list within 4 weeks or else all the work done is yours for free. These are targeted people that opted in, showing interest in your idea which you can then later work with to launch your product to, or talk to in order to improve what you're working on.

Was thinking in the $2k range, but love to get ideas

30 comments

[ 231 ms ] story [ 1143 ms ] thread
AznHisoka
Getting 100 users is easy. Getting 100 paid users? i would sign up for that.
COil
I think every one would. :)
brudgers
Curious how such a service would qualify the users.
Gustomaximus
You're describing a performance marketing agency/freelancer. This already exists.

And thinking a good price is irrelevant until you have a product. Some products you supply at $0.70 others at $1,000+

mswen
Are you thinking only B2C or B2B as well? Also "user" sounds more substantial than what you describe in your last point which is really a lead with expressed interest that has agreed to be contacted again. A lead isn't exactly a user.

Having clarified that distinction between user and lead what you seem to be thinking of offering is $20 per opted-in targeted lead along with design and copy editing services to make pre-launch start-up look more professional.

The pricing seems fine if you have a portfolio that shows that you can actually do the design and copy editing. I feel like the 100 users or your money back is gimmicky.

Maybe a fixed pricing something like the following:

Logo, color palette and font selections - $300

Create landingpage - $300

Writing and copy editing for landing page, automated response email $400

Targeted opt-in leads $10 per lead

This still gets you to the $2000 if you succeed at the lead generation.

sharemywin
I agree I would rather see it piecemeal and/or hourly on some items. you want to knock it out of the park figure out how to do sales on commission for projects. although most people are cheap and completely under estimate cost of acquiring their customers.
skinnymuch
These aren't users which would be something else of course :p. These are [qualified] leads. Not that they aren't worth anything. They are. But the distinction is big.
majc2
Yes, I think people would pay and I think you're not charging enough. Think about what an SE would charge an entrepreneur to build a product.

> Promises to get you at least 100 people to sign up to your pre-launch list within 4 weeks or else all the work done is yours for free. These are targeted people that opted in, showing interest in your idea which you can then later work with to launch your product to, or talk to in order to improve what you're working on.

What about a pipeline of leads and an outbound marketing campaign instead; and then the execution of that campaign once the product is built would be another way to do it - I think some SE folks would love to build a product but completely outsource the marketing of it until they have some traction. Thats the problem you're solving.

borplk
I'd imagine the first 100 "users" would rapidly turn into a here's 100 random emails that are interested in ANYTHING (but not really).
kryptonic
Not all users are equal though. Do you mean 100 free/trial users?

In general it's going to be much harder to convince 100 users to sign up to a $100 service compared to a $5 service.

It's also going to be much harder to get 100 users to sign up for a terrible product. Are you saying I could create a crappy MVP then pay $2,000 knowing that you'd probably only achieve 10 users max and then get my money back?

It sounds like you need a more complex metric than just number of users.

pixelfeeder
Yes i mean free/trial users. To convert those into paying customers, there's funneling and all sorts of othet work involved. This service would be to take an idea and validate it in 4 weeks. So you have a group of early adopters that can help you shape the product they want.
deepnotderp
Would definitely use this. Hit me up at sixsamuraisoldier [at] gmail.com
typetypetype
I have no personal use for this, but it sounds like a great idea.
disordinary
Yes they would, but I think there would be caveats, so not just 100 random people signed up to your mailing list but people who are in the correct demographic for the company and have actively signed up / are using it (not necessarily paid though). If you could do that you could charge more than 2k.
mgberlin
Absolutely. I'd also pay for a service that generates a business idea, has 100 paying users, and is willing to sell the idea and list.
danieltillett
If you can get a 100 real users then $2000 is way, way too cheap. If you are just going to shoot through 100 people with no real interest in the product and who are just signing up for monetary reward then you would have to pay me to use your service.

Basically what you are trying to offer is the holy grail of startups. If you have figured out how to get a 100 real engaged customers to any service on demand then you can get a thousand or a million. If you can do this can I please invest in your business because you are going to be a billion dollar company.

pixelfeeder
So the 100(+) signups would be people who opted in to the service and answered the question why (by filling in their reason). So on the other side you'd have a list of leads including their individual motivation (instead of a random bunch of email addresses). I've been doing this for some time, it's not that hard actually.
danieltillett
Let's say I run a new service that targets SMB decision makers. Let's say this service is an email marketing service that costs $49 a month. Can you really send me 100 targeted SMB customers who are genuinely interested in using and paying for a new email marketing service? If you can do this on demand you can charge me 90% of the LCV of these people and I will willingly pay.
pixelfeeder
I obviously can't predict if the price + product is something people want. Which is exactly why I like running these lean experiments. You can only find out by getting the idea out of your head, launch it in a quick and lean way and find out if people are interested. By getting early leads to sign up, you might find out by talking to them that 39/mo is thye magical nr. Or maybe 89/mo if feature X and Y are added.
danieltillett
If the effort is not too great I would suggest you give it a try. My feeling is the traffic you will send will be pretty low quality, but if you do find you can get high quality traffic on demand for different services (especially in the B2B market) then you are on a major winner.
Gustomaximus
> If you can get a 100 real users then $2000 is way, way too cheap

For some services I've delivered people at $0.70. Other at $1,000+. Both are profitable for supplier and the company. Price has no meaning until you understand eCPA, per user revenue, margin and scale.

> If you have figured out how to get a 100 real engaged customers to any service on demand then you can get a thousand or a million.

Scaling campaigns doesn't work like that, especially in performance channels. Some channels scale better than other but there is always a exponential cost per user acquisition.

This is complete misinformation your saying. Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude. And I'm a bit surprised in a forum that is usually as considered as HN this is getting pushed to the top of the page.

danieltillett
I am not saying that you can't acquire 100 real customers under $2000 (in many niches you certainly can), but that if you can do this on demand for any service then $2000 is far too cheap. If you can get me 100 real customers I will pay you $10,000 in a heart beat.

In my niche we can't acquire customers under $2000 a pop - luckily the LCV supports this expenditure. My customers don't click on ads, don't respond to emails, don't respond to snail mail (even hand written ones), and don't answer their phones. The only way we can reach them is by physical cold calling and we have to visit each prospect multiple times in person to get to the stage we can make a presentation. The only good news is once we go through this ordeal 75% of our prospects buy.

gesman
As long as first signups are not like these:

dslmndsfnsdlk@gmail.com

sdlfndslfksdd@gmail.com

dfgdgdsehdghh@gmail.com

fnxzgagedhdag@gmail.com

bbcbasic
If they are paying users. Hell yeah :-)
jmathai
We paid $600 per lead for a meeting with a CEO or VP of a sizable company that met various criteria. It sounded great because we were confident that we could close enough deals to make it profitable.

In reality we only got a few leads and they weren't as relevant as we had hoped. We ended up suing for breach of contract and got about 1/2 of our money back.

My takeaway was to be very skeptical of someone else that says they can get customers for you. It may work at a later stage for a company but for earlier stage companies I'm not sure you can (or should) outsource that.

That said, you can probably find people who haven't had the same experience as me that would pay you some $.

jklein11
If you don't mind me asking what were the grounds for the breach of contract?
jmathai
They didn't fulfill the number of leads we had paid for. I think they fulfilled 2 of 18. The big mistake we made was paying for the leads up front. We lost any and all leverage we had.
ezekg
Getting users to sign up for a pre-launch list isn't incredibly hard, especially when you have a good looking product. Getting those users to convert into paying customers is where the real challenge is. I generated a list of a few hundred users pre-launch and am still sitting at a consistent ~25 paying users 3 months in.