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

4 pointsby scollinsalmost 11 years ago
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&#x27;t engage with the product, and didn&#x27;t respond to feedback emails &#x2F; widgets.<p>Now I am trying to find new users and have followed tips from various &quot;How to get first X users&quot; threads without much luck. I have a co-founder who has background in web marketing and sales, but he hasn&#x27;t been much help with this.<p>Should I find a business co-founder who will be able to sell the product, or just tweak my signup process via iterations?

2 comments

dylanhassingeralmost 11 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...<p>- 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)<p>Your key channel needs to be able to feed the funnel and end up with enough conversions to get you some compound growth going.<p>Whether you do it, or someone helps you, doesn&#x27;t matter. You still need to find that key channel.<p>I would probably recommend trying a personal blog&#x2F;podcast + occasional webinars. you might even find a cofounder once you get this going.<p>The other thing I recommend is what I call &quot;The 2 person test&quot;. Find 2 people in your target market, show them the landing page. If at least 1 of them doesn&#x27;t go &quot;I need that!&quot; then you probably need to work on product&#x2F;market fit.<p>good luck!
fasteoalmost 11 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.<p>Then, right off the bat, you have started blaming your co-founder for a failed product launch. This is no good.<p>Submit a &quot;Show HN:&quot; post with your product, let´s see what you have got and let´s see how HN community can help.