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I run a one man B2B SaaS (www.hrpartner.io) and marketing has proven to be a real mystic art for me. I always thought the programming would be the tough bit, a

I run a one man B2B SaaS (www.hrpartner.io) and marketing has proven to be a real mystic art for me. I always thought the programming would be the tough bit, and the marketing the easy part, but it has been totally the opposite in my experience. My biggest issue has been finding the right channel to market. I've tried Facebook and Twitter advertising (on a small scale - about 5 campaigns at $100 a pop) without much result. I've spent over $2K on Google AdWords with limited success. In all above cases, I got a lot of people visiting my site, with about one in 20 visitors actually signing up. But after that, very few signups stayed around for more than one or two login sessions, and even fewer signed up for paid plans. (We use Intercom to track conversions and activity) Don't get me wrong, I am not really complaining as I have a steady core of users who seems to use the app regularly, but I am mystified at the very low rate of converting visitor and initial account creators into regular users. Next step is to look at specific review sites such as GetApp and Capterra. Our product also integrated tightly with Xero so we just advertised in the Xero User Magazine this month which will be distributed to thousands of users at their US convention soon, so we will see what comes out of that. My biggest struggle is that because I am still actively developing and adding new features to the app, I have problems putting down the coding tools and building momentum with marketing. Oh, and as for pricing, I've got a free forever plan for smaller companies (up to 10 employees), with paid plans after that. Expectation was that smaller companies could onboard for no cost, then as they grew, they would upgrade to a paid plan, but because we have only been live for a few months, still too early to tell if that will be a great strategy. I may drop the free plan later this year. We also built a totally free companion site (www.staffstatus.io) that integrated with HR Partner and made free to ALL sizes of companies to see if we could get some side business (similar to what crew.co are doing with unsplash.com, but so far it doesn't seem to be doing what we intended - though it is really early days for that too). Looking forward to keeping an eye on this thread to see what other solo SaaS drivers are doing. Feel free to ask any questions or critique any of my methods.

simonswords82 10y ago
You're doing a lot of things right but drop the free plan ASAP It's all the support and overhead of free customers with none of the financial upside. I presume you need to start generating proper revenue/profits from this site ASAP. The free plan will hinder that. Adwords is indeed a waste of time and money, Facebook is too. I spent a lot more than you before I realised that, well done for working out it's a waste much sooner than I did! Bing is probably worth your attention. Capterra will drive good leads initially but they'll fall off after a while. Keep an eye on your spend there and pull it if the conversions dry up. Get App always had too high a cost of entry for me to try. Stop thinking the next feature you add to the app will grow your client base. There's a lot of shitty HR apps out there with excellent marketing making more money than you :) Don't make the mistake of thinking that your app can be used in all countries and so why wouldn't we market to the US (or <insert other country here>)? I'll tell you why - there are a lot of large, incumbent and well funded HR apps in the US that you're going up against and you'll lose every time because you don't understand exactly what the US market want. If you're based in Australia focus all of your attention in what Australian businesses want to see. You probably also need to decide what size of company gets the most value out of your app and go after them - same for industry vertical(s). "A person who chases two rabbits catches neither". Work out what rabbit to chase, stop chasing the others, go after that rabbit with all your marketing might. Shape your products roadmap off the back of what that one rabbit needs for you to capture it. Shape your USP off the back of this too. "ANNOUNCING A BEAUTIFUL, EASY TO USE, WEB BASED HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM." is far too generic to appeal to any one audience - so guess what, it appeals to nobody. Source: I run a HR software app called http://www.staffsquared.com http://www.staffsquared.com. I've been where you are. Good luck!
- agopaul 10y ago
  Could you expand on the choice of the advertising platform? Do you find that Bing performs better than others?
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Yep - less competition and hence lower PPC prices for keywords that are highly sought after on Adwords. There is of course less traffic overall, but more of it converts at a price we can stomach. Would definitely recommend anybody in any industry struggling to make Adwords prices stack up check out Bing.
    - zaroth 10y ago
      Years ago when I did this sort of thing, 'less traffic overall' was maybe 5% of the traffic on Bing that you would see on Google. Often traffic was so low it wasn't worth the extra overhead of trying to manage the campaign. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and to what degree?
      - simonswords82 10y ago
        Totally agree with you, that was the case before but not now... Microsoft have slowly caught up and now operate around the 20% search volume mark versus Google's 60%. Here's more info on the market share breakdown: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-February-2016-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases... The thing to also keep in mind is the %'s will vary according to the preferences of your target audience. For example, our target audience are office based with an admin focus. They tend to use a Microsoft OS, which usually has Internet Explorer and you guessed it - has Bing setup by default! I suspect if you're going after a more "techie" crowd that they're more likely to use Chrome, and therefore use Google for their search needs. Obviously all that really matters are the conversion numbers for your particular app. So I usually recommend that people set up some ads in Bing to mimic what they've setup at Google Adwords. Bing has a Google Adword importer, so just import your Adwords and then run them on Bing for a few weeks to see how you fare. That's what we did for Staff Squared, and we were much happier with the Bing numbers than we had been Google - and still advertise on Bing even now.
hluska 10y ago
Sounds like you're doing great! If I could offer one bit of friendly criticism, it relates to this sentence: My biggest struggle is that because I am still actively developing and adding new features to the app, I have problems putting down the coding tools and building momentum with marketing. I keyed in on that particular sentence because it sounds almost exactly like something I said in a few of my own solo ventures. The longer that I kept adding features, the easier it got for me to think that the next 'killer' feature would turn everything around and I'd end up with legions of customers begging me to take their money. In retrospect, I think that this all relates back to how, for me at least, development is easier than marketing. Marketing always felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall, but dev was the exact opposite - I'd get things done and get all of these constant little rewards. I wish that someone had told me to freeze features for a few weeks and get out there and start hustling. In retrospect, I realize that I wasted much of my runway adding in features that nobody would ever actually pay for. Since I got so distant from customers, I didn't realize that until it was too late.
- laurencei 10y ago
  Andrew Chen actually wrote a blog[0] on this exact topic titled: "The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product" [0] http://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-that-the-next-new-feature-will-suddenly-make-people-use-your-product/ http://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-th...
  - hluska 10y ago
    Good link. Thanks for sharing!
  - FooBarWidget 10y ago
    I remember reading a Joel Spolsky blog post a couple of years ago that contradicts this. I can't find the post anymore but I think he said that out of everything he tried, nothing gained him more customers than adding new features.
- cyberferret 10y ago
laurencei 10y ago
Love the site. One small thing I noticed - remove the 'carousel' from your landing page on the top image. I was reading your main CTA - when it suddenly changed to the other image. It is too fast. If you want both - perhaps A/B to see which one is best. Also - you mentioned you are using Intercom.io; have you tried using their feature Acquire? It allows you to communicate with potential customers on your home page. I've used it on one of my sites with great success...
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Thanks. Good tip about the carousel - I may consider randomising the web page to show either/or and measure, or else increase the time on the carousel flip. I don't use Acquire yet - mainly a cost reason because it would increase our monthly Intercom bill quite a bit, but also a 'back of the clock' reason. I notice that being in Australia, a LOT of site visits and new user subs happen in the middle of the night for me (i.e. on the other side of the world), and if I had users pinging me with questions etc. before signup then it would mean lots of sleepless nights, and less than stellar interaction with me. I do plan to add it in later though, perhaps when I have enough revenue to add team members to look after acquisition and support.
  - vram22 10y ago
    >I notice that being in Australia, a LOT of site visits and new user subs happen in the middle of the night for me ..... then it would mean lots of sleepless nights, and less than stellar interaction with me. You may know this already, but there are some customer interaction (not sure what is the right term here) services that, if you are not logged into them, will convert the user's IM into an email to you. https://tawk.to https://tawk.to is one of them (I use it on my web site); Olark may also support that feature. Then you can just answer in the morning. Of course it's not the same as being able to reply immediately, but better than nothing.
caseysoftware 10y ago
> Don't get me wrong, I am not really complaining as I have a steady core of users who seems to use the app regularly, but I am mystified at the very low rate of converting visitor and initial account creators into regular users. Have you asked them? No, I'm dead serious. Have you dropped any of them a note or scheduled a call to see why they don't stick around? If you can gain information that increases your ratio from 1 in 20 to 2 in 20, you double your funnel (and potentially revenue) immediately.
- shimon 10y ago
  Yes, this. It seems almost too obvious but a few interviews can be incredibly revealing. You should also do this with your exising happy customers, and ask them how they'd explain the value to someone else.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Hi, and thanks for your feedback. I do ask the clients who don't stick around, but unfortunately I almost never get replies. I have an automated Intercom personalised note that goes out after 30 days if they don't log back in, but get next to 0 replies, or else one liner "Not really interested" type replies. A few months ago when I only had about a hundred signups, I actually sat down one weekend and wrote individual emails to people who had not logged in in a while. I even went to the lengths of visiting their own company web pages and checking their location via Intercom so I could open the letter with "Hey Bob, hope the weather is great in Berlin - I see you run a small catering company..." etc. but even those got negligible replies. A little better is asking my existing users. After about 20 logins to our system, I have Intercom pop up an in app message asking them to name one thing the love and one thing they don't like about my app. That one almost always gets a response and is proving to be really useful, but alas not helping with retaining users who sign up and disappear...
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    Have you tried to cross reference referral source to active users? If people find you based on certain keywords or links, they may think that your tool solves the problem and once they try it... yes? no? It may be that your SEO is (inadvertently?) describing you as one thing when you're not that at all.
ozim 10y ago
I am no expert but I think if you sell B2B ads on FB and Twitter are not best place. It doesn't look professional IMO. And I think really people who make decisions in business are not hanging out on FB. More like on LinkedIn and specialist sites relevant for their business.
- gk1 10y ago
  Yes to testing LinkedIn. Twitter could also work if your audience hangs out there (you may be surprised...). On Twitter and LinkedIn you're catching people as they're browsing, not actively looking for a solution, so you should promote educational content rather than the product/service itself.
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Good tip. I've pulled all paid advertising from Facebook and Twitter, but there are a TON of HR related companies on there tweeting articles and advice, so nowadays I actively seek out great articles and use BufferApp to schedule a regular trickle of them on my own feeds. I get a fair few new followers and retweets etc. this way, but impossible at this stage to measure how that relates to sign ups.
- blahi 10y ago
  That's just plain wrong. I'm sorry I can't be more constructive but what you say makes sense on paper, but is not true in reality. b2b purchasing decisions are still made by people who are as obsessed with social media as everybody else. You just have to figure out the best way to approach them. LinkedIn on the other hands has a very high bid floor which makes it a very tough to turn any return on the investment.
eterm 10y ago
I'm not an HR manager, but one of your main points on your landing page is security, yet there are a few ways you link to unsecure versions of pages, including login pages. In fact the sister site you built doesn't have a certificate at all. Modern browsers will show scary warnings when login pages aren't served over https.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Thanks for the heads up - We do use https all through the actual web app, but the server has the option to run http or https together. We are in the process of making it enforce https on all web app pages. The main page should link to only https pages on the web app so I will check it out again to ensure it does. I know the main page links to a documentation site and a blog, but those are running on two independent servers without https at this stage - we may add it later, but they are 'non critical' site that are purely informational and don't store any customer data. As for the sister site, yes that was a quick weekend build also running on a separate server. Seeing as that is a totally zero revenue site, I didn't want to spend any additional $$$ out of pocket at this early stage (though I may try out one of those free SSL certs that are becoming available now). If it proves to be useful in funnelling users to our main HR site then I will definitely beef up the security on that too.
buss_jan 10y ago
Please excuse, if my comments come off as presumptuous or overbearing, you certainly know your business and customers better than I do, I’ll just rattle off what my set of fresh eyes observed and what I think you might want to look into. In general, what stands out to me is that you do not have a clear USP and you do not seem to speak your target markets language, it might be that since you are addressing markets in many different verticals that you have no clear persona in mind to convince with your copy, no specific set of pain points or benefits to address directly.  In any case, I would try to interview my current customers, ask them to describe in their own words how your software is helping them, what pain they were experiencing before and how they previously dealt with it.  Then you can go about ‘cloning’ them by marketing to specific verticals, have landing pages for hospitals and retailers, agencies and address problems specific to these industries using the information and sound bites you mined from your customer research.  This will also allow you to do some long-tail SEO, produce relevant white papers, tailor your testimonials and in general tighten your copy since you now know who you are talking to.   Take a look for instance at your benefits, they are not benefits, at best they are product features: “Reminders & Communication”, and some are not even that: “No Install Or Setup”. How about “Never fail audit xyz again with our bullet employee foozle tracking system”, find a specific problem and tie it to what your software can do.   There is an interesting line on your landing page: “Stay on top of critical legislative and legal requirements to store and recall employee.“ How many businesses are not compliant with these requirements, what are the consequences, use this risk and fear in your marketing, it is a strong motivator and sure to catch the attention of any business owner or HR manager, HR is inherently boring if you can’t excite at least agitate. This is also a great opportunity to educate, small business owner, entrepreneurs, agencies, we all like to skimp on HR, do more research on the legal risk and host a webinar for business owners educating them on it, underscore the necessity of reliable HR management for becoming a ‘serious’ business.   I also found there was a lack of strong social proof on your site, this is HR show some people, preferably happy teams, show company logos, media mentions, photos of the people you quote. If you have impressive sounding metrics such as the number of employees processed by your system, total payroll handled etc. display them somewhere. Also, if you aren’t already, try outbound sales, email people, get them on the phone, discuss their problems and whether there is a mutual fit, maybe you can uncover a great selling point, niche or approach, read Spin Selling and Predictable Revenue. If you can get this channel to work profitably and in a predictable fashion, you have total control over your revenue. If you not going full outbound make it easier to contact you, many companies, especially old economy want to talk to someone on the phone, no-touch sales on the internet is a tough proposition in some industries. As to pricing here you probably have the easiest wins, get rid of all your plans (especially the free one) charge 19 bucks or something per employee in the system, this is a true value metric, easy to understand and uniform. Right now you have a large number of fairly arbitrarily split pricing plans, with non linearly increasing prices, why do bigger companies pay less per employee, if anything you should find a way to have them pay more. Not only will this increase your revenue, you will also grow linearly with your customers.  Once you have built out quantitative buying personas, that is quantifiable sets of customers that differ in they price sensitivity, budget, the features they value etc. (most likely corresponding to the different verticals you serve) then go about and segment. Have tiers actually cater to distinct customer groups segmented by meaningful criteria such as specific feature sets, integrations with industry specific software etc. see here http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/everyone-in-saas-is-using-buyer-personas-incorrectly http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/everyone-in-saas-is-u... for more info.   You also mention HR consultancies, is there a way to partner with them, offering either a white label version of you software they can sell to their clients or a commission, are there opportunities for other types of partnerships; events, conferences, case studies etc?  You seem to have a great product in a good market I hope you have commensurate success :)

simonswords82 10y ago

You're doing a lot of things right but drop the free plan ASAP It's all the support and overhead of free customers with none of the financial upside. I presume you need to start generating proper revenue/profits from this site ASAP. The free plan will hinder that. Adwords is indeed a waste of time and money, Facebook is too. I spent a lot more than you before I realised that, well done for working out it's a waste much sooner than I did! Bing is probably worth your attention. Capterra will drive good leads initially but they'll fall off after a while. Keep an eye on your spend there and pull it if the conversions dry up. Get App always had too high a cost of entry for me to try. Stop thinking the next feature you add to the app will grow your client base. There's a lot of shitty HR apps out there with excellent marketing making more money than you :) Don't make the mistake of thinking that your app can be used in all countries and so why wouldn't we market to the US (or <insert other country here>)? I'll tell you why - there are a lot of large, incumbent and well funded HR apps in the US that you're going up against and you'll lose every time because you don't understand exactly what the US market want. If you're based in Australia focus all of your attention in what Australian businesses want to see. You probably also need to decide what size of company gets the most value out of your app and go after them - same for industry vertical(s). "A person who chases two rabbits catches neither". Work out what rabbit to chase, stop chasing the others, go after that rabbit with all your marketing might. Shape your products roadmap off the back of what that one rabbit needs for you to capture it. Shape your USP off the back of this too. "ANNOUNCING A BEAUTIFUL, EASY TO USE, WEB BASED HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM." is far too generic to appeal to any one audience - so guess what, it appeals to nobody. Source: I run a HR software app called http://www.staffsquared.com http://www.staffsquared.com. I've been where you are. Good luck!

agopaul 10y ago
Could you expand on the choice of the advertising platform? Do you find that Bing performs better than others?
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Yep - less competition and hence lower PPC prices for keywords that are highly sought after on Adwords. There is of course less traffic overall, but more of it converts at a price we can stomach. Would definitely recommend anybody in any industry struggling to make Adwords prices stack up check out Bing.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    Years ago when I did this sort of thing, 'less traffic overall' was maybe 5% of the traffic on Bing that you would see on Google. Often traffic was so low it wasn't worth the extra overhead of trying to manage the campaign. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and to what degree?
    - simonswords82 10y ago
      Totally agree with you, that was the case before but not now... Microsoft have slowly caught up and now operate around the 20% search volume mark versus Google's 60%. Here's more info on the market share breakdown: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-February-2016-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases... The thing to also keep in mind is the %'s will vary according to the preferences of your target audience. For example, our target audience are office based with an admin focus. They tend to use a Microsoft OS, which usually has Internet Explorer and you guessed it - has Bing setup by default! I suspect if you're going after a more "techie" crowd that they're more likely to use Chrome, and therefore use Google for their search needs. Obviously all that really matters are the conversion numbers for your particular app. So I usually recommend that people set up some ads in Bing to mimic what they've setup at Google Adwords. Bing has a Google Adword importer, so just import your Adwords and then run them on Bing for a few weeks to see how you fare. That's what we did for Staff Squared, and we were much happier with the Bing numbers than we had been Google - and still advertise on Bing even now.

hluska 10y ago

Sounds like you're doing great! If I could offer one bit of friendly criticism, it relates to this sentence: My biggest struggle is that because I am still actively developing and adding new features to the app, I have problems putting down the coding tools and building momentum with marketing. I keyed in on that particular sentence because it sounds almost exactly like something I said in a few of my own solo ventures. The longer that I kept adding features, the easier it got for me to think that the next 'killer' feature would turn everything around and I'd end up with legions of customers begging me to take their money. In retrospect, I think that this all relates back to how, for me at least, development is easier than marketing. Marketing always felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall, but dev was the exact opposite - I'd get things done and get all of these constant little rewards. I wish that someone had told me to freeze features for a few weeks and get out there and start hustling. In retrospect, I realize that I wasted much of my runway adding in features that nobody would ever actually pay for. Since I got so distant from customers, I didn't realize that until it was too late.

laurencei 10y ago
Andrew Chen actually wrote a blog[0] on this exact topic titled: "The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product" [0] http://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-that-the-next-new-feature-will-suddenly-make-people-use-your-product/ http://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-th...
- hluska 10y ago
  Good link. Thanks for sharing!
- FooBarWidget 10y ago
  I remember reading a Joel Spolsky blog post a couple of years ago that contradicts this. I can't find the post anymore but I think he said that out of everything he tried, nothing gained him more customers than adding new features.
cyberferret 10y ago

laurencei 10y ago

Love the site. One small thing I noticed - remove the 'carousel' from your landing page on the top image. I was reading your main CTA - when it suddenly changed to the other image. It is too fast. If you want both - perhaps A/B to see which one is best. Also - you mentioned you are using Intercom.io; have you tried using their feature Acquire? It allows you to communicate with potential customers on your home page. I've used it on one of my sites with great success...

cyberferret 10y ago
Thanks. Good tip about the carousel - I may consider randomising the web page to show either/or and measure, or else increase the time on the carousel flip. I don't use Acquire yet - mainly a cost reason because it would increase our monthly Intercom bill quite a bit, but also a 'back of the clock' reason. I notice that being in Australia, a LOT of site visits and new user subs happen in the middle of the night for me (i.e. on the other side of the world), and if I had users pinging me with questions etc. before signup then it would mean lots of sleepless nights, and less than stellar interaction with me. I do plan to add it in later though, perhaps when I have enough revenue to add team members to look after acquisition and support.
- vram22 10y ago
  >I notice that being in Australia, a LOT of site visits and new user subs happen in the middle of the night for me ..... then it would mean lots of sleepless nights, and less than stellar interaction with me. You may know this already, but there are some customer interaction (not sure what is the right term here) services that, if you are not logged into them, will convert the user's IM into an email to you. https://tawk.to https://tawk.to is one of them (I use it on my web site); Olark may also support that feature. Then you can just answer in the morning. Of course it's not the same as being able to reply immediately, but better than nothing.

caseysoftware 10y ago

> Don't get me wrong, I am not really complaining as I have a steady core of users who seems to use the app regularly, but I am mystified at the very low rate of converting visitor and initial account creators into regular users. Have you asked them? No, I'm dead serious. Have you dropped any of them a note or scheduled a call to see why they don't stick around? If you can gain information that increases your ratio from 1 in 20 to 2 in 20, you double your funnel (and potentially revenue) immediately.

shimon 10y ago
Yes, this. It seems almost too obvious but a few interviews can be incredibly revealing. You should also do this with your exising happy customers, and ask them how they'd explain the value to someone else.
cyberferret 10y ago
Hi, and thanks for your feedback. I do ask the clients who don't stick around, but unfortunately I almost never get replies. I have an automated Intercom personalised note that goes out after 30 days if they don't log back in, but get next to 0 replies, or else one liner "Not really interested" type replies. A few months ago when I only had about a hundred signups, I actually sat down one weekend and wrote individual emails to people who had not logged in in a while. I even went to the lengths of visiting their own company web pages and checking their location via Intercom so I could open the letter with "Hey Bob, hope the weather is great in Berlin - I see you run a small catering company..." etc. but even those got negligible replies. A little better is asking my existing users. After about 20 logins to our system, I have Intercom pop up an in app message asking them to name one thing the love and one thing they don't like about my app. That one almost always gets a response and is proving to be really useful, but alas not helping with retaining users who sign up and disappear...
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  Have you tried to cross reference referral source to active users? If people find you based on certain keywords or links, they may think that your tool solves the problem and once they try it... yes? no? It may be that your SEO is (inadvertently?) describing you as one thing when you're not that at all.

ozim 10y ago

I am no expert but I think if you sell B2B ads on FB and Twitter are not best place. It doesn't look professional IMO. And I think really people who make decisions in business are not hanging out on FB. More like on LinkedIn and specialist sites relevant for their business.

gk1 10y ago
Yes to testing LinkedIn. Twitter could also work if your audience hangs out there (you may be surprised...). On Twitter and LinkedIn you're catching people as they're browsing, not actively looking for a solution, so you should promote educational content rather than the product/service itself.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Good tip. I've pulled all paid advertising from Facebook and Twitter, but there are a TON of HR related companies on there tweeting articles and advice, so nowadays I actively seek out great articles and use BufferApp to schedule a regular trickle of them on my own feeds. I get a fair few new followers and retweets etc. this way, but impossible at this stage to measure how that relates to sign ups.
blahi 10y ago
That's just plain wrong. I'm sorry I can't be more constructive but what you say makes sense on paper, but is not true in reality. b2b purchasing decisions are still made by people who are as obsessed with social media as everybody else. You just have to figure out the best way to approach them. LinkedIn on the other hands has a very high bid floor which makes it a very tough to turn any return on the investment.

eterm 10y ago

I'm not an HR manager, but one of your main points on your landing page is security, yet there are a few ways you link to unsecure versions of pages, including login pages. In fact the sister site you built doesn't have a certificate at all. Modern browsers will show scary warnings when login pages aren't served over https.

cyberferret 10y ago
Thanks for the heads up - We do use https all through the actual web app, but the server has the option to run http or https together. We are in the process of making it enforce https on all web app pages. The main page should link to only https pages on the web app so I will check it out again to ensure it does. I know the main page links to a documentation site and a blog, but those are running on two independent servers without https at this stage - we may add it later, but they are 'non critical' site that are purely informational and don't store any customer data. As for the sister site, yes that was a quick weekend build also running on a separate server. Seeing as that is a totally zero revenue site, I didn't want to spend any additional $$$ out of pocket at this early stage (though I may try out one of those free SSL certs that are becoming available now). If it proves to be useful in funnelling users to our main HR site then I will definitely beef up the security on that too.

buss_jan 10y ago

Please excuse, if my comments come off as presumptuous or overbearing, you certainly know your business and customers better than I do, I’ll just rattle off what my set of fresh eyes observed and what I think you might want to look into. In general, what stands out to me is that you do not have a clear USP and you do not seem to speak your target markets language, it might be that since you are addressing markets in many different verticals that you have no clear persona in mind to convince with your copy, no specific set of pain points or benefits to address directly.  In any case, I would try to interview my current customers, ask them to describe in their own words how your software is helping them, what pain they were experiencing before and how they previously dealt with it.  Then you can go about ‘cloning’ them by marketing to specific verticals, have landing pages for hospitals and retailers, agencies and address problems specific to these industries using the information and sound bites you mined from your customer research.  This will also allow you to do some long-tail SEO, produce relevant white papers, tailor your testimonials and in general tighten your copy since you now know who you are talking to.   Take a look for instance at your benefits, they are not benefits, at best they are product features: “Reminders & Communication”, and some are not even that: “No Install Or Setup”. How about “Never fail audit xyz again with our bullet employee foozle tracking system”, find a specific problem and tie it to what your software can do.   There is an interesting line on your landing page: “Stay on top of critical legislative and legal requirements to store and recall employee.“ How many businesses are not compliant with these requirements, what are the consequences, use this risk and fear in your marketing, it is a strong motivator and sure to catch the attention of any business owner or HR manager, HR is inherently boring if you can’t excite at least agitate. This is also a great opportunity to educate, small business owner, entrepreneurs, agencies, we all like to skimp on HR, do more research on the legal risk and host a webinar for business owners educating them on it, underscore the necessity of reliable HR management for becoming a ‘serious’ business.   I also found there was a lack of strong social proof on your site, this is HR show some people, preferably happy teams, show company logos, media mentions, photos of the people you quote. If you have impressive sounding metrics such as the number of employees processed by your system, total payroll handled etc. display them somewhere. Also, if you aren’t already, try outbound sales, email people, get them on the phone, discuss their problems and whether there is a mutual fit, maybe you can uncover a great selling point, niche or approach, read Spin Selling and Predictable Revenue. If you can get this channel to work profitably and in a predictable fashion, you have total control over your revenue. If you not going full outbound make it easier to contact you, many companies, especially old economy want to talk to someone on the phone, no-touch sales on the internet is a tough proposition in some industries. As to pricing here you probably have the easiest wins, get rid of all your plans (especially the free one) charge 19 bucks or something per employee in the system, this is a true value metric, easy to understand and uniform. Right now you have a large number of fairly arbitrarily split pricing plans, with non linearly increasing prices, why do bigger companies pay less per employee, if anything you should find a way to have them pay more. Not only will this increase your revenue, you will also grow linearly with your customers.  Once you have built out quantitative buying personas, that is quantifiable sets of customers that differ in they price sensitivity, budget, the features they value etc. (most likely corresponding to the different verticals you serve) then go about and segment. Have tiers actually cater to distinct customer groups segmented by meaningful criteria such as specific feature sets, integrations with industry specific software etc. see here http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/everyone-in-saas-is-using-buyer-personas-incorrectly http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/everyone-in-saas-is-u... for more info.   You also mention HR consultancies, is there a way to partner with them, offering either a white label version of you software they can sell to their clients or a commission, are there opportunities for other types of partnerships; events, conferences, case studies etc?  You seem to have a great product in a good market I hope you have commensurate success :)