"businesser" people can do marketing and user support. use google and twitter search to find people looking for what your product does, but don't know about your particular product. reply to them personally and try not to sound too spammy.
same for user support. reach out to your current users and find out what they like and don't like. gather feedback to deliver to your more techy partners who can do the actual implementation.
Unless you are automating this (i.e. spamming), it isn't worth your time for their product. Do the math: how many people would you find per hour? How many would you contact, per hour? How many trial signups? How many convert to a paying plan? What is their ARPU? Of that, what is the margin?
I'm looking at their pricing table, and it suggests that a customer is likely to be worth less than $10 a month in profit to them, unless they are an institutional account.
Concentrate on stuff which scales out of proportion to time invested, or you're just buying yourself a low-skill low-value job.
This is a really valid concern. Right now it's really tempting to use my time inefficiently essentially building up unsustainable expectations from our user base. To be fair, I've given in many times, and I write personalized thank you cards to people who pay (we don't advertise that anywhere, so I can stop whenever it becomes unmanageable), but a lot of the things that I could be doing don't make a lot of sense when I run the numbers, which is frustrating. I see all these other businesses running huge adwords campaigns (we tried it, didn't get good ROI, we'll try again later, but not yet), hiring employees, moving into offices, managing payrolls, schmoozing with clients (something that's hard to do in rural Ohio) and generally doing things which the numbers say aren't a good use of my time.
Comments
"businesser" people can do marketing and user support. use google and twitter search to find people looking for what your product does, but don't know about your particular product. reply to them personally and try not to sound too spammy.
same for user support. reach out to your current users and find out what they like and don't like. gather feedback to deliver to your more techy partners who can do the actual implementation.
reply to them personally
Unless you are automating this (i.e. spamming), it isn't worth your time for their product. Do the math: how many people would you find per hour? How many would you contact, per hour? How many trial signups? How many convert to a paying plan? What is their ARPU? Of that, what is the margin?
I'm looking at their pricing table, and it suggests that a customer is likely to be worth less than $10 a month in profit to them, unless they are an institutional account.
Concentrate on stuff which scales out of proportion to time invested, or you're just buying yourself a low-skill low-value job.
This is a really valid concern. Right now it's really tempting to use my time inefficiently essentially building up unsustainable expectations from our user base. To be fair, I've given in many times, and I write personalized thank you cards to people who pay (we don't advertise that anywhere, so I can stop whenever it becomes unmanageable), but a lot of the things that I could be doing don't make a lot of sense when I run the numbers, which is frustrating. I see all these other businesses running huge adwords campaigns (we tried it, didn't get good ROI, we'll try again later, but not yet), hiring employees, moving into offices, managing payrolls, schmoozing with clients (something that's hard to do in rural Ohio) and generally doing things which the numbers say aren't a good use of my time.