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Ask HN: So I got first two paid customers, now what?
89 points by vgurgov on Nov 5, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 69 comments
Hi Guys, This is my third or forth try to address this community and ask advice w my startup (previously I got zero responses).

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



Keep going and build upon that initial momentum.

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.


This could very much be a personal preference issue, but the scrolling steps on the right hand side just bugs me. I expect new steps to be below their predecessors, so when the slide scrolls up to the next step, it's a bit jarring to me.


Never thought about this :) Thanks! I will surely change it if your comment will get few upvotes :))


A/B test it ;) I know what xatax means though, it's just a little jarring.


Exactly what these two said. I was reading through the copy and kept getting distracted by the slides scrolling down rather than up


> "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.

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.


I have noticed the same thing on many, many occasions, and most of the time I cannot think of a single good reason to justify why the text is contained in quotes. As much as I don't want to believe this, I honestly think that people are just stupid. There seems to be some apparent correlation between emphasis and quotation marks, but this is obviously not their intended use.

A quick google search turned up a blog dedicated to the subject: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/


Not wanting to be pedantic but the main logo, "Videolla" and the title "Make money on videos" appear a little jagged around the edges. I tested this in IE, Firefox and Chrome on Windows-7. To me, this gives a rather amateurish feel to the website. I am no web expert but is it not possible to make the fonts look smoother ?


Thanks for very practical suggestions!


Don't let the hype get to you. Just focus on developing your product and make sure you solidify your customer acquisition process. These people will only be around for a short while, afterwards they will move to the next featured thing. Make sure the basis of your business is strong.


Thanks, I was thinking along the same logic. What do you think about market niche i should focus on initially?


I have no idea, I'm not very conversant with how your business works. Just do what you feel is best, build strongly on the biggest, then expand to the smaller ones till you discover the one that takes off strongest.


This is what I do for building internal software and it may work for where you are now. Look at your existing roadmap and then get feedback from your customers (the ones who are paying for and the who are using the site). Take this feedback and incorporate[1] it into your roadmap. Now go back to work.

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.


Thanks, very general but still good advices. Especially about Hollywood guys! I wish i could share some conversations i had with that type of ppl )))


Well other people were giving you detailed advice on your site (typos, A/B, etc...) and since you're the only one who knows your current roadmap and any feedback you're receiving you're the only one who can make the big picture decisions going forward. I like the idea and wish you success!


Practical advices are always useful. Listen to clients, iterate, do split testing, etc are all great. I am gonna do most of this anyways. This is not all new to me and I believe do have so experience.

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.


I would say start with small producers and learn from your experience.It's always better to make mistakes with the small players before swimming with the big fish.

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!


"Custom Plan We have special offers for Serious Businesses Please get in touch"

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.


Thanks, i will change it! My eng sucks, sorry.


You should probably pay somebody to proofread your site, or you're going to lose customers. Your tech could be rock-solid, but a potential customer can't see that, so they look at what they can see. If they see bad English or bad design, they'll assume that the rest of the business is of similar quality.


Thanks, great advice. Gonna do this anyways. Just didnt have time yet.


I can do it for you if you like. Email me (in profile) or give me your email address. I'd also like to discuss some collaboration with my startup if you're interested.

Please put your email address in your profile. You never know who might want to get in touch!


thx, just added


You could call it the "large enterprise plan".

Edit: Unless it's not just for large enterprise, of course.

Also, the mouseover text on "Business plan" is "medium plan". Is this intentional?


thx, will take care of it


Well, I don't know you (sorry), or what your product/app is, so it's hard to give much advice.

All 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.


This seems to be his site:

http://videolla.com/


Yes, that my project. I didnt know if its fine to post link couse, i might be considered spammer etc. As I said my first two submissions got zero replies so i decided to try not posting link this time, just asking advice. Edit: So avrg stas so far are - around 700 visitors/day, 20 new users/days, 2/100 are paid users.


That sites redirecting my iPad to the mobile subdomain/site. You don't want to do that.


Thats interesting(I spend couple days making this mobile version). Why? I dont have iPad, but tested it on iphone and adroid. Can you please check if same happens when you go to youtube or it has some custom version for iPad?


Are you redirecting based on user-agent string? The iPad reports Mobile Safari in its user-agent:

  Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10
You might want to white-list user-agents containing 'iPad' from the redirect.


Thanks, I know how to do it technically. I am just not sure how other video sites do it with iPad. Custom mobile version or redirect to general site?


Worth going to your local apple store and testing with their display models. ;)


I have a little experience in this domain: developed a video product/model for a large publishing company that produces a little over 500K rev/annum.

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.


Great practical advices, thanks! I have most of this developed already or planned in my roadmap.

What do you mean by:

>Reach out to me if you have a viable business and want to sell.


When/If you are seeking a cash exit and the product is stable, growing & profitable.


Hi - Good luck with your business. As a technology marketer & first time visitor (and someone not in your target segment) to your site here are few points of suggestion:

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.


To begin with, I would suggest making a list of your target customer segments, if you havent already. Who will use this service to distribute video ? Media agencies, DIY publishers, sports publishers etc. Your service is not targeted to the users who upload videos to Youtube.

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.


I would recommend you to focus on the busines side for a while. Your minimum viable product seems to work, you've already a pricing strategy and a few customers. To validate your pricing and offer you need to get a few more customers. 5-10 at minimum.

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!


The Hollywood guys are giving you good advice, but their wrong about the reason.

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.


Thanks Noah! Your email is still in my "Stared", sorry I am so busy in these days with this and other projects, but i will reply to you in a few days


The part of the site that looks like it needs the most work at the moment is the browse section. Get people to tag their videos - make it searchable as once you start getting content you're going to want people to see that similar videos are up there. It's also the simplest form of feedback - are people tagging their films "movie", "ruby" or "money"? Which ones generate the most revenue, and which ones prefer which payment plans?

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.


Get a few more and form a VIP club of first n customers - and give them special benefits -> they'll get you more customers.


congrats on the first few paying customers. Feels great, doesn't it?

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.


Post the URL of your service so people can give more constructive feedback based on specifics.


If you have two paying customers it means you have something people want. Congratulations! That means you actually have a business. Now, all you have to do is keep growing and improving. One thing I would do is reach out to those first customers, and thank them for being early customers. Ask them how you might help them even more, and why they found you valuable enough to buy. If you can find out more about them, then you should be able to find more people like them, and target your marketing to them. Good luck!


couple guys from Hollywood called and said that i should go to LA for big guys in Movies and entertainment industries

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?


You are probably losing a customer by not linking to your business here. I wish PG would add this to the site guidelines: when asking for help, be specific.


To be honest, after PG's recent post about rising spam wave from low carma accounts (I have 160), I was afraid to post my link. Link posted above is correct though.


You are right. But, you are clearly not spamming! If genuine posts like these don't contain links, then we are only worsening the problem.


You've been here over a year and one of your most recent posts was offering the community no-strings-attached RoR help, so I'd hope you didn't get branded a spammer!


Can you repeat the acquisition process for 10 more customers? Getting the initial set of customers is extremely tough. Good luck.


Yes. Figure out how you got those two customers and try to repeat the process. Also figure out the right keywords for your business and submit your site to a bunch of directories for SEO. Here is a good list: http://blog.traindom.com/places-where-to-submit-your-startup...


Thanks! I believe I can. So far i have like 0.5% conversion (and i can improve that rate). I am not looking to grow traffic right now as I want focus on my initial users and improve product a bit (like fix obvious typos on site), experiment with pricing etc...


Are you paying for traffic or is it organic? Do a cost analysis to see how long you'll last at the current burn rate. Make amends accordingly.


I am not paying anything for traffic (well except some interesting experiments with fb ads). its mostly from twitter, fb, blogs and google. I do have enough savings and my freelancing/consulting brings me enough, so money isnt an issue here so far.


Having spent far too much time dealing with Hollywood I advise you to avoid them like the plague. They will expect a great deal more from you than you will be willing or able to provide/spend.

However, do get your DMCA ducks in a row sooner rather than later so the first major copyright infringement that someone misuses your service for doesn't take you down.


Thanks everyone for your suggestions and feedback! What a great community here! If you know somebody with experience in this field, please forward my contacts (in profile). Lets get in touch.

I am looking for advisors for that project(not looking for funding atm).


Now that you have a few customers, why don't you put up some testimonials? For your site, video testimonials would be great as they would help your customers promote themselves too and showcase the technology at the same time.


Well the first thing you need to do is get market validation.

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 believe that market is validated and quite big. Idea is nothing new. Some of competors are everyone from iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Video, down to sites like Railstutorials.org...

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 would recommend it to the ebook selling crowd. Those business owners would love to have more "How to raise a parrot" sort of ebook sales, but in video.


"Any currency, any payment method"--I think you're overpromising here. Someone is sure to want to pay in something unreasonable, and then your customers will complain that you misled them.


Like Canadian tire money? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money


Or even just a niche payment card. "Any payment method" includes things like a Macy's card, or the stored-value cards some subway systems use.

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.


So far i got zero complaints at this, but its still good idea to change it. How would you paraphrase it?


Just tell the truth. In a headline, say you support N different payment methods, or payment methods that X% of customers have, or something like that. Once someone drills down, of course, you can just list them.


In your pricing slide you have 'monthly' spelled as 'mothly'

And as a minor preference thing having the slides scroll downwards looked wrong ... maybe upwards or sideways would look better.


Get two more. That's 100% growth.




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