Hey, you should be looking for someone with marketing experience, more specifically building funnels. You'd ideally conduct customer interviews yourself also. But before that you'd need to define a good set of questions.

It seems like while you do manage to capture traffic, you fail to convert it fully - based on retention rates you're posting, they're not getting the outcome they thought they'd get based on your landing page/s. If that's the case it might be time to explore what other pains they have, revisit old ones and make sure you're solving those, and also communicating everything to them framed as outcomes they'll get by subscribing.

I'm a web developer myself, building products in my free time all the time. Let me know if you'd want to chat, it's pretty lonely out here :D

Cheers, thanks for the response!

I have reached out to my paying customers several times via email and haven't been able to get anyone to respond for feedback. It's possible I'm taking the wrong approach in those emails, or maybe the app is transactional for them, not something they are interested in taking the time to discuss. I've also reached out to free users with similar resulting crickets.

Is the marketing person you're thinking of someone who would look to work on a contract basis? Or are they more typically looking for some sort of partnership?

It seems like they're disengaged yeah, or maybe you should find a way to incentivise them somehow. If you don't mind me asking - what's the app url?

Regarding the marketing person - I guess you can try both. I myself haven't had good luck with marketing people, although in recent times I've found one lady which is great at what she does. Unfortunately way too expensive for me at the stage my apps are. And I've also struggled a lot to find a qualified marketer willing to partner on a product.

One thing I can say - if you've grown organic traffic via SEO, it'll probably be hard to engage with existing customers since you don't know much about them.

What has worked from my experience: if you've defined a proper ICP figure out where they hang out - forums, subreddits, etc. Try to look for places where they could potentially be talking about the problem (if you can't find such a post then maybe make one yourself to kick it off). And figure out a way to engage in a conversation with them, provide value without selling the product and just ask for 5 minutes of their time. It's a very slow process until you figure it out, but once you do the data is valuable and allows you to build the product based on it.

I wanted to add more value to this comment about monetisation - regardless if that's doable or not, it's an extremely cool project!!

What if you could sell the data for each argument? That might be valuable to LLM labs, because then you can essentially guarantee that every single argument you provide is human checked, and you could accumulate a large DB of those. Of course you'll never be able to capture every single argument possible, but it's rather a mechanism that would allow incremental improvement with time. But codifying logic and natural language is a very nice idea.

Hello everyone,

I'm doing market research on startup founders so that I can understand and serve their needs better. The form is closed questions only and would take 1 minute of your time. I'd appreciate it if you filled it out.

Thanks!

Interesting idea. At the least it’s always good to see both sides of the coin not just blindly believing one. Not saying one should accept there’s no free will but at least think about it.

Haven’t yet found one myself, but from the information I’ve gathered I see that you can: 1. Go to events where you can meet such people 2. Sign up for different clubs (marketing, tech, etc.) and build strong relationships there though projects. 3. Working at your dayjob, if you see something outstanding you see yourself working with in the future, go the extra mile to show them they mean something to you.

Generally I think it’s all about the buildup after a certain amount of time of working in your industry. And not only 9-5 working but just doing interesting projects and attracting such likeminded people.

damn, straight to the point. thanks! :)

Thanks for the advice! I mean it in the maker spirit yeah. I don't want to write about thing I have no idea about, or haven't done. To be frank, I have the most experience in landing jobs, so I was thinking about niching down to more of a beginner audience. The ones who'd like to enter the market. And considering the state of the job market right now it might be the right time. Who knows, I guess I'll have to post about it to find out :D

Edit: Thanks for that last sentence you wrote. I've noticed I tend to come up with simple stuff for the most part, then I think hmmm... maybe this can become a blog post idea, and then I usually think - it's too simple, obvious, etc. I supposed that the best thing to do is for me to start writing about those and then see where it leads me to.

Great idea, though I’m not sure how user friendly this would be for commercial customers. Because they wouldn’t like to install some other app just to get notifications, etc. I guess a way to improve that would be to white label the app. If it gets mass adoption it wouldn’t be an issue probably but that’s hard :D

I agree with you

But it really depends on the type of product.

i.e. think about customer support live chats, or similar products. your support agents need to receive mobile notifications, and they are probably more keen to install a third-party app.

Yep, in that regard it’ll be perfect. I could label it as perfect for internal company workflow. Not the “end end” customer. The average consumer.

If that's your target market then this would be the perfect product certainly. I was thinking more in terms of the general end consumer.

I think your best bet is to code it yourself (assuming you can, I don’t know your background). If you’re trying to sell a digital product it’s not going to take you much time. The core part will be to integrate a payment processor like stripe. There are lots of libraries which simplify this process. One important thing to take into account is to make sure you have as many payment options as possible to make the sale process as easy as possible. (ApplePay, GPay, etc.)

Yeah ideally I want to code myself except the payment part, just need a good payment system provider that supports multiple options. My country isn't directly supported by Stripe (but I heard there's workaround haven't dived in yet), so I currently don't know other good options.

Edit: I just learned it's called "Payment gateway", looking at various options now..

Great stuff. Yeah in case your country isn’t supported be sure to research local providers. There surely are some. If not local then there’s other ones supporting it.

Would love to see a mobile app for this or at least a mobile optimised web page as this looks like something I’d play when commuting. Very cool idea regardless. Cheers!