Please view the site as a precursor to our customer development conversation or an add-on to the cold call. It's not for inbound marketing, in-fact we have spent Zero dollars on advertising.
1. The service exists as a bunch of Java and Python scripts running on data sets in zip files. We needed just enough to get the core algorithms. We totally stopped development there and then forced ourselves to do customer conversations – we knew we could build this but not sure if people cared.
2. We were experimenting here and used to change the tag line every 20 or so cold emails to see which one worked better. It ranged from “Increase CTR…”, “Customer Success Platform”, “Interrupt to Please” – We monitored our conversions and asked our prospects what worked for them. We do not have a ton of data[12 customer conversations] to prove one way or other but found a provocative line to work better to pull them in the conversation than the most matter of fact explanation – discussions always were about specifics.
Would more than appreciate getting specific feedback ritwik@informion.com or @ritwiktewari.
3. This is an interesting one – we had two choices 1. Create make belief scenarios and try explaining that 2. Showcase examples where companies had done this well.
We started with 1 but almost never heard positive things in our conversations – we switched to 2 knowing that we could really NOT dupe someone since at this stage no one could sign up on the site besides a conversation -> demo followed by a pilot.
We have only one target in next 8 weeks replace this with a real customer testimonial ..
Please do understand that we just started and yes we might have crossed the line here.
If many share the feeling we would be more than happy to revert.
4. This one we have really put a lot of pain into so let me defend this ..
We asked our prospects
1. How much they would value the service @ - the answer was around 1K/mo
2. How much do they pay for compete/researched all the alternatives and the fact is that 1-3K is an average [Not really accounting for the difference between us and compete.]
From there we put in $599 – so that we are competitive yet account for the risk a company would take on an early stage startup
PS: Closes compete charges 3c/user – and we are targeting >100Kma
5. Well it might surely be – but being in Microsoft till date meant people outside rarely knew about the cool tech that was built – it is not the case with Google/FB/Twitter et al.
I had 6 points and Microsoft was just one which was specifically related to
• Have Non-existent open source profiles [Didn't we say Microsoft ☺]
I think that’s a fact – I am more than glad that things are changing rapidly for good at MSFT.