Ask HN: Should I find a business co-founder or learn marketing myself?

4 points by scollins 12 years ago | 2 comments

I have developed a SaaS product for devops after a user survey. I got 500-600 users to signup for invitation list. After sending them invitations, around 10% users signed up but didn't engage with the product, and didn't respond to feedback emails / widgets.

Now I am trying to find new users and have followed tips from various "How to get first X users" threads without much luck. I have a co-founder who has background in web marketing and sales, but he hasn't been much help with this.

Should I find a business co-founder who will be able to sell the product, or just tweak my signup process via iterations?

dylanhassinger 12 years ago |

You need to find a key channel. By this I mean, 1 reliable mechanism that gets people into your funnel. Examples might be...

- A podcast or blog or email list that talks about your product and your progress on it. ex: Startups for the Rest of Us and Drip app - a really good viral hook built into the product - Facebook ad strategy (probably not good for devops product) - a webinar strategy. (i.e. do a free monthly webinar on DevOps and have calls to action at the end)

Your key channel needs to be able to feed the funnel and end up with enough conversions to get you some compound growth going.

Whether you do it, or someone helps you, doesn't matter. You still need to find that key channel.

I would probably recommend trying a personal blog/podcast + occasional webinars. you might even find a cofounder once you get this going.

The other thing I recommend is what I call "The 2 person test". Find 2 people in your target market, show them the landing page. If at least 1 of them doesn't go "I need that!" then you probably need to work on product/market fit.

good luck!

fasteo 12 years ago |

You are assuming - big assumption - that the product is not the problem, but a 100% churn rate for 50-60 users makes me suspicious about the product itself.

Then, right off the bat, you have started blaming your co-founder for a failed product launch. This is no good.

Submit a "Show HN:" post with your product, let´s see what you have got and let´s see how HN community can help.