I launched BromBone a few months ago. About 150 people signed up and tried it at least once. Most of them never came back after that. No one ever paid.
A few weeks ago, I refocused BromBone into a subset of what it was before. I've already got a handful of paid accounts and I expect a few more soon. I'm not rich yet, but some people paying is way better than no one paying. There is hope this time.
For BromBone, I think there are two main things that have made the difference:
1) The first version of the service would make developer's lives a little easier but still leaves a lot of development for them to do. The new version completely eliminates a pain for them with very little work on their part.
The first version could have been helpful to a lot of different people. I thought a bigger market would be better. Instead it meant:
* I couldn't focus on one community
* I had to try to market to communities I didn't really understand
* It fix half of a lot of people's problems, but didn't completely fix anyone's
2) The new version has a landing page that looks more like a traditional SaaS landing page. I tried to go my own way to much with the previous landing page. I'm not a designer, and I didn't pull it off. I think the new landing page looks more legit to people and makes them more likely to recommend it to their boss.
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BromBone v1 was a "Headless Browser as a Service".
BromBone v2 is "Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google".
http://www.BromBone.com
Your targeted market definition for v2 is better. I personally wouldn't have been interested in the "Value Prop" of V1 because I couldn't extract how it would make my world better. V2 phrasing is very clear, and I think you can go a long way with that. You might also look at saying giving much better SEO to Angular(etc) websites.
a) Google can read JS, but they can't necessarily navigate through all the different pages of a single page app. Their recommendation for that is currently to use #! and then when GoogleBot visits a page and sees the #!, GoogleBot will replace that with ?escaped_fragment=... It's then up to you to provide the content of the page to GoogleBot, and that is what this service appears to do.
b)As long as you are serving the same content to Google, it is not considered blackhat seo, and you won't be penalized. Cloaking would be serving different content to Google than you serve to the user in an effort to boost your rankings over what the content the user sees would rank.
At SEOMoz,no? But that shouldn't matter - I could see a few ways you could gain large market share. It's clear to me that SEOMoz, large SEO firms, major/minor search engines will either build or acquire something like this. Some thoughts on large account acquisition strategies and revenue...
Account acquisition
For SEOMoz - Try a few channels in the door. A) More aggressive/direct - Contact a junior salesman, and sell him. Offer him a referral fee for anybody that uses Angular, etc that he refers. THen try that with each, and approach the head of sales. B) Less aggressive - Follow their blog, and find the key SEO thought leaders in their company or that guest blog. Those are influencers, contact them and offer them initial access. C) Partners - do the same for each of their partners. Investigate their entire client lists (eg: maybe linkedin, etc...offer it for free or reduced - and then leverage that for sales).
For major search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) - Offer directly to them, their staff, sales staff to partner to do SEO for angular apps and feed that to the search engines for free (or as a service initially of your time). Have their accounts pull you in. Partner with head SEO influencers, or Google partners. Then use that to approach Google/DuckDuck's staff saying "We already do SEO for 30 of your angular app customers".
For growth hackers - Focus on growth hackers, do cross-promo with them offering special deals. Get them to pull you into the major startups they're at.
For major SEO Firms - similar partnering, sales startegies as above.
Revenue
Offer a few tiers, initally to the larger marketing agencies, do it as a service. THis would give you enough revenue to bootstrap (eg: a couple $k per month for a few clients).
Approach a few well known, high grossing startups you know are using Angular, etc and offer to either do it as a service, or to partner and do it for cheap for marketing.
All of these are worth the price you paid - your mileage may vary.
That's great to hear! My only feedback, your new site has way toooo much text. I think you need to cut out atleast 80% of it. I am pretty sure that will improve your signup/conversion rates.
Long copy often converts better, actually. Personally, I liked the page. I prefer it when I can find out what the service does and how before I have to sign up.
Also, consider that if, like many other pages, this one just had a few soundbites and a big "Sign Up" button, the conversion rate to signups may be higher, however the conversion rate to paying customers is another matter altogether.
I came here to say that your long-form copy is quite good!
One very small change that you can make to get more people INTO the long-form copy is to "lead with the pain" in that paragraph. For example, in the opening paragraph, you open with "Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google" and then after some picture-painting for the reader, you go in for the kill with "Right now Google can't see your website. You could change that in just a few minutes."
If you swap those two sentences, the entire package becomes a lot more persuasive. There's a boatload of similar opportunities through the rest of the page that should be pretty easy to spot, too.
Do you mean how did I decide which market to target or how have I marketed to those people? Either way, same answer. I choose a market/community I was already part of and understood.
My mistake was not doing that the first time. I knew there would be a market for a headless browser service in the client-side javascript framework community. I tried to expand it to also include testing and screen capture. I didn't understand those markets. I wasn't able to offer value there, but trying prevented me from offering max value to the market I did understand.
Comments
I launched BromBone a few months ago. About 150 people signed up and tried it at least once. Most of them never came back after that. No one ever paid.
A few weeks ago, I refocused BromBone into a subset of what it was before. I've already got a handful of paid accounts and I expect a few more soon. I'm not rich yet, but some people paying is way better than no one paying. There is hope this time.
For BromBone, I think there are two main things that have made the difference:
1) The first version of the service would make developer's lives a little easier but still leaves a lot of development for them to do. The new version completely eliminates a pain for them with very little work on their part.
The first version could have been helpful to a lot of different people. I thought a bigger market would be better. Instead it meant: * I couldn't focus on one community * I had to try to market to communities I didn't really understand * It fix half of a lot of people's problems, but didn't completely fix anyone's
2) The new version has a landing page that looks more like a traditional SaaS landing page. I tried to go my own way to much with the previous landing page. I'm not a designer, and I didn't pull it off. I think the new landing page looks more legit to people and makes them more likely to recommend it to their boss.
--
BromBone v1 was a "Headless Browser as a Service". BromBone v2 is "Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google". http://www.BromBone.com
Your targeted market definition for v2 is better. I personally wouldn't have been interested in the "Value Prop" of V1 because I couldn't extract how it would make my world better. V2 phrasing is very clear, and I think you can go a long way with that. You might also look at saying giving much better SEO to Angular(etc) websites.
By the way, I read your site more - and I really think you're on to something. Partner with SEO Moz
I don't think so. Perhaps I'm wrong but I thought that:
a) Google CAN read single-page JS based websites
b) Google doesn't like it if you treat the googlebot differently to a real browser. That's blackhat and you'll be penalised if they find out.
We follow all of Google's recommendations for making AJAX website crawlable. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
Google does process some javascript, but it can't crawl full blown AJAX websites.
a) Google can read JS, but they can't necessarily navigate through all the different pages of a single page app. Their recommendation for that is currently to use #! and then when GoogleBot visits a page and sees the #!, GoogleBot will replace that with ?escaped_fragment=... It's then up to you to provide the content of the page to GoogleBot, and that is what this service appears to do.
b)As long as you are serving the same content to Google, it is not considered blackhat seo, and you won't be penalized. Cloaking would be serving different content to Google than you serve to the user in an effort to boost your rankings over what the content the user sees would rank.
I stand corrected. Thanks for making that clearer.
You don't happen to know anyone who works there do you?
At SEOMoz,no? But that shouldn't matter - I could see a few ways you could gain large market share. It's clear to me that SEOMoz, large SEO firms, major/minor search engines will either build or acquire something like this. Some thoughts on large account acquisition strategies and revenue...
Account acquisition For SEOMoz - Try a few channels in the door. A) More aggressive/direct - Contact a junior salesman, and sell him. Offer him a referral fee for anybody that uses Angular, etc that he refers. THen try that with each, and approach the head of sales. B) Less aggressive - Follow their blog, and find the key SEO thought leaders in their company or that guest blog. Those are influencers, contact them and offer them initial access. C) Partners - do the same for each of their partners. Investigate their entire client lists (eg: maybe linkedin, etc...offer it for free or reduced - and then leverage that for sales).
For major search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) - Offer directly to them, their staff, sales staff to partner to do SEO for angular apps and feed that to the search engines for free (or as a service initially of your time). Have their accounts pull you in. Partner with head SEO influencers, or Google partners. Then use that to approach Google/DuckDuck's staff saying "We already do SEO for 30 of your angular app customers".
For growth hackers - Focus on growth hackers, do cross-promo with them offering special deals. Get them to pull you into the major startups they're at.
For major SEO Firms - similar partnering, sales startegies as above.
Revenue Offer a few tiers, initally to the larger marketing agencies, do it as a service. THis would give you enough revenue to bootstrap (eg: a couple $k per month for a few clients).
Approach a few well known, high grossing startups you know are using Angular, etc and offer to either do it as a service, or to partner and do it for cheap for marketing.
All of these are worth the price you paid - your mileage may vary.
That's great to hear! My only feedback, your new site has way toooo much text. I think you need to cut out atleast 80% of it. I am pretty sure that will improve your signup/conversion rates.
Good luck!
Long copy often converts better, actually. Personally, I liked the page. I prefer it when I can find out what the service does and how before I have to sign up.
Also, consider that if, like many other pages, this one just had a few soundbites and a big "Sign Up" button, the conversion rate to signups may be higher, however the conversion rate to paying customers is another matter altogether.
I came here to say that your long-form copy is quite good!
One very small change that you can make to get more people INTO the long-form copy is to "lead with the pain" in that paragraph. For example, in the opening paragraph, you open with "Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google" and then after some picture-painting for the reader, you go in for the kill with "Right now Google can't see your website. You could change that in just a few minutes."
If you swap those two sentences, the entire package becomes a lot more persuasive. There's a boatload of similar opportunities through the rest of the page that should be pretty easy to spot, too.
Congrats on finding your focus and pushing ahead!
Very cool! Awesome to see you taking a specific focus and seeing results. How did you go about reaching your ideal market?
Do you mean how did I decide which market to target or how have I marketed to those people? Either way, same answer. I choose a market/community I was already part of and understood.
My mistake was not doing that the first time. I knew there would be a market for a headless browser service in the client-side javascript framework community. I tried to expand it to also include testing and screen capture. I didn't understand those markets. I wasn't able to offer value there, but trying prevented me from offering max value to the market I did understand.
I see. Makes perfect sense. Congrats on your recent success, best wishes for the future!