Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
That's me in 2018. Spent a good amount of money in Google Ads and only attracted users that we did not want.
Just putting negative keywords wasn't sufficient, and even one miss was enough to waste all efforts.
How do you target ads when many B2C versions are trying same thing. For example, image editor that are targeted towards b2b.
I get initial interest but then people drag their feet for trials and paying after that.
Any thoughts how can I counter these drag and boost sales?
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.
For me personally PH would be more like ideas to copy from.
Hence the importance of industry knowledge and gut feeling.
Entrepreneurship is not for weak hearts.
Best way is learning through practical experience by starting with small budget, and increasing slowly with refinements.