FINALLY! <3
I know for most of you, it is quite normal and something okay, and even for me as well, I have a bigger goal with this SaaS product as well.
I have been building SubtitleO since June, and it took a very long time for me because of some initial issues with the developers, new things in the market, etc. But I sorted that out by building a very strong team with people I can trust and who can go a long way with me.
Getting the first 5 customers is a really great validation that tells me that I am on the right track with this project.
I was nervous because we started getting 1000+ free users signed up to our platform but the conversion rate was low.
The reason that I have found is:
not having a clear idea of what they are getting in the paid plan, not having added bonuses of features in the pro plan
And we are working on it with a super keen interest now. Hopefully, we are going to see a good amount of conversion rate because all the feedback that we have got till now is not just good, but it is GREAT!
The things that we have done till now with SubtitleO for marketing:
SEO blogs
Email marketing to the free users
Listings on AI websites
Creating shorts for social media
Linkedin outreach
Google Ads
Facebook Ads (turned off because of super high CPC)
We will need to focus more on content marketing and social media content as our target audience is waiting for us there.
Did I miss anything? Please ask me in the comments, and I will be happy to talk about it. Have suggestions? Please have a talk.
Congrats, first 5 are huge
Yooo! Let’s goooo 🎉🚀
Wow! Congrats, on getting the first customers! We all know how it’s hard to get those at the very start.
Does “Creating shorts for social media” include TikTok, not only YouTube shorts?
Congrats.
If I can offer some advice, you clearly have some good traffic and people are interested enough to create a new account, which means you should focus less on marketing until you improve the conversion rate of your funnel. Pick the 2-3 channels that are working best so far and keep them running, and spend the rest of your time on improving your overall onboarding experience.
I would suggest a few things to focus on:
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Better onboarding - Use some kind of product tours for new users. In addition, you could even build a fully customized walkthrough that essentially “forces” a user to upload a video of theirs and add at least 1 caption.
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User surveys - Watch for people who sign up and immediately drop off (i.e. they don’t come back). Email them after a day or 2 and try to get an explanation of why. You might find out that they ran into technical issues you were not aware of, or found that they couldn’t import a video from a specific platform, etc.
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Email marketing during the first few weeks - I know you mentioned this, and it’s a good thing to focus on. If you can customize it based on user activity, even better (e.g. for users that are active, keep sending educational information, and for inactive users, send case studies that get them motivated to come back try again).
If you are not tracking user activity, that’s something that’s super valuable and you should be.
Great tips! Yes, y0u are totally right. The current issue that I am facing is users’ using the app itself. They should not just sign up but upload the video and see the output. Most of the people are not uploading the video and trying the tool after signing up.
For this: I am going to make it better by showing them how they can do it easily. and send them emails by running crons jobs that if they don’t create the project they will get that mail.
Maybe keep a demo file uploaded to save some efforts to show them the benefits and then ask them to try with their own video
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This is interesting. While I am in a completely different sector, I get probably 10-20 new sign ups on Sipharmony.com a week. “Conversion” happens when they add a card, choose or port a number, and start using the system.
But out of those signup numbers, maybe 5% do anything. I am currently putting together a survey campaign to see what’s up!
How many of those sign-ups are scammers looking to “leverage” your $0 PAYG offering
So far, none. Pushing 500 sign ups now. All legit. Going after the voipms market ;)
You don’t happen to be looking for an L1 do you? 😁
Haha. Man. I am still doing all this myself. Good thing I am a Sr Software Engineer lmao. One day… The struggle is real when you try to do it without outside investors. I did approach a couple a few years back. Apparently sweat equity isn’t a thing. 😂
Your niche is very targetted and hard to find people. But i guess it would be very less competitive as well.
Business phones (VoIP)… for businesses is no small niche. My competitors are multi-billion dollar companies. The only true competitor I see is voip.ms. The others are just bloatware.
Hey Suraj,
Congratulations on your first 5!
Given that you have over 1k free users there’s obviously an appeal to what you’re offering and the website. So I’d keep doing what you’re doing there (though I have some suggestions - see below).
It’s normally way easier to up-selling to, or retaining, existing users than acquiring completely new ones so I’d definitely focus on up-selling the paid service to existing users. I’d look at AB testing the CTAs and conversion points in your funnel; and in your emails.
Having just tried it out, one thing I’d say you’re definitely missing is that you see to let people use the free service without supplying any email etc. I’d look at adding in a step after the processing that requires an email address before they can access the result. That way you have a definite way to follow up and upsell.
In terms of some immediate, specific, thoughts browsing your website (in no particular order):
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I’m rather surprised there’s not an example video on your homepage. Makes me wonder why. it would be especially great to see a couple of real users’ videos.
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My first question was to wonder about the privacy, security and copyright on the uploaded and generated content. This doesn’t seem to be addressed in the privacy policy. I’d want some pretty convincing stuff about uploads not being kept, how long they’re held for, who can access them, etc. And clarification that you take no ownership of the resulting outputs. Or what credit you expect. And I’d summarise a bit of that in the FAQs as well as the proper details in the legal bits.
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I’d get a copywriter to review all your copy and help write variants for AB testing. Much of it is great but there are bits that don’t read quite right and I don’t think you can have that given that your product is built on understanding language. Example: the “Contact Us” text in the footer: “We will revert you back within 24 hours” isn’t correct English. (FYI - I’m no copywriter but change it to “We will get back to you back within 24 hours.”). There are also errors in the Terms page which would make me worry.
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Again, given the focus of your product I think you need to ensure every single bit of text on your site is entirely optimised for easy reading. A few bits are not (eg the text that summarises SubtitleO on the left in the footer).
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It’s definitely worth thinking about adding a $5 or a pay-per-use tier to see if that makes any difference.
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