Being a solo founder myself here are a few tips I would like to add:
1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience.
2. Making a product without any user feedback. You work 1 year on a product and realize people don't get your idea. That's why it is essential to get feedback every step of the way and your spouse doesn't count :D
3. The good news is being a solo founder is no longer very unique thing. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are doing this and hang out on online communities like indiehackers, makerlog, etc.
4. After trying out hundred tools I've found that nothing beats trello. To each his own though but you really need a todo tool when working alone to keep on track. I've actually written a local trello for myself with one twist - the tool assigns me a task daily and as soon as mark it as complete it assigns me the next item from the list. But at any moment there is never more than 1 item on my "doing" list. It was because i was spending inordinate amount of time bike-shedding when i don't have one single todo.
While I agree with the sentiment of #1, I would argue that sales are more important than marketing at this stage. You can spin your wheels “learning SEO” and “creating content” with very little tangible results. In the beginning, sales + product are just about all that matter.
Both can be important and it really comes down to who your customer is.
For B2B (SME+) - Absolutely invest in Sales. Worth mentioning that it isn't too hard hiring seasoned sales professionals, with existing relationships who are trying to find their next career move etc. They'll often agree to a higher commission payout in-lieu of a base salary. This doubles up as a good way to get feedback from the market.
For B2C or smaller B2B - Definitely invest in marketing and customer experience if you would like the main driver behind your business to be product-led growth or some form of a self-signup/self-onboarding.
Could you provide any further advice on how to hire sales professionals? I'm starting to feel comfortable hiring tech roles, but hiring for sales still feels like a black box!
Sales can definitely feel like that. Without more context on your market, decision maker personas etc. the one piece of advise that I can give confidently is this:
Start with Senior Sales Leadership. Ideally someone with experience in your target market.
Reach out to a few individuals, in your network or on LinkedIn or similar. Ask them for advice, see the type of advice they provide. If you like them, ask them to recommend someone – the hope is they recommend themselves.
B2B sales is an area I'm going to need help with quite soon. Solo-bootstrapping a startup means that money can be tight though.
Do you think it would be possible to get part-time help using the approach you describe? Alternatively, do some sales professionals work on a commission-only basis?
Also, do you have any idea what typical commission is expected?
On sales leaders:
I personally know some sales leaders who mentor/advise other start-up founders. This includes getting on some client calls.
However it's tricky, in that they wouldn't do it if there was a conflict of interest of any kind, they'd be more likely to do it once they know these people a bit more. There is also the WIIFM factor.
All that to say, it is possible to get help.
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On sales reps:
As others have mentioned the biggest factor here will be how long it takes to close a deal. If you have quick close cycles (typical in the small to mid-market), a higher commission component or commission only is possible.
Typically, I've seen commissions in B2B to be about 7-10% of Annual Contract Value (ACV) for the first year. Mind you this is highly generalized, based on my experience.
Most sales compensation plans aim for sales reps to earn 1x base as commissions if they meet target. So a base of $60K, would result in $120K in income if they performed.
Based on this you could try finding reps on 14-20% ACV on a commission only basis, paid out on paid invoices.
To be candid, I wouldn't try doing commission-only positions for my own ventures. That said it's worth a try if there are constraints that make it hard to pay a base.
Getting part-time help in sales is going to be hard. It will depend on how long your sales cycle is too.
Sales reps will happily work on commission only if they see a huge market for your product. Which might be difficult to show with a new product.
The commission rate is negotiable at the hiring point. If they are great at sales and know there is a big market they will want a lower base with a higher commission. You should also set a commission cap at some point as your variable costs increase your profit will drop and you could end up at a point where the sales team is making more than the company.
One exception would be if your product has really good and obvious search keywords that are being searched at a reasonably high volume. Google ads can work really well in this scenario. Even better if no one else is buying ads for those keywords.
Sales without marketing isn't the best strategy, it literally turns you into a one man[selling machine where everything is based on your time. Marketing develops channels of customers.
This really depends on the stage your company is at. If you haven't found product-market fit, you need to spend a majority of your time in sales mode talking to potential customers/users so you can figure out who your ideal market is and what your market wants. If you try to start marketing without finding product-market fit, you may end up wasting a lot of time and money without knowing whether anyone even wants your product.
It also depends on who you're selling to as well. Consumer/SMB customers may require less sales efforts than enterprise customers. You will always want to start with talking to users regardless, which is sales.
Well, you sort of described the position I'm in :)
Given that, do you have any recommendations for developing channels of customers? I haven't really hired for marketing before - what should I be looking for in that role?
- Content writers: Helps with Long tail SEO and building thought leadership; Ask within your network if they know someone.
- Website design and branding: Make a good first impression
- Banner and booth design for Conferences: Hopefully the folks from the design and branding can do this. caveat: Once this becomes a viable channel again.
- Ranking etc: Sign-up for a subscription of SEO Moz or something similar
- Adword: DIY
Honestly it's much much harder hiring for Marketing. If you do hire someone – find someone good at Project managing external resources.
From my experiences over the last year I would say there are too many channels that require so much work to reach a point where your reach matters. So unless you have a team I focus on one channel. If you pick youtube learn to create effective videos and use other social channels to reenforce the youtube content by posting on fb, ig about your new videos.
But that's just general advise trying to cast a big nest. The more effective channels usually come from being part of an existing community (think reddit forum or website forum or facebook group) and offering a product that fixes what people want.
As for hiring. Hire someone who has done marketing before or hire someone who is part of a community you want to be in who is usually doing a lot of unpaided work to make the community better.
One thing I disagree on is that you should spend equal time on everything, at least at first.
The way I see it is that product development should still come first, but marketing and building an audience should be tied into that process instead of being an afterthought.
When you're building the product out initially there's just so much shit to do, I think if you don't dedicate most of your time to building it takes too long to get anything done.
Perhaps I'm biased as I'm trying to juggle a full-time job and building my product. I barely have enough time to build stuff, let alone get distracted with things like SEO.
Hey, I'd be interested in your local trello. I was meaning to write a todo-app based on best psych best practices, especially only presenting the highest priority ( = urgent * important) item at any given time. I also wanted to add ordered sub-tasks, due-date, and time estimate features so that the urgency ramps up automatically as the remaining time to complete a task approaches the estimated length of the task.
Sure thing. It's open source and you can find it here (1).
Unfortunately it's very badly written (sorry) because I wrote it just for myself on a weekend and is very limited, just enough to get the job done for me.
You should look at Taskwarrior for some inspiration! I use TW and it has the features you mentioned(and I use them regularly). Urgency is derived from certain coefficients[1].
The problem I have with Taskwarrior is that (from a layman's point of view, i.e. mine) there's a lot of new information you need to learn just to get to the point of a simple TODO. Whereas Trello has the massive benefit of being intuitive and you're up and running in seconds after making the board without even having to read any docs.
Anyway I'd be interested in learning Taskwarrior, but in my day job I work in a team and I can't make them use that kind of tooling.
I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective?
I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations".
If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?
Yes SEO is still very much relevant and effective IMO. Regardless of the paid ads, Google sends a lot of organic traffic when you rank for the right keywords. If you were to buy this traffic you would spends thousand of dollars doing it. Same for Youtube. A good video is amazing source of targeted prospects.
Just think about how you find a new service, chances are you googled it and tried the 2-3 results.
Now as for the question - is it necessary? The answer is yes. Because if you don't do it your competitor will and as the joke goes "The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google".
> Are there really any "tricks" that work?
I'm no SEO expert and so I don't care for meta tags, keywords. Title and page description are still important I think. I believe the most relevant things are the time user a spends on your page and social signals (shares, etc) and unfortunately backlinks from high authority pages (this is the worst part of SEO).
The good news is that you don't have to do anything sneaky to do SEO anymore. Make an excellent page on which a user spends a lot of time (so good that he actually bookmarks or shares it) and it starts ranking. For all its evilness Google is still doing something right here.
sitemap.xml can cause your search result to appear with sub-links.
Keyword density (just the right amount) and total word count seem to have an effect and I’ve seen targeted landers work very well for specific search phrases.
Backlinks will probably always be relevant to rankings as they were the original bedrock principle behind PageRank. If you get prominent blogs to link to you, that can help a lot. Inversely, use rel=nofollow on anchors to avoid seeping relevance to other pages.
Ever since Mobilegeddon your site MUST be mobile friendly or you will get penalized. Also other UI stuff matters (E.g. don’t put ads above the fold)
Not an SEO expert here but I would consider those effective and small things you can do for SEO.
A lot of people don’t do technical SEO right. It sounds like you’re asking about whether there is something other than technical SEO and links to do right?
Not really. If you write good content, with relevant keywords, and people link to it, that is good SEO. Not clear what distinction you’re trying to draw.
There may be some scammy stuff with short term results, but you’re always one step away from an algo change or a manual penalty.
Edit: I forgot good internal linking/url schemes. Those matter.
There's gotta be like a github repo somewhere that lays out the actual technical aspects of SEO, without any of the bullshit. Anyone know of a project like that?
1. Solo founders are most often devs, which means they focus 90% of their energy on dev and what little remains on marketing. Unfortunately this is a easy trap to fall into and you should invest equal if not more time doing/learning SEO, content marketing (which you've done here very successfully btw) and building an audience.
2. Making a product without any user feedback. You work 1 year on a product and realize people don't get your idea. That's why it is essential to get feedback every step of the way and your spouse doesn't count :D
3. The good news is being a solo founder is no longer very unique thing. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are doing this and hang out on online communities like indiehackers, makerlog, etc.
4. After trying out hundred tools I've found that nothing beats trello. To each his own though but you really need a todo tool when working alone to keep on track. I've actually written a local trello for myself with one twist - the tool assigns me a task daily and as soon as mark it as complete it assigns me the next item from the list. But at any moment there is never more than 1 item on my "doing" list. It was because i was spending inordinate amount of time bike-shedding when i don't have one single todo.