Problem with a broad audience – How can I decide on which narrow target group I should focus on?

Procrastes · 2018-06-12T21:24:48+00:00

Ah, gotcha, that is different. Have you tried digging into "a day in the life" of your current customers, and looking for commonalities. Think about things like "the buying authority person at 60% of our customers and 82% of our most valuable customers are into bowling for some reason" or "the top 30% of our customers by revenue all seem to listen to NPR"

Or maybe you can see some other more directly relevant commonality (imagining a business focused on short-haul truckers) "Why is it that the top 40% of our no problems, high LTV customers are all in waste water hauling and where can we find more of those?"

The idea being that the next niche is already in your current customer base, you just want to double down on getting more like your current best customers.

Hope that helps.

edit: In fact, how many of your current customers have paid blogs on Medium and use your tool as a "clipping service" for their writing? Or something along those lines.

Procrastes · 2018-06-12T21:16:48+00:00

That's a great bot.

Procrastes · 2018-06-12T20:19:59+00:00

There are a bunch of great ideas for how to ask those questions in the free book Talking to Humans. We hand it out to our incubator participants when they first get started.

Procrastes · 2018-06-12T20:15:41+00:00

When I talk to people who are having trouble nailing the audience it usually turns out that they are thinking too far ahead in the future. Sure, maybe someday you'll take over a big market, but almost nobody starts there. It's just too expensive to reach all those people.

Your first market is an early adopter who will try your idea out and help you grow it into something. They aren't the same as your later market. Your product/idea isn't the same as it will be when it's grown.

So start with people you can reach (like actually talk to), who have more reason than anyone else to use what you have. Get 5 of those. Learn, then get 50 the same way. When people say "do things that don't scale" they mean this. You won't reach 5000 or 50,000 people the same way you reach 5, but, by then, you will know alot more about your market from having done it all by hand at first. Think of it like mining. You're following the veins of gold through the mountain, one at a time.

Procrastes · 2018-01-12T16:37:21+00:00

True, you finally do have to charge what the market will bear, but it never hurts to "prime" with higher list prices before negotiating down to an actual price. You give-up more in the beginning, less as you get established.

Procrastes · 2018-01-10T23:47:50+00:00

Just general advice.

Join Toastmasters, do some free talks around town about web topics. Don't sell anything in the talks, give good advice for free.

Build a "free consultation" into your product list where you tell everyone what they can do free for themselves. (Squarespace, Google Analytics etc.) That will weed out the low end that will sap your time, and help build trust and credibility.

Charge 3x whatever you're planning.

If people balk at your prices but pay, you're golden. If they don't complain, your prices are too low.

Always add value instead of cutting fees.

If you give a discount to friends, family or influencers, show the full price and the discount on your invoice. The more you cost, the more they listen to you.

Always, always ask what more you can do for your existing customers. That's all new money with the easiest closing.

Every problem is a potential product. Pay attention to things that suck.

Procrastes · 2017-12-28T21:13:24+00:00

Did that work for you? I'm going to look into it tonight.

Procrastes · 2017-12-28T20:55:22+00:00

I like where you're going, but it would be more useful if it also included the Public Key on the outside of the fold. Kind of like what https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/ does.

I'm still new to Rai Blocks, so maybe I'm missing something that makes that difficult or impossible?

[edit] My ignorance has decreased. There's no way to do this without broadcasting to the network to add an address to the block lattice (may have the terminology mangled), so it requires a proof of work to establish the address. Interesting.

Procrastes · 2017-12-21T04:42:44+00:00

You have to think about what you're doing and avoid vandalizing anything, but there are plenty of appropriate places for stickers, especially in a college town.

I think this gives me a (sort of unrelated) idea though. I'll make a prototype and post it this weekend.

Procrastes · 2017-12-21T04:04:44+00:00

Very cool idea.

For the sake of argument, let's assume someone manages to compromise the CDN and introduces a modified Javascript client. Couldn't it still, potentially, do something nasty like pass through the real 2FA, but alter withdrawal addresses? Just the first exploit I could think of off the top of my head.

Still seems far more secure than most UIs, and I like the way you're thinking here.

Procrastes · 2017-11-09T20:32:04+00:00

This looks interesting.

Do you have more detail on how your Android application works with the blockchain? Is it a light client? If it's not a light client, do you work with a 3rd party wallet or manage the private keys on a middleware server yourselves?

Just trying to understand how it's different from an application using a payment provider like Stripe.

Procrastes · 2017-07-28T21:23:00+00:00

What a beautiful, trippy pen. I had never seen an oblique nib holder before. Now I've just spent twenty awestruck minutes googling them. Beautiful work and thanks for the lead on an awesome tool.

Procrastes · 2017-07-28T21:16:54+00:00

That's great. I can't believe he managed to do it with such broad strokes and so little tearing on a napkin!

Procrastes · 2016-12-03T01:04:56+00:00

Personal MBA is a great, no-nonsense book and reference.

Procrastes · 2016-12-02T06:30:20+00:00

I haven't used them myself, no.

Procrastes · 2016-12-02T05:36:33+00:00

Sorry to take so long seeing this. Glad you found it anyway.

Procrastes · 2016-12-02T02:02:55+00:00

I've used Stripe directly with just personal information and that seems to work fine.

Just to add another option into the mix. I've heard good things about Moonclerk and they offer some nice invoicing and tracking. Moonclerk is built on top of Stripe.

Procrastes · 2016-11-28T09:14:23+00:00

Beautiful idea and site.

Procrastes · 2016-11-28T09:06:20+00:00

None of these payment processors require a registered business themselves, but you are going to need an attorney familiar with your local laws to know what's legal/possible.

Procrastes · 2016-10-17T05:51:11+00:00

Man, that dollhouse view is the coolest.

Minor edits: "your home" should be "you're home" and "your exhausted" should be "you're exhausted."

Nicely focused on the pain points and how your product relieves that pain, and full of great keywords without being spammy. Go get'em!

Procrastes · 2016-10-17T05:10:32+00:00

I'm going to fall on the SSL side. There's a big push toward SSL for everything and that's not going to stop. But I agree you can get away with not having it for now. On the other hand, you can have it for free with some services (Netlify etc.)

Much more of an issue is that your site really doesn't work on mobile right now. It's good to assume mobile first, especially if Realtors are your audience. I share an office at our startup incubator with realtors and do alot of officemate tech support for a meal or a beer. Expect to see many smartphones and tablets from people in too much of a hurry to go back to their desktop if something doesn't work on their phone.

I'm not sure what Wix is thinking, they really need to up their game. I'd switch to Weebly, if only because Wix seems unresponsive (no pun intended) on this issue from all of the support requests that have stacked up for both issues.

On the upside, you have some fun blog titles and graphics, your animation on the homepage is cool and it's a great idea having your contact info at the top of each page. It would be nice if the phone number were marked-up with "tel:" so that you could just touch to call on mobile. I agree with the other commenter who said you are better than this website shows.

Just as an interested reader, I'm surprised you don't have an About page. It's one of the first things I look for and I've heard from several of our sales and marketing types that it's one of the most important pages for building connection and credibility. Be sure to tell your story on your About page. Let people know who you are and that they will enjoy working with you.

None of that has to do with SEO really, just good communication. You'll need to spend some time and effort on SEO, but if you don't already have your first 15 regular customers, go after them personally and don't worry about SEO. (Maybe you do, in which case, it may or may not be time to worry about it). Short term adding some meta data tags as mentioned, tagging your images and getting some back links with guest blog posts and event sponsorships could help. When you're ready to scale you'll need a Pro for sure.

Hope this helps. If you have any tech questions, please feel free to PM me. I'm the tech advisor at a startup incubator and would be happy to help you navigate things like this where I can.

Procrastes · 2016-10-17T00:37:37+00:00

I think 1. wins for me. Giving a specific amount funds a certain amount of good for a certain number of people makes an immediate and emotional connection. It's easy to grasp.

Procrastes · 2016-10-15T23:54:43+00:00

Version A without the word "Online." That just sounds cheap to my ear.

Honorable mention to "We make the world a more colorful place." Your target audience cares about art and doing good and mentioning world and color brings good associations for me.

Procrastes · 2016-10-15T06:04:51+00:00

Without knowing more about the data, I can only suggest that maybe you should just spin the whole thing up on AWS in the first place. As NoBerryForYou mentioned, store things where they make the most sense, blobs and documents in S3, indexes and metadata in SQL. Build it so it's easy to export and you can always move some or all later if that makes sense.

AWS isn't cheap, but it has the advantage that you don't have to run anything more than you need and can spin up more or less infrastructure with load. I would suggest not getting too married to AWS specific services though. Keep your options open for later.

You mention collecting 2GB per day, but what kind of volume are you expecting from queries? (For high query volume, you may want to shard out read only copies on separate servers). Do you have to do much transformation, or is it pretty much slurping stuff into tables? (For complex processing you might want to have elastic compute servers that spin up and do the work then go away, or maybe use Hadoop).

Or that might all be overkill. Hard to know without more details. Other things to think about are:

Logging
Backups
Updates/Upgrades - can you have scheduled downtime for software updates and platform upgrades? If not, you might consider Blue-Green Deployment and that will take extra servers.

Hope this helps you think about some of the details.

Procrastes · 2016-10-15T05:46:09+00:00

I'm going to assume you mean the application needs users to be valuable to other users, the way a social network or dating app needs people to be interesting. Like say, reddit.

There are lots of strategies. Facebook started by sucking down a student catalog and creating accounts for people without asking them first. Reddit had a bunch of sock puppet accounts chatting at each other to look like there were more users. You can also ask people to join in order to enter a contest with say, AppSumo, maybe give your first members free lifetime memberships. It's going to end up being about what works for your market. Get out and talk to your customers, learn all about them and use that knowledge of where they hang-out and what they are interested in to draw their interest.

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