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Ask HN: I have money, how do I spend it to grow my business?

8 points by aymeric ↗ HN
Hi there,

I am the founder of taskarmy.com, a website that helps small businesses outsource to great freelancers from countries with lower cost of living.

I bootstrap taskarmy.com by doing .net and facebook app consulting three days a week and I find myself in a position where my business and my consulting work earn more money than I am spending and I don't know where to best spend it to grow my business faster.

I have one full-time Ruby on Rails developer working with me and one full-time marketer (I am still looking for a great writer/blogger).

I would appreciate if you could have a look at http://taskarmy.com and suggest where I should spend my extra cash (over $30K and less than $100K)

Should I spend it in PR? in SEO? in AdWords? in Facebook Ads? in design? in writing quality articles? etc...

Some more information: 1. I believe my website is well SEO'ed already 2. I set up AdWords but the keywords I can target to be profitable don't bring enough traffic (I am building up my mailing list to increase the customer lifetime value so that I can spend more on ads). 3. I procrastinate a lot when it comes to writing so I believe I'd need someone else to do any sort of writing work for me if this is what you would suggest. 4. taskarmy has an affiliate program (should I put more effort into it?) 5. taskarmy has a white labeling solution (should I put more effort into it?)

Thanks!

Aymeric

16 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] thread
veyron
Just curious: Does the business itself generate more cash flows than you are spending on it? more than you are spending overall for personal and business matters? [ie can you actually quit your consulting]
pgroves
You could try to somehow monetize your data that describes who is paying for what services. Even if it's just blog posts with general graphs (like OkCupid) it could at least help your brand. For instance, ADP's employment statistics are as closely watched as government statistics by some people on wall st.

I wouldn't necessarily encourage you to directly sell detailed info about your users to marketers as it may very well annoy your customers, although there is probably a market for it.

At the very least, bringing in a consultant to do some data mining to find patterns that correlate to actual revenue may help you with all your other concerns.

Once you feel confident you know who is really spending money and why, an inside sales person to cultivate a list of potential customers is probably fairly cheap and may lead to a real uptick in sales. You seem uniquely situated to hire someone like that through your own service.

While writing this comment, I keep being reminded of Groupon. The last time they raised an obscene amount of money, the investors kept talking about (1) their sales army that had a relationship with thousands and thousands of small businesses and (2) sales data for all those businesses. You could read up on them to see if you get any ideas.

aymeric
I am not very well educated about the topic of selling data, it is not a topic that comes often online. Do you have some urls of interesting articles on this topic?

Regarding the sales army, this sounds like a good option but you have to remember my customer lifetime value is still fairly low, so maybe the question should be:

Where should I spend my money to increase my customer lifetime value?

[dead] joyce_ampah
I like to meet a hacker that i like to work with
staunch
1) Make sure your service it outstanding, so when a customer tries it they spend significant money because it actually works. If it doesn't really work well you're hurting your brand and throwing money down the drain.

2) Buy AdWords and buy ads on relevant entrepreneurial sites. Tons of startups have the need for MTurk and alternatives. Tell them you exist and they'll try you out.

3) Explain really convincingly (on your site) why you're better than MTurk, since most startups already know about it.

aymeric
1/ Clients are already happy: http://taskarmy.com/user_feedbacks

2/ It is interesting that you mention MTurk because it is not the market I am after. I am looking at Odesk/Elance/Freelancer instead. So you are right the copy of the website might not be clear enough.

pbreit
Would you be open to hiring a full, part-time or contract sales person? It might be at least worthwhile to learn if a sales effort could generate ROI. Would your marketing activities be able to generate sufficient number of leads?
aymeric
The difficulty with the sales person is that one sale on taskarmy is fairly small. I am in the process of organizing bundled services like (this one: http://taskarmy.com/services/1549-create-a-website-for-your-...) that will have a bigger price tag and would make it worth having a sales person.

What would you consider a lead on taskarmy? A visitor comes and goes, but the only moment they express any interest is when they either leave a comment on a service page, contact a service provider or sign up for the newsletter. Is that what you would define as a lead?

How do I know how many leads I would need to keep a sales person busy?

And finally, where can I find a sales person?

JoachimSchipper
patio11 is always touting scalable content generation, so you may want to look into a writer.

Also, I'm not trying to be nasty, but the website is riddled with English problems. Most of those are the freelancers' fault, but they still don't inspire confidence.

An editor (person) or integrated spell checker (script) may be useful. On the other hand, your customers may be in for a rude awakening when actually e-mailing the workers...

aymeric
(you are right about English but I think it is a ok compromise when the English is not a big drawback in comparison to be able to have access to great talent from countries with lower cost of living).

Regarding scalable content generation, I haven't found keywords for articles that would convert my visitors into clients well enough yet.

JoachimSchipper
Failing that, try linkbait. Ever notice how many of his engagements seems to end with something that HN just loves? Appealing to the people who'll give you links is valuable, even if you're not going to be selling anything to those people.

You should have some amount of interesting data that you can have someone turn into articles; for a massive flamewar, try plotting costs and ratings per country of both freelancer and client.

aymeric
How would you suggest using my cash to generate linkbait?

Should I look for freelancer writers that write for other blogs in my industry?

JoachimSchipper
I'm sorry, I wouldn't know where to find a good writer. But yes, something like that seems sensible.
triviatise
inside sales. Google, facebook, groupon etc all have telesales organizations even though each transaction is small. growing an inside sales team is hard. You most likely will have to hire a manager and could blow your whole cash reserve on a dud. Alternately you could go with an outsourced sales company.
aymeric
Interesting.

Do you have any pointers on how to find "inside sales" people? Have you tried outsourcing it? How much can I expect to pay?