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This was such a great post. I read last years as well, and it was super interesting to see how things evolved. I am curious about your ad spend. I noticed that

by lbhdc 3y ago

This was such a great post. I read last years as well, and it was super interesting to see how things evolved. I am curious about your ad spend. I noticed that it dropped 24%. Can you talk about your strategy for marketing your business?

mtlynch 3y ago
Thanks for reading! >I am curious about your ad spend. I noticed that it dropped 24%. I added a few more details about that in a different reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39398746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39398746 >Can you talk about your strategy for marketing your business? For the first two years, I was primarily reaching out to bloggers and YouTube creators that I liked. TinyPilot appeals to people in the homelab / IT prosumer community, and I've been involved in that space for a few years, so it always felt like a pretty organic way to get the word out. There have been diminishing returns to that strategy, though. When we got our first big review, our sales nearly tripled overnight.[0] At the time, we were the first affordable KVM over IP on the market, so YouTube creators were very excited about to be able to break a story about it, and their viewers were excited to buy our product. Since then, we continue to work with reviewers, but even high-quality reviews don't get that many reviews because we've been around for a few years and there are similar products like ours. We've been experimenting with new channels, but nothing has been a huge hit. One of the things I'm trying to do is talk to bloggers and YouTube creators about doing projects with TinyPilot rather than just reviewing it. We had one a few years back,[1] and I think there's potential for new interesting use-cases for TinyPilot through experiments, but I haven't found anyone with a good idea yet. It seems like our most successful channel has been word of mouth. I think it's a result of putting a lot of effort into customer service, so our customers feel good about working with us and tell other people about the product. [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/02/#tinypilots-first-youtube-review https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/02/#tinypilots-first-... [1] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/dslr https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/dslr
- digikata 3y ago
  A feature that would have been useful from my IoT / embedded device development days would be the ability to fully turn power on/off of with usb port from software. It's nice feature for automated test and dev of embedded devices. Sort of adjacent to your kvm focus, but I suspect your h/w might not too far off from being able to support that use. A full A/C plug pwr control is useful too, but a much bigger hardware delta.

by lbhdc 3y ago

mtlynch 3y ago

Thanks for reading! >I am curious about your ad spend. I noticed that it dropped 24%. I added a few more details about that in a different reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39398746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39398746 >Can you talk about your strategy for marketing your business? For the first two years, I was primarily reaching out to bloggers and YouTube creators that I liked. TinyPilot appeals to people in the homelab / IT prosumer community, and I've been involved in that space for a few years, so it always felt like a pretty organic way to get the word out. There have been diminishing returns to that strategy, though. When we got our first big review, our sales nearly tripled overnight.[0] At the time, we were the first affordable KVM over IP on the market, so YouTube creators were very excited about to be able to break a story about it, and their viewers were excited to buy our product. Since then, we continue to work with reviewers, but even high-quality reviews don't get that many reviews because we've been around for a few years and there are similar products like ours. We've been experimenting with new channels, but nothing has been a huge hit. One of the things I'm trying to do is talk to bloggers and YouTube creators about doing projects with TinyPilot rather than just reviewing it. We had one a few years back,[1] and I think there's potential for new interesting use-cases for TinyPilot through experiments, but I haven't found anyone with a good idea yet. It seems like our most successful channel has been word of mouth. I think it's a result of putting a lot of effort into customer service, so our customers feel good about working with us and tell other people about the product. [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/02/#tinypilots-first-youtube-review https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/02/#tinypilots-first-... [1] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/dslr https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/dslr

digikata 3y ago
A feature that would have been useful from my IoT / embedded device development days would be the ability to fully turn power on/off of with usb port from software. It's nice feature for automated test and dev of embedded devices. Sort of adjacent to your kvm focus, but I suspect your h/w might not too far off from being able to support that use. A full A/C plug pwr control is useful too, but a much bigger hardware delta.