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Ask HN: Scaling a product that has product/market fit?

3 points by founder_advice ↗ HN
Hi HN!


Long-time reader, I’m asking from an throw-away to keep things unbiased.

I’ll try to be brief.

Back in January began working on a side-project with my small team. Decided to focus on product/market fit and went directly to customers. Developed real cold leads and converted them into paying subscribers on the MVP. Retention is near perfect. 

Problem is, we can’t scale direct sales fast enough between the founders. At this rate it will take us 1-2 years to reach $10k/mo. Our most popular and entry-level plan is $19.99/mo

We have a really great conversion funnel on our website but we don’t know how to begin testing and marketing it. Competitors in our market are GIANTS and already dominate YT ads, Facebook, Google Ad Words etc. Would hate to wake a sleeping giant on this.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: More details about the product

It's B2B. Most of our customers so far are small businesses but we're confident our product can be offered to medium/large and businesses and enterprises.

3 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 22.7 ms ] thread
jeffinpdx
You need to give us more information. What kind of product is it: consumer or business-to-business (enterprise)? Chances are, if your retention is nearly perfect and you've converted nearly all cold leads into customers, you're not charging customers enough money. Second, throwing money at ads -- when you have hardly any money -- is a typical mistake. Always try to earn attention before paying for it. Send some emails to bloggers about your pleased customers, ask your customers if they'll mention your product in their networks, write about your customers' success on your site (in your blog, etc.). When people don't want to freely talk about you anymore, then throw some money at ads to boost the old conversations.
founder_advice
Thanks for your reply and for the ideas. I'm absolutely going to begin to write bloggers about some of our success stories. I've also updated my post to include that it's B2B and our customers are mostly startups.

One follow-up question. On probably not charging enough money, we're charging what our big-box competitors charge. Is this a bad strategy for pricing?

jeffinpdx
What do you mean by big-box competitors? Can you give me one name so I can see how you define "big box?" I'm assuming you have a more innovative approach than your big-company competitors, so you could theoretically charge more. Particularly if it's b-to-b.

Also, personally, I'd try to secure some medium to large company clients as soon as possible. Small businesses, while wonderful (your offering is one, after all), often don't have the size budgets you'll need, nor the influence, to take you to the next level. However, try to avoid or de-prioritize the "whales" (e.g., Fortune 500) in the first year, as they'll often consume a lot of your time/resources "kicking tires."