Ask HN: So I got first two paid customers, now what?
I am launching my project (as part of HN - November Launch pad initiative) Ystd i got some 1k uniqs about 50 registrations (couple paid), few calls from potential customers, advisors, investors etc
My question is again the same. What now? What should i do now? I have solid roadmap on developing product, but feel like I am all over on business dev strategy: I was sure my initial market is education(screencasts, tutorial, etc) and got some good agreements there, but yest couple guys from Hollywood called and said that i should go to LA for big guys in Movies and entertainment industries... I feel like i am lost a need some good advices.
Thanks in advance. Hope this post will not get lost again, please consider upvoting, i really need some advice from respectful ppl here(not more traffic, thats why i am not posting link to my site here.)
Edit: Based on feedback in comments here is the link: http://videolla.com
70 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadAll I can say, if you got 2 customers, go get 2 more. Keep doing that until profit :)
In all seriousness you have to be careful about trying to look at trends from small data samples. Your first two or twenty customers might not be representative of your best user base, they might just be a couple of early adopters that happened to hear about you.
Pay attention to the trends though and try to look for commonalities among the customers, or other use cases or verticals you might not have thought of, while at the same time trying to make sure you don't get yourself pulled down a rabbit hole by following the wrong data.
http://videolla.com/
I wouldn't call them "Serious Businesses." For one, it looks odd as a proper noun. Secondly, it makes it sound like you're putting down smaller businesses or single people.
Also, periods would be nice.
Edit: Unless it's not just for large enterprise, of course.
Also, the mouseover text on "Business plan" is "medium plan". Is this intentional?
Please put your email address in your profile. You never know who might want to get in touch!
A few other thoughts:
"Videolla is a media business revolution!" on your homepage is enclosed in quotation marks. If it is a real quote, attribute it correctly and let people know of its source.
Getting the [Site in 70 seconds] video onto the main page is something that could also increase your conversions.
Seeing the word "Sign" twice in your menu bar (Sign In/Sign Up) somehow does not look right to my eye. I believe something similar to Log In/Sign Up might improve usability of your site by approximately 0.0018%.
Details like these are not necessarily what you should focus on right now. But as your schedule permits, you might want to allocate some resources to A/B testing if you are not already doing so. Find out what works. Rinse and repeat.
A lot of businesses seem to put things like that in quotes, and I've never been able to find an explanation for why. Based on the ones I've seen on things like plumber's or electrician's vans and in print ads, it seems that the things in quotes tend to be either slogans or be statements about how the service is performed or the quality of the business itself ("Fast, Courteous Service!", "Proudly Serving the Community Since 1923").
Anyone know why quoting these things is common?
I've got a couple of guesses but have not been able to find anything to back them. One would be that it is to make the slogan stand out a bit in an ad. The idea being that when people see the ad, such as on the side of a truck, by emphasizing the slogan people will be more likely to remember it. Then, someday later when people need a plumber, they might remember the slogan and tend to call that plumber first.
My other guess is that the quotes are supposed to make it seem like the company is speaking. The rest of the ad gives the cold, hard facts, but the quoted slogan or phrase is more personal.
A quick google search turned up a blog dedicated to the subject: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
You got a few signups...but your actual market validation is whether someone would actually buy the videos. Noone is going to pay you a subscription if they aren't making sales.
I am struggling to find my initial place in this wide market. Where should i focus - Education? Movies? Sports? I got some good feedback and contacts in all these niches and dont know where should i focus my efforts.
I got two real(not counting number of test) purchases(i suspect from friends of my customer).
I'm always apprehensive of 'Hollywood guys.' In my opinion there is just a much higher ratio of BS in LA than many other places. You should certainly talk to them, but keep your BS meter on high alert :)
[1] You don't want to let your current customers completely drive your vision since their feedback is going to be based around their exact needs (this isn't always true for example when dealing with fewer but very high paying customers), but you should be able to use their feedback as a stepping stone to understand the bigger picture and if your current roadmap makes sense.
But right now I am mostly looking for general advices regarding my product, initial market, grow strategy, etc
Like:
DHH replied me and advised that I should get some partnerships in hollywood and get some premium content like movies to grow audience.
Another well known guys suggested to focus on smaller producers and materials like tech tutorials.
In terms of your homepage and conversion rate, you have five call to actions with two sign up for free buttons. I would consolidate these to the one or two most important ones to make them more effective.
Congrats and good luck!
I wouldn't go after the movie industry. It's something I don't understand and something you probably don't either. However, you need to dominate a niche. I e-mailed some advice on how I'd go about doing this a couple days ago to you.
The most important thing is to become THE website for x. You can always branch out from there.
One way to pith this to bloggers is basically for $25.00 a month a person can subscribe to your channel. This where you dump all your excess thoughts about your niche. I have a lot of ideas that I think are useful, but I probably couldn't write a 1500 word minimum blog post on. I could make a 3 minute video on it though and produce 2 or 3 of these a day.
1) if you have enough "volume" of unique and registrations, analyze you acquisition cost. How is it relative to your margins? Try to account for externalities (your time) and see if it's sustainable. It's ok to be upsidedown on your acquisition cost early in the game if you think you can optimize the acquisition engine.
2) Be willing to talk to partners, but be weary of hollow partnerships. Its easy to fall into the trap of thinking you are making progress because you are "in talks". IMO, this is especially true of hollywood/music industry.
3) Talk to you customers. Both paying and registrants. Learn what their pain points are and their use case for your product. You will learn a crazy amount of stuff you never thought of.
1- Market & Biz Dev: -You said your target market is education, this is a very broad vertical. I suggest picking a segment from this broad market, for example K-12. You could do one step better by focusing on a sub-segment within this group, for example science teachers/content creators.
2- Look & feel: - The auto scrolling 1,2,3 steps to getting started is too fast to follow and read. Makes it difficult for users to learn about your service. - The current page is too busy with too many calls to action (support our campaign, upload, browse, tour, singup, sign-in etc), simplify this for higher conversion.
3- Hollywood or not: -I think meeting with new folks (Hollywood or not)is always good for business. But don't waste your money flying there - tel calls are cheaper and more effective.
Hope this helps and the very best to you.
Obviously a reasonable person wouldn't expect to buy a video with a farecard, but that just means you'll be getting complaints from unreasonable people, which are the worst to deal with.
Do everything you can to get your first 10 paying customers, you'll learn a lot, and after that focus on your product roadmap. You don't know what your customers need, or want, until you have a bunch of 'em.
So, call people, sell, market your site, try to get some PR and do everything you can come up with to get these 10 customers. When you've done that, you will start to get real feedback from your customers not other entrepreneurs and will a better clue on how the product roadmap should look like. And how your product will fit into the market.
Then, it's time to get 100 customers. Do everything you can to get them.
Then, it's time to get 1000 customers. If you have 1000 customers, you know you have a scalable business. Time to celebrate!
In short: Keep on pushing the product. Do not pay much attention behind any of the hoopla that comes with a product launch - but entertain all opportunities nonetheless, you never know when the contacts might be beneficial.
Where you have positioned yourself makes this a perfect solution for a small business or entrepreneur with a unique content offering. The service is cheaper than Brightcove but more optioned than YouTube. Target coming up with a Wordpress plugin to market directly to that very powerful segment and promote to them. Wordpress + your service would be a 80% solution to a challenging issue related to monetization of video.
Find some way to integrate distribution with YouTube to leverage the power of their network (perhaps set up a site for preview videos).
Target the educational video providers (5min and others), make sure you scan the ENTIRE ecosystem to see what the other competition is doing right / wrong. See what guitar lesson video producers are using, for example.
Once you have some notable customers (even give away a free/discount account to a notable customer just to get their testimonial). Post their VIDEO testimonial on your site.
Even before features, you may want to explain "How it Works" in a brief tab so that users do not have to view the whole 70 sec video to find out how this works.
The word "Alfa" in your header is spelled "Alpha" in common English.
Play the intro video on entry into the page, better yet, create an illustrated video of how things work (not technical, just illustrative) and place it on the homepage.
No offense, but I had a tiny bit of trouble understanding what you were saying in the 70 second video. You may want to replace that with a female voice reading the script.
I'm not sure I see the pricing model set up working for micropayment videos (anything less than $4).
Also, how does the authentication/sessions work? Will a user that's paid for one video automatically be able to buy a another video on the same domain (or within the Videolla domain) without another authentication?
Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.
What do you mean by:
>Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.
I am looking for advisors for that project(not looking for funding atm).
Possibly you can suggest people place their video under certain headings for them and develop vertical browse pages for people looking at those markets. These categories prove to might well warrant their own landing pages similar to the home page but with targeted content "sell your screencasts - charge per video or per course" and their own testimonials and examples etc. If you can effectively silo your content and marketing messages you can directly target more than one audience.
Going after big deals with the movie studios sounds like it could be a big waste of time unless your contacts aren't simply wannabes.
And as a minor preference thing having the slides scroll downwards looked wrong ... maybe upwards or sideways would look better.
Is it your full-time job? If not, don't do this. You are talking about a huge investment of time for sales. Are you a good salesman? If not, you will need to become so to make this work.
Alternatively, you have 50 registrations and a couple of paid ones. Perhaps you could find out who your first few customers were, and do more of that?
Once you have this list, figure out what are current solutions available to that segment of users. Then, start your customer acquisition process. Be it google adwords marketing or organic SEO or whatever. If you want to begin with a niche and evolve from there, thats fine too. Identify which target segment is tech savvy and will be easy/cheap to acquire and can easily try out your service. For instance, DIY publishers might be easier to approach and convince in terms of trying out your service. Wedding videographers might be another (just thinking out loud here).
Once you start this way, you should get a good feel of what the market needs, how and where you can acquire users etc.