Ask HN: Plenty of organic traffic but struggling to make sales | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Plenty of organic traffic but struggling to make sales

2 pointsabysmalconvers3 comments

Hey HN,

TL;DR: I believe my traffic is healthy for my stage, but my conversion to paid is abysmal (<= 0.1%) and I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm looking for someone I can connect to professionally who might have some input.

I've got a small-in-scope freemium web app that I've had out in public for a little over a year. Current revenue is about $115/mo. I've grown organic traffic to approx 100-200 visitors per day across all landing pages. The overall conversion rate to paid though is about 0.1% over the last 6 mo. Retention in the app is similarly awful: day 2 is ~5%, and it flattens to 1% by day ~14.

To my eye, this means that the landing pages communicate enough that people want to try the app, but then the app is failing to deliver whatever they were actually looking for.

So, I suppose my main question is: what type of person should I be looking for who might be able to provide me some direction? I am a technical person with good credentials - but I don't have anyone in my professional network who has experience in this sort of thing.

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.

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