[HN Gopher] What we would've done differently in the first year ...
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What we would've done differently in the first year of
bootstrapping our company
Author : DtNZNkLN
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-07-28 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (foundersconfidential418.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (foundersconfidential418.substack.com)
| jarsin wrote:
| I really wonder about spending time on #1.Content Marketing in
| the new age of search + AI.
|
| Most searches are filled with large paragraphs of AI responses at
| the very top of the page now days.
|
| Then everyone doing content marketing is using the same AI to
| spew out massive spam sites of worthless content.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| It might impact top of funnel (visits), but quality content
| will really stand out once visitors are at your site, which
| should increase conversion rate. Regardless, quality content is
| important for branding/perceived reputation, which is going to
| be helpful.
|
| It's easier to stand out when everyone goes crappy and cheap.
| This won't change.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| lol, a website is not a good way to promote a business for
| most startups. Even a YT, facebook, or linkedin page will
| generate better lead volume.
|
| The nonexistent brand recognition means most SEO and online
| advertising is a waste of time and money. i.e. random users
| are usually not going to suddenly discover your products and
| services in significant volumes.
|
| Mostly we would see around 2400 new users after each
| contextually relevant community event, 400 per trade-show,
| and around 25 per informal business gathering.
|
| To match similar lead volume on the web, it would take about
| 8 months to reach the same volumes as a single community
| event. i.e. random browsers are generally not going to
| investigate unknown brands unless they were tipped off by
| another user. You will see that exponential curve initially
| as early adopters share their experience with friends, and
| more users investigate the "free tier".
|
| That exponential growth also requires persistent release
| updates (extinction rate is about 5 months), monitoring
| customer feedback, and keeping your profit mode traction
| quiet. However, do not rely on people stepping up to help out
| on any vanity project, and plan 2 month release cycles around
| your core use-case for paying customers.
|
| The key to survival as a company is cash flow in the front
| door, and providing value to customers. Unless you can do
| both, than form a nonprofit instead.
|
| Note, every castle needs a moat with legal alligators... If
| the product/service technological barrier is too low, than a
| competitor in a better brand position will scoop the market
| your team cultivated.
|
| As a startup your chances are 1:22, and even lower if you are
| not objectively studying other firms founding years. Not the
| success stories, but rather the 21 other firms that didn't
| win the launch lottery.
|
| As a side note, entering a market already saturated with crap
| is usually economically unfeasible. The goodwill available
| with consumers has been burned already.
|
| Best of luck, =3
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Not a founder at the moment, but I do purchase a lot of b2b
| SaaS/infra services. Usually I hear of the brand first, but
| really high quality content is one factor that makes me
| decide between competitors. That's all I meant.
| neom wrote:
| What it seems like you are specifically talking about is
| advertising? Content marketing is just having the right
| collateral in the right channel at the right time, this can be
| as simple as making sure you have stickers at a meetup. SEO the
| way we did it at DigitalOcean is probably still possible (that
| is high quality tutorials about relevant tech), but that is an
| expensive undertaking and you have to ride it out if you're
| going to do it (+ find someone like Etel Sverdlov).
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Content marketing isn't just about search. It's about putting
| things out that people want to read, or want to share, or use
| as a reference, with their general awareness of your site
| coming alongside that. Sure, if it's SEO'd that can be nice,
| but SEO is competitive - really good content often isn't,
| especially when that content comes from your own unique areas
| of expertise.
|
| Our blog's been on the front page here twice in the last two
| months. Once [1] was me posting, but the posted blog did not
| directly pitch my company at all - it was just an interesting
| retrospective about what I learned at my last one. The other
| blog post [2] was explicitly about us, but it was posted
| organically (I was actually asleep at the time and woke up to a
| bunch of slack alerts). Neither has been searched for very
| much, nor do I expect they will be in the near future - but
| they did bring in hundreds of signups and a dozen high-intent
| inbound calls, which is more than enough to make them
| successful from a marketing perspective.
|
| For comparison, a decent client call would take many, many
| hours of manual outreach, meaning that each of those posts was
| the equivalent of months of grindy, spammy, demoralizing labor
| on my part even if we set aside all the engineers they brought
| in.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901224
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Funnily enough, all the crap out there makes useful content
| more valuable, not less.
|
| Sometimes it's harder to find on Google now, but people still
| need it, so if you can create it and help them find it, they
| will be grateful. And grateful people will take out their
| wallets.
| DtNZNkLN wrote:
| I could not agree more with this. I think as the quantity of
| content increases, quality content will only increase in
| value.
| p0nce wrote:
| Time to invest in non-AI content
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I just seems to me that the problem is market fit. If you are
| finding it hard to get people to sign up, then maybe you are
| tackling the wrong problem or framing the product in the wrong
| way.
| neilv wrote:
| > _This experience allowed us to set a clear focus for the next
| phase of our roadmap: No More Martins._
|
| If you decide either that you owe it to Martin to help him
| succeed, and/or you want other people like Martin to succeed...
| you could dedicate a team of some of your best people to high-
| touch determine whatever is required to help Martin
| _specifically_ to succeed. Validating it with the success of the
| original Martin. (Preferably constraining the approaches to
| things that might conceivably scale. But if necessary doing
| things that you initially don 't see how to scale.)
|
| Instead of roadmap phase "No More Martins", it could be "No
| Martin Left Behind", "Martin Tiger Team", "360 Degree Martin
| Experience", or "Martin of Oz".
| DtNZNkLN wrote:
| Because we're just 2 people, the only team we have is us :)
| That's why whatever our focus is becomes the next phase of our
| roadmap.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Unfortunately, a lot of this compliance stuff is really
| confusing. To make matters worse, there is shockingly little good
| information out there to help you through it. If any accountant,
| tax specialist, or business backend process expert of any kind is
| reading this: There is an SEO goldmine waiting for you if you
| write clear, step-by-step instructions for compliance stuff for
| bootstrapped C-corps._
|
| Won't LLM businesses steal this SEO attempt in an instant?
|
| More likely, keep that know-how as a black box service, maybe
| with some IT automation.
|
| For advertising that with SEO, you could make the SEO text LLM-
| aware, and lean harder on not just providing enough information
| for someone reading it to think "these people seem to know what
| they're talking about; I should give them my business", but
| crafting the article in such a way that the desired conclusion is
| preserved in the output of the robo-plagiarist.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I can't help but feel that is pushing another SEO turtle on the
| stack. There's always another rung of SEO bottom-feeder trying
| to steal your thunder, I feel like.
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