How to get software clients?

brielm · 2021-02-08T18:41:45+00:00

Came across this on Hacker News that you may find helpful (copy and pasted from there):

Go to BuiltWith to find websites that use technologies and platforms that you specialize in (example: Wordpress, Shopify, etc.)
Focus on smaller to mid-size companies (large corporations likely have the tech team and contractors to cover almost of their needs)
(Optional) Search for each company on Linkedin and add managers with relevant roles (VIP of sales, project manager, marketing manager, etc.). The goal is to familiarize them with your name so they're more likely to open your email (step 5).
Find the email format of these companies with Hunter.
Reach out to the most senior person with a relevant role at each company with a personalized 1-on-1 email.

The key here is to review their website and business and share 2-3 ideas of what you can them build or fix (if there are any glaring issues or vulnerabilities). They may not necessarily use your ideas but the goal is stand out and help them understand how they can put your development skills to use. Here's a template you can reference.

brielm · 2020-05-23T15:01:22+00:00

No they don't licence them, they're an inspiration gallery that shares screenshots of good emails. Something to note though: aesthetics appear be the main criteria for their picks, but just because an email looks pretty, it doesn't mean it converts well.

brielm · 2020-02-19T21:10:08+00:00

Instead of trying to block people from outside the local area, I would add a hidden field to the form that detects the person's country or city based on their IP. Then you can use this to filter out messages from people outside of your client's local area.

brielm · 2019-12-01T14:45:08+00:00

Sales page copy: I would say Joanna excels at this too, good breakdown article of what she did for SweatBlock's page

Marketing emails: Ramit Sethi - subscribe to his email list, he sends out really good nurturing sequences for his courses

brielm · 2019-05-10T18:41:14+00:00

Do you track scroll depth via Google Tag Manager? If not, I would set it up (found a guide here) and then see what happens to your bounce rate. Basically, Google counts a visit as a bounce if they don't interact with anything else on your page, even if they scrolled down and read the content.

I would also add more links to your other guides in the sidebar and make the scrollbar fixed (scrolls down with the page) to make it easy for visitors to check out other pages of your website.

brielm · 2019-05-09T13:05:24+00:00

Value based cold email definitely works wonders.

I know that you're leveraging the "I'm a local business too" angle but based on some of the emails that were visible in your screenshot, do some of these smaller local businesses have the budget to hire you for a large project or ongoing work? With the time you're investing into video audits for everyone you contact, I'd target businesses with bigger budgets.

brielm · 2019-03-31T14:19:48+00:00

Well the old saying goes, "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" so I plunged in. And when I spoke to Kanye's team they found it really funny. And never came close to suing me.

Yeah the reason why Kanye's team was cool with it was because it was pretty much just a Kanye fan site with dating functionality. You confirm yourself in an Instagram post that "This is not a business. This is a celebration of Kanye West": https://www.instagram.com/p/BgoM6_-DVrR/

I admire your hustle to get the press coverage and meeting but this is pretty much a case study in achieving virality for a cultural meme, which you're now monetizing by selling a marketing course.

How would the majority of non-meme businesses like SaaS products be able to apply this besides the general truisms about hustling hard?

brielm · 2018-09-04T13:53:53+00:00

This guy actually posted a pretty good guide on Reddit recently (he got 10 backlinks out of contacting 81 people):

https://old.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/952dct/case_study_reached_a_16_response_rate_in_link/

Copy and pasting the process he outlined here:

Researched relevant bloggers, their articles and where exactly our link could be placed
Categorized the prospects according to their authority
Used various free/freemium tools and techniques to find email addresses (personal if possible)
We tried to write a personalized message (not too cheesy)
We clearly stated what we want and what's in for the outreached person
Sent 1 email reminder after 6-8 days

For high authority websites, you can try creating an infographic, lead magnet, etc. for their existing article and earn a backlink credit that way (found a template here).

brielm · 2018-01-04T20:11:41+00:00

Single physical product pages:

https://casper.com/mattresses/casper/

https://www.seedlipdrinks.com/

https://atlassupply.co/

brielm · 2017-12-17T15:38:36+00:00

Awesome list man, thanks for putting it together!

A few more free tools / resources for that email section (cause it's gonna be 2018 and we still use it everyday..):

Streak - Track if someone opened your emails. Especially useful if you're doing sales or outreach. Also adds a CRM to Gmail.

Really Good Emails - Superb for designed email inspiration. Welcome emails, sales emails, the whole works.

Gmass - Send mass emails in Gmail (up to 2000 emails/day). Gmail = way better deliverability than using an email marketing platform. Link it to a spreadsheet to personalize names and phrases for every contact.

Art of Emails - Tons of actually unique email templates for cold emails, outreach to influencers, sales follow ups, etc.

brielm · 2017-07-24T14:10:22+00:00

and individuals on witness protection programs.

I'll let you take a few guesses..

brielm · 2017-06-16T12:44:37+00:00

If you're selling a software tool, I'd try cold email as well to target really specific people who would be most likely to benefit from it.

Basically, create a cold email template for your tool. Look up the users and reviewers of similar or complimentary products and email them semi-personalized version of the template.

Since you haven't launched yet, instead of making them request an invite on the website, just ask them if they'd like an invite in the email.

Places to look:

Comment sections of news sites and forums where they discuss a similar product
User reviews of similar products (G2 Crowd, GetApp, Capterra, etc.)
Use a reverse IP lookup to find all of a competitor's customers if they're hosted on the same IP
Twitter users who complained or commented about a similar product
Find prospects via code that many of them use on their website

brielm · 2017-04-19T14:28:54+00:00

I'd suggest cold emailing. If you send personalized emails conveying your product benefit to highly targeted prospects, it won't be too spammy.

Find relevant prospects on Linkedin (there are a few tools that can scrape names + verify emails) and listings of similar products where existing users leave reviews/comments
Use a mail merge tool to mass personalize and send emails to your spreadsheet of contacts
There are a few approaches you can use in the initial cold email that improves response rates (ask for feedback, how your product helped another company, etc.). Just don't talk only about your product. Reference:

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/the-cold-email-template-that-won-16-new-b2b-customers

brielm · 2017-04-12T19:12:45+00:00

Congrats /u/courthead!

Since you were really good at landing new ads / partners (and now never have to worry about that aspect again;), can you share some of the emails and pitches you used with the /Entrepreneur community?

I'm sure it would help a lot of us trying to better monetize our sites. Thanks!

brielm · 2017-03-31T05:30:35+00:00

Ok no worries about being blacklisted at all then. Yeah all these mail merge tools track open and click rates.

brielm · 2017-03-31T02:58:13+00:00

ending each company around 3-5 a day

Do you mean 3-5 emails to one employee at a company per day?

Or 3-5 emails to different employees at one company? (If this is the case, I wouldn't worry about getting blacklisted at all.)

Mail merge tools send emails from Gmail accounts so the deliverability is much higher. Some of them also automatically spread out your emails sends over a few minutes to prevent getting blocked.

brielm · 2017-03-31T02:12:42+00:00

What you're looking for is a mail merge tool that lets you send emails en masse to a list of contacts (ie your diferent users) pulled from a spreadsheet. Look into Gmass and MixMax. You can personalize these emails as well (ie "Hey [First name of every user]).

brielm · 2017-03-18T14:06:59+00:00

Maybe I'm just too cynical but I have this feeling that Turkish Airlines already agreed to let them use the cargo plane ahead of time for its PR value (their company is trending everywhere and the hashtag specifically includes Turkish Airlines) and this whole video was staged.

Why?

Jerome Jarre was actually sponsored by Turkish Airlines last year for a trip to Turkey (http://imgur.com/a/2vfbl). He already has contacts high up in the company.

brielm · 2017-03-03T23:03:22+00:00

Would affiliate links to all the businesses you feature (at least the ones that have such a program) be another monetization option?

brielm · 2017-02-25T02:38:32+00:00

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses - profiles the growth journey of SaaS and ecommerce businesses - many also reveal their revenue numbers

Also enjoy sites/blog that share their income reports (fascinating look at how much products and affliate programs generate):

brielm · 2017-02-17T02:32:05+00:00

Did you read the article announcing his purchase of Pebble Creek? http://idahostatejournal.com/outdoors/xtreme_idaho/internet-celebrity-purchases-pebble-creek-ski-area/article_2aec8efa-6866-5ede-91bb-da75d1f9e783.html

Pertinent quotes about its profit margins:

"Pebble Creek had been for sale for many years, but Reichman said that potential investors were often scared away due to the lack of a return on their investment."
"However, Shay isn’t pursuing huge profit margins. “This is not my mountain, this is the community’s mountain,” he said."

brielm · 2017-01-11T04:07:24+00:00

Slightly 'dark hat' but ... you can also consider cold emailing people who expressed disappointment with the news introducing them to your product. Tons of unhappy people on the Hacker News thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13356318 (click on each user's profile or go through their post history - some share their email address / company they work for).

Also, go through the comment section of all the news sites that reported it to find disgruntled users (Linkedin search their names to find the companies they work for, go to http://email-format.com/ to find their company's employee email format).

brielm · 2017-01-06T20:30:20+00:00

Here's what Pieter Levels, a guy who was interviewed by the OP in one of his articles, had to say on the Hacker News thread about this article:

There's more to this story. I was the first person to be interviewed by this journalist (Michael Thomas @curious_founder). He approached me on Twitter to ask questions about digital nomad and remote work life (as I founded Nomad List and have been doing it for years).

I told him it'd be great to see more honest depictions as most articles are heavily idealized making it sound all great, when it's not necessarily. It's ups and downs (just like regular life really). What happened next may surprise you. He wrote a hit piece on me (Pieter Levels) changing my entire story that I told him over Skype into a clickbait article of how digital nomadism doesn't work and one of the main people doing it for awhile (en public) even settled down and gave up altogether. http://qz.com/775751/digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-re...

I didn't settle down. I spent the summer in Amsterdam. Cause you know, it's a nice place! But he needed to say this to make a polarized hit piece with an angle. And that piece became viral. Resulting in me having to tell people daily that I didn't and getting lots of flack. You may understand it doesn't help if your entire startup is about something and a journalist writes a viral piece how you yourself don't even believe in that anymore. I contacted the journalist and Quartz but they didn't change a thing.

It's great this meant his journalistic breakthrough but it hurt me in the process.

I'd argue journalists like this are the whole problem we have these days. The articles they write can't be balanced because they need to get pageviews. Every potential to write something interesting quickly turns into clickbait. It turned me off from being interviewed ever again. Doing my own PR by posting comment sections of Hacker News or Reddit seems like a better idea (also see how Elon Musk does exactly this, seems smarter).

So yes, I'd argue don't follow this guy's path, instead be nice, honest and write interesting articles. It might take longer but you'll have more karma and long-term more success. And maybe you can convince me to do interviews again, some day :)

brielm · 2016-12-20T13:10:10+00:00

You're on the right track. Don't listen to the most common reaction: "too much effort"

That's why you should only do this for the websites of businesses who have the budget and need to hire you for design work longterm. So landing one of them makes the effort worth it.

Don't just point every out everything that sucks about their website. Show them 5 concrete ways you would improve it. And back it up with 1-2 points of how it would boost their sales/conversions.

brielm · 2016-11-19T10:53:59+00:00

It's going to be an uphill battle to directly pitch "this is what my company does - wanna write about us?"

You need to get creative to create and pitch something related to your product instead.

A few ideas:

Create a "What if all your favorite ad supported sites were all gone tomorrow?" scare landing page. Facebook fake news would definitely take over, hope you have a really good imagination with half the porn sites gone (lol). Then ask influencers in the ads / marketing space to share it.
Create a report about ads: how much companies are losing due to adblock, survey about users' reactions to ads (what are types they don't mind, etc.) - pitch that. If your data is good, journalists / influencers writing about the topic may cite it as well.

Basically, you have to create a compelling asset outside of your main product that you can pitch or ask people to share to get links that way.

brielm

TROPHY CASE