I got the first paying customer for Appointment Reminder the first day it was open for business. (DB id #22, after a bunch of test accounts and friends & family demos.) ~2.5 years and ~$1,000 later he still happily pays $29 a month. This was not unknowable prior to launching the site (though I was still on pins and needles): I had already walked the sales pitch for it to enough businesses in downtown Chicago that I was pretty sure some number would buy what I was selling if it were put in front of them.
I think people who are pre-business vastly overestimate the difficulty of getting the first sale and probably vastly underestimate the difficulty of reaching scale. Gail Goodman has a presentation on the Long SaaS Ramp of Death. When you say those words in a group of SaaS entrepreneurs you'll see pained recognition on everybody's faces, even those (of us?) whose businesses are fairly successful. Dear God does figuring out the scalable marketing piece take time. (I've got it figured out for Bingo Card Creator, but have only isolated bits and pieces of the orchestra playing in disjointed fashion for Appointment Reminder.)
I kind of feel like I beat on these drums to death, but organic SEO, AdWords, lifecycle emails, and an optimized first-run experience are sort of my favorite arrows in the quiver for increasing sales. That and a whole lot of just grinding it out.
Also, tie a string around your finger for Rob Walling's presentation from Microconf 2013 where he takes HitTail, a SaaS he acquired, from ~X to ~30X in recurring revenue over the course of a year. (There are numbers in the presentation but I remember him asking us to be circumspect about them.) He goes into month by month detail of what he was doing, and you'll understand the level of sheer frustration involved until hard work and ingenuity starts to reveal "flywheels" (his word for scalable/repeatable acquisition channels). As far as I know, this isn't on the Internet yet, but I expect it will be late this year.
It has a proprietary algorithm that looks at the keywords people are finding you with and letting you know which long tail keywords you have a clear shot of ranking high (e.g. position #1) for so you can write specific content targeting that phrase. Unfortunately, it's getting harder to do this as more referrer traffic is coming in as (not provided)
Thanks! That makes sense. I've noticed more and more "not provided". What's the deal with that? I was assuming I was doing something wrong :-( I don't much seo.
If you're authenticated when doing a search, google hides the kw for the target site. What you see now in keywords is just from users that aren't signed-in.
Patio11, can you explain more about what you mean by SEO? Do you mean writing blog posts targeting long tail keywords that are low volume but easy to rank for? Or, do you mean creating SEO landing pages for specific market segments you're targeting? Or, do you mean something totally different? What's the most effective way to "do SEO"?
I think people who are pre-business vastly overestimate the difficulty of getting the first sale and probably vastly underestimate the difficulty of reaching scale. Gail Goodman has a presentation on the Long SaaS Ramp of Death. When you say those words in a group of SaaS entrepreneurs you'll see pained recognition on everybody's faces, even those (of us?) whose businesses are fairly successful. Dear God does figuring out the scalable marketing piece take time. (I've got it figured out for Bingo Card Creator, but have only isolated bits and pieces of the orchestra playing in disjointed fashion for Appointment Reminder.)
http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
I kind of feel like I beat on these drums to death, but organic SEO, AdWords, lifecycle emails, and an optimized first-run experience are sort of my favorite arrows in the quiver for increasing sales. That and a whole lot of just grinding it out.
Also, tie a string around your finger for Rob Walling's presentation from Microconf 2013 where he takes HitTail, a SaaS he acquired, from ~X to ~30X in recurring revenue over the course of a year. (There are numbers in the presentation but I remember him asking us to be circumspect about them.) He goes into month by month detail of what he was doing, and you'll understand the level of sheer frustration involved until hard work and ingenuity starts to reveal "flywheels" (his word for scalable/repeatable acquisition channels). As far as I know, this isn't on the Internet yet, but I expect it will be late this year.