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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Don't market to "everyone". Market to a very narrow, carefully defined market. And it doesn't matter if they "love" it. What matters is that they need it, and need it enough to pay.

Who are you seeking for beta customers? How are you reaching and inviting them? What kind of feedback are you getting from them?

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My target market is small (2~10 employees) web agencies. I worked for such companies and build that app to address the pains they have with the feedback loop. So far I have mostly been doing cold mailing to very targeted market and made some promotion through listing site (betalist, reddit). I had about 300 users out of this. The type of feedback I got so far sounds like: "Great app will save me lot of time!!" yet after 1 month since the launch I have 2 "active" users.

Have you spoke to those users that stopped using the site. Seems like they're you're biggest chance to find what's wrong. You can get as many users as you want, but if you can't keep hold of them then you'll still have problems.

Find out why they started, then find out why they stopped. Maybe it wasn't right for them in the first place, in which case you can focus on the people it is right for. Maybe there's something they thought it had which it doesn't, it might be worth adding that in if it's consistent for everyone. Good luck!

I've seen several strategies like this to improve startups/sideprojects Keep statistics on people who have: signed up but not set up your product <- Contact these to see if they need help setting up signed up and set up your product but stopped using it <-Contact these to find out what's wrong with your product

The best way to do this is to send a personal email to the users. You should be able to get some real feedback and if you're responsive to their suggestions get some customers for life

Thanks, as mentioned above I am trying this but not getting so much success with it so far. I probably need to crunch bigger numbers to get significant results.

I did do send them personalised email - in which I actually poured way to much time - and I am usually getting or not answers or "I'll use it soon" type of answers. " Will continue putting more energy down that path tho. Thanks.

It's tough, but eventually it should pay off and once it does then you should be able to focus your efforts on stopping it happening in the first place.

I've always found it's a good idea to keep in touch from the start at an early stage (not too much though, don't make them regret they signed up in the first place). You won't always get a reply but people will be more open to your emails when it's less out of the blue. Try to make them relevant to the stage they're at though (just signed up, just started using stuff properly). You could probably automate some of the earlier parts too. I find people are usually pretty happy to help when they think they're making a difference.

Hope it works out for you!

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