Did we get paid? Yes we did! Over the past few weeks, I’ve covered the story of our little ‘mini-product’ experiment. Here’s a reminder on the background.
We’re launching our online service for conference speakers early next year.
We had planned to launch at the end of the summer to hit the conference season that starts in September, but we got too much feedback of the negative variety – stuff needed to be fixed.
When you run a startup, you’ve got to get used to plans going south. All of your plans.
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So we held our nerve, and doubled down on making the core product better.
We’ve been improving usability and capability. We haven’t stopped trials and demos, but you can’t ask for money when you do that.
And we want money. That, after all, is the point of starting a business.
But that still leaves a problem: no visible momentum. Your team needs to see progress.
As a founder, you need to see progress. And you need to make sure that people will actually pay you for what you have built. So we hustled.
We carved out a little bit of the product, and we released that as a stand-alone mini-product.
Technology conference speakers don’t just end up getting speaking gigs (‘vox-gig’ – geddit?) by magic. They have to find conferences and apply to speak.
Conferences don’t find speakers by magic either. They have to put out something known as a call for papers – a CFP.
Matching speakers to CFPs is the problem that we solve for them. Each week, they get a personalised set of three open CFPs to the right conferences for them, with the deadline, and a direct link to the submission page on the conference website. This is a huge time-saver.
We provide CFP recommendations and alerts as part of our product, so this was a perfect little piece that we could try to sell independently.
We leverage our existing community via the newsletters that we write for speakers. All the effort to build that audience is finally paying off.
As an aside, whatever business you are starting, technology or otherwise, I would always start with a newsletter – a fabulous way to build trusted relationships.
We put a little notice in the newsletter. Nothing flashy. We offered a two-week trial. After that, you have to pay $17 (€15.30) a month. Nice and simple.
This is a perfect little microcosm of the entire Software-as-a-Service business model. And true to SaaS form, it’s all about the numbers.
This week, we have 14 trial subscribers. We have two new ones since last week. We lost 16. And we have four paying customers (woo hoo!).
Our conversion rate is 4/28 (trial last week), thus 14pc. We don’t have any paid churn yet – touch wood. Trial churn is a concern, however. Why did 16 people drop off the trial?
We’re not going to speculate. Instead, we’ll reach out to them to see if that provides us with more information. You have to think like a scientist – there is no room for opinion in these matters. These numbers are also very, very small.
That’s deliberate. We do not have the capacity to support a large user base outside of our enterprise clients right now. We’ll spin out a customer success team in due course, but it’s too early.
Hence the low-key marketing. That said, we’ll see if we can ramp things up in the new year.
We also learned an important lesson when it comes to web design. We set up a landing page on our website to take payment.
It’s a typical landing page. It does a bunch of selling, has testimonials and, of course, a ‘Buy Now’ button.
In the first version, the Buy Now button was at the bottom of the page. This made sense to us; you’d want the prospect to read all of our sales guff first. Dead wrong.
For the most part, people visiting the landing page had already decided to buy. The content on the page was just about reassurance.
Our very first customer went to the landing page and tried to sign in as a user instead of buying, because that was the only button he could see. Ouch.
Luckily, he sent us a mail and eventually we figured it out. Always talk to your customers!
We have a duplicate Buy Now button at the top of the page now. If you’re curious, the website address is: voxgig.com/cfp-recommend.
This unforced error is an example of a classic sales mistake: ‘selling past the close’.
Isn’t that a great expression? It means the customer has already decided to buy, and you are now getting in the way of the sale by continuing to try to convince them to part with their money.
It happens a lot more than you think. The general rule in sales is, shut up and listen. That applies to your mouth, and your website.
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