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Ask HN: Marketing for a web-app: Adwords, Forums, Twitter, or..?

12 points by iamclovin 16y ago

We're building web-based software (http://gameplanapp.com) which lets amateur sports league managers create and manage their sports leagues. Some of you may have heard from us before (we blog at http://nakedstartup.com about our startup journey) While we've been getting trickles of signups since the two and a half months we've put the landing page up (and this has been slowly increasing over the last couple of weeks), we were wondering how startups generally market to people right at the beginning of their journey. We've been talking to as many people as we can face-to-face (but we're obviously limited by geographical constraints), we are regular bloggers and tweeters. We've run Adwords campaigns to fish out potential customers, and we've also cold-called/emailed sporting entities to tell them about our product. My question is - apart from the typical "tell-your-family-and-friends-and-it-will-spread" spiel, I would love to hear how HN'ers have gotten their startups off the ground. Was it Adwords, was it blogs, announcing-on-relevant-forums, Twitter, and if it's a combination of everything, which was the most successful? TIA!

iamclovin 16y ago
I'd be especially interested in apps whose potential customers included people who weren't web savvy. For e.g. in our situation, a huge number of people use Excel to manage their sports leagues right now and they are people who aren't tuned necessarily into Twitter, blogs, etc.
- byoung2 16y ago
  There are usually conventions where the league organizers/coaches/members meet (e.g. http://www.nscaa.com/annual.php http://www.nscaa.com/annual.php). There's a chance to meet a few hundred or thousand in one place. I'm not sure what your travel budget is, but a weekend at one of these could yield some good contacts.
  - iamclovin 16y ago
    Thanks! We're based out of Singapore, so trips to the US at this point are probably something we might not consider, but we're planning to hit a few of the sports conferences in South East Asia to spread the word.
    - AlexBlom 16y ago
      Why not find somebody local and pay them a chunk + referral fee for representing you on the day? If you vet properly it will be far cheaper than flying, cost a few hundred and could get you some solid contacts anyway.
      - byoung2 16y ago
        That would be a good idea even if you were based in the US. You would be able to hit a lot more cities by using locals.
      - jeffepp 16y ago
        A referral fee or affiliate program would definitely be helpful for engaging potential customers outside your reach. Ideally, you could have "community (or insert geo location) managers" who have the knowledge to sell (or setup) your software for their leagues for a commission. Other creative and potential affiliates would be trophy sellers, jersey printers, etc.. Just because it would be an affiliate or referral program, does not mean that it would have to be available to anyone. Good Luck
- bdickason 16y ago
  We're starting to market our salon software (about to release v1!) and are running into the same trap. Salon owners aren't savvy, generally don't read blogs, and rely on word of mouth/print marketing. Adwords keywords are also VERY competitive by the 'juggernauts' of the space. Thus far we've relied on word of mouth and trying to make our product 'discoverable' but there's not much social stuff happening in the salon industry. We haven't solved this yet so I'd love to see what you guys come up with. We're actually considering taking out a magazine ad.
simonk 16y ago
I'm a B2B business, and a lot of our marketing that is working is the cold-calling/emailing. We focus on small businesses so finding the right person to talk to is the most important part, its usually not the boss actually.
- iamclovin 16y ago
  Right. May I ask what kind of conversions do you get on cold calls/emails? As in what percentage return calls or reply to emails, what percentage would want to sign up but think pricing is an issue, and what percentage actually sign up? How persistent are you with cold-calling/emailing? If people don't respond, do you try to call them one more time? <Sorry for the spate of questions> Btw, love your company logo :)
pkaler 16y ago
Cold calling is underrated. My first thought would be to call every YMCA/YWCA in North America. Call every school in every district. Call every community centre.
- iamclovin 16y ago
  Thanks, yes we're definitely doing our share of cold-calling right now - although we could do a lot more. Since we're still a little way away from launching - cold-calling people outside your city (or country) without a launched-product they can try out, feels like it won't work, but would definitely try it out.
- johns 16y ago
  Instead of calling every YMCA, try to make a deal with their parent organization. Or find a health club chain (a lot of them run leagues) to form a partnership. Go after them all in one fell swoop. If each location has it from "on high" that yours is the solution, they're much more likely to use it.
glen 16y ago
You might consider a type of incentive program or a revenue share approach. If people refer others, then you give them a certain percentage of whatever money they yield.
JangoSteve 16y ago
This is the same issue I had with RateMyStudentRental (we license a private-label version of our platform to colleges and universities), so this advice is primarily aimed toward B2B businesses. I'll echo the advice that cold-calling/emailing is emensely effective in the B2B arena. With colleges and universities, though, the sales cycle is excruciatingly long. So I couldn't waste a lot of time calling, emailing, and following up with universities that didn't already have a demonstrated definite need for what I could offer. So I made a tool that aggregated RSS feeds from the student housing industry, as well as Google Alerts for terms like "problems with off-campus housing", to show me schools that were having problems with their off-campus housing. Then I'd spend my time contacting those schools. I've since formalized this process and made it about 100x more efficient than it was in the early days. And that's the story of how http://www.leadnuke.com http://www.leadnuke.com came about ;-)
johns 16y ago
Having run a league management web app for the past 4.5 years, here are some things I've learned: - Make prepaying easy. A lot of the time you're dealing with a volunteer or parent who has to pay for it themselves and get reimbursed from the organization. This is a pain if you're billed monthly. - Don't spend any effort targeting municipalities or schools. The amount of time and red tape they have to go through to pay for a service like yours isn't worth it for them. And a lot of times their league stuff is a small part of a much bigger software package that runs the whole city or school. If you can't integrate with that, you're out. - Scheduling and registration are where the money is at, everything else should be free to drive traffic to those. Those are by far the two most common and hardest problems for people to solve. They're easier to bill for too since you can do it per instance instead of a subscription. If I were to start over, those would be my focus. - Pick sides: youth or adult leagues? leagues, teams or clubs? You can't possibly serve all 8 combinations of those well through one interface. Separate the different feature sets into unique products. - I had very little success with AdWords, but my marketing site is awful so ymmv. Feel free to get in touch (see profile) if you want to talk more or buy my app from me ;)
- iamclovin 16y ago
  Thanks John for the insights. We've realized the bit of pre-paying and the fact that the scheduling/setting up a league is probably the most difficult part of setting up a league. The point about schools being difficult is an interesting one, we have meetings lined up with some of the local schools here, so will let you know how that goes. Thanks again for sharing!