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269 points mtlynch | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.222s | source
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arewethereyeta ◴[] No.43953717[source]
TBH, I find it extremely hard to acquire customers. Even with a rock solid product that is NOT, in any way, below the competition. I get the visits but the signups are non existent. Probably because my audience is geared towards programmers and tech oriented businesses. I can do almost any project but marketing kills me.
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pyb ◴[] No.43953881[source]
What's your product?
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arewethereyeta ◴[] No.43953977[source]
https://visitorquery.com
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kristianc ◴[] No.43955610[source]
Marketer here. Your homepage says

USE CASES For a million reasons. Here's a few.

This is a common pattern ('We serve everyone!'), but you'd be well advised to actually pick a use case early on - you'll find that ecom, gaming, finance (especially), content, security, marketing all have their own specific needs and requirements, and they will want to see how you fit them before signing up.

This also makes your marketing efforts a little easier, as instead of having to spread thin across six different verticals, you can target for instance communities of indie gamers, bloggers, small shops who face this problem. when you've got validation from one of these, its easier to scale, but trying to go too broad too early in targeting is one of the most common errors founders make.

nicely designed site though and a lot of other stuff is on point.

EDIT: Your branding is also a little opaque. I wouldn't naturally associate "visitorquery" with what you were trying to do. Going for a domain like detectvpn even if you had to drop down to something like detectvpn.me feels like more of a direct match.

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arewethereyeta ◴[] No.43957288[source]
Thank you for the input, valid points, I'll chew on that. Do you have a specific target market you think I could start with?
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1. kristianc ◴[] No.43957910[source]
In order, I would say that your most promising plays are:

Game studios - a low touch way of getting around smurfing, botting and ban evasion, cheap farming accounts, and likely already think in terms of proxy/VPN abuse. Reach them through Unity and Unreal forums, dev groups, GameSec Twitter/LinkedIn

FinTech / Crypto compliance teams - position yourself as a plug in to KYC or KYB platforms. Behavioural analytics is a big play in fraud prevention, whether someone is using a VPN won't be the whole picture, but is part of it.

Deprioritise marketers, content teams - they're promising but ultimately false positives as no one but the very biggest players amongst them are losing sleep over this.

The key more than anything for both is going to be to emphasise in your positioning the ease of integration. Remember how Stripe had the exact code you needed to use on its homepage for ages? You've got to give the impression that integrating this is going to be super simple.

I feel like you spend quite a bit of time on your homepage selling why someone would want to do it, but not so much on the how and why you make it so easy fo them. Clicking into your docs it looks super simple, but the minute someone's had to click into your docs if they’re a non-dev audience, you're losing people.

You also absolutely must have a GDPR story. You’re detecting proxies and VPNs. This means you’re inspecting user connection data, possibly in real time, and possibly storing flags or identifiers. Even if you’re not processing names, emails, or cookies, under GDPR, IP addresses, device signatures, and behavioural data = personal data if it’s tied to a user.

Your GDPR story needs to cover data type transparency, what exactly what you collect: IP, device type, headers, connection method? If you’re processing requests in memory and returning results via API, that’s low risk. Highlight it. Offer EU hosting or at least say “data processed within EEA-compliant infrastructure." IANAL but you'll want to have a lawyer look at it.