6 ms·
Ask HN: I created a landing page to find potential customers. Any tips?
Hello HN! I'm working on a startup that sells datasets from ongoing Web crawls. I detailed more of what I'm doing here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160408
I "tossed together" a landing page [ http://webscaled.com/ ] after reading an article on HN describing how the author met success selling e-books online. I'm trying to find potential customers now, mostly by tracking AdWords campaigns to see who is signing up for the newsletter.
Are there other ways that I can try to locate potential customers during this brief "landing page" period? Should I even attempt to contact other bloggers about my startup, or should I wait until the product is online?
- pedalpete 17y agoI'm actually at the same stage, so I can't offer too much advice, a few quick things. 1) I like your design, company name, branding, etc. well done 2) I'd re-write 'marketplace for datasets of the Web's structure, like the entire link graph (in chunks, of course)'. You didn't describe it that way in this post, you just said 'datasets from ongoing web crawls'. That is WAY easier to understand. I'd use that as a starting point. Just tell people what it is that the site does, or more important, what it can do for them. 3) along with the previous remark, your keywords can use some work. use the google adwords tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. you've got 'datasets' when in fact, 'dataset' has 10x as many searches. I'm sure you can get better descriptors as well. Keep up the good work!
- coderdude 17y ago1) Thanks! That's always the best feedback. ;) 2 & 3) I really needed outside perspective on this. It's been difficult verbalizing what I'm offering. I'm still working on the suggestions, but I've updated the page with a (somewhat) better description and with researched keywords. Thank you for the feedback
- pedalpete 17y agoYour description is getting better, but maybe somewhere have an example of something somebody could do with your dataset. For instance 'have you ever wanted to xyz on all the data from Acme company mashed with the data from AcMeToo, but didn't have access to that mass of data? well, now you can with Webscaled'... Something like that. Also, check out http://80legs.com/ http://80legs.com/, it seems like you're in a very similar market, but that you are pre-building the crawlers. They are a fairly well backed firm, so they've already put the time and money into some of the messaging, so use them to give you some ideas.
- coderdude 17y agoGood stuff here. :) I'm going to work on some use cases and put them on the landing page. Thanks again for your time.
- il 17y agoIf I hadn't read your previous HN post, I would have no idea what your site does. It needs more descriptive content to clarify the immediate benefits of your app. If you're running it on Adwords, unless you want your campaign slapped in a few days, you need: 1. More text on page 2. Privacy policy/ contact us on bottom 3. Basic SEO- top keywords in h1 tags or at least in text
- coderdude 17y agoIt certainly seems to lack enough description. I'm going to add a few bullet points tonight that better describes the datasets I'm selling. Thanks for the tip on Adwords. I'm going to add the privacy policy and a contact form tonight as well to cover my bases. I haven't been too concerned with SEO at this stage, mostly because the domain is new, still sandboxed, and comprised of a single page. That is why I skimped on the meta description, and Google basically ignores meta keywords anyway. Thanks
- jdrock 17y agocoderdude - I work at 80legs (http://www.80legs.com http://www.80legs.com). Just messaged you via your contact form. We should talk about a potential partnership. It would make more sense to cooperate than to compete, as we are in the same market.