Comment by imp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You're obviously going for maximal SEO with a name like that. Good luck getting ranked highly. I know you're a whiz at that, but that keyword looks pretty darn competitive: http://www.google.com/search?q=appointment+reminder

I'm guessing you'll have to rely a lot on your AdWords kung-fu that you talk about so much, because I think customer acquisition is going to be your toughest challenge.

Edit: Actually, I partially take that back. The ads look competitive, but the results look penetrable. Your blog post announcing the site is already #21 for that term, so you appear to be in good shape.

Edit 2: Although you may do well for SEO, I can't help but wonder if you're taking a hit on word of mouth sales with such a generic name that doesn't use a .com. "Have you tried Appointment Reminder Dot Org? My sales increased 10%!" It make work, but I think you're putting all your eggs in the SEO /SEM basket.

One last thought on this: In DropBox's lessons learned slides they said they had a lot of trouble getting customers via search because that was just a way to harvest demand, not create it. This product feels like it may fall in the same trap. DropBox at least had a 2-syllable name to fall back on for word of mouth marketing, but this has an 8 syllable name and could have more trouble.

I will second the parent comment. I feel that there's a large number of people who have needs for this kind of product, but haven't recognized it: the need is latent. Unlike active needs (the bingo card creator program, for example), people don't just go searching the internet for latent needs. The number of people who are actively searching for "appointment reminders" are probably less than 1% of the total number of people who have the need. That's why latent needs are very hard to harvest in online marketing. How are you going to tackle this problem?

[bingo cards] is also surprisingly competitive. The trick is, he's not going to go for [appointment reminder]. He's going to go for hundreds of variants of the term.

I'm really interested in hearing what the content marketing angle is for appointments though. Bingo cards had a natural content fit.

I'm really interested in hearing what the content marketing angle is for appointments though.

If I figure one out, I'll tell you. This is one of the things I'm less than sanguine about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com