Reached 100 users. What should you do next?

Question

Hey everyone!

I recently just hit 115 users on my startup Affistash. We got around 80% of the users we have at the moment on our launch day, but we are getting around 10-15 users daily.

I am in a wired place at the moment, because we are getting lots of free signups, but not so many people upgrade to our pro version. I am not sure if there is anything we are doing wrong about it, but I would like to know your opinion about it to.

For now we used the following customer acquisition: Reddit posts, Comments on Social Media, LinkedIn groups and Twitter threads.

I am also trying to scale through influencer marketing, but I am just in the outreach phase at the moment.

Should I try to double down on what is currently bringing customers or should I try to look for other methods (blog placements, ads, SEO, etc.) that could bring a bigger amount of customers?

How could I try to convert the current users to paying customers?

I am looking forward to see what you guys think, because I'm really looking for some advice.

Thanks : )

Krishna Kumar · Accepted Answer

if 115 signed up for the free account, then by rule of thumb, under 20 should convert to paid. If that is happening, you are actually in a comfortable place. But you cannot expect the conversion overnight, unless your free account has term limits.

Puneet Kohli · Answer

@vicdevelopmently Great glad it could kick start some creative gears! I would say however, also have those feedback interviews with non-paying customers (You'll learn a lot more about what you could have done to convert them!)

Also thanks for your support on my upcoming launch :D

Victor Giurgiu · Answer

@puneet_kohli definitely made a great point. To be honest, we are still searching for a great balance, and we try to have feedback interviews with every paying customer on the platform and we also implemented a Survicate popup over there.

We are still in our first 3 days since the launch, so we are only figuring things out, probably a lot of stuff will change in the near future, but I found some pretty interesting aspects that we can improve on in this conversation on PH. Thanks the feedback and I am excited for you launch ;)

Cameron Howe · Answer

Congrats on the initial users! I wouldn't focus yet on monetizing. Identify what drove those initially people to sign-up, double down on finding more people who align with those cohorts and market to them. Also track engagement and ensure they're sticking around and liking the product. Once you have consistent sticky users, you can start turning on the monetization funnel. That's what we are doing! Provide tons of value then look to monetize once we have the rest down: https://www.producthunt.com/post...

Richard Gao · Answer

I was tracking your launch, and it's only been a couple of days, hasn't it?

It's more than reasonable that they're just taking some time to try out the free version first before going to the paid one.

If some times has passed and you're still having this issue, that's when I would use some analytics app (google analytics, hotjar, etc) to do some more testing.

In fact, it's good if you get those set up now, and then check their results after a couple of weeks.

Puneet Kohli · Answer

@vicdevelopmently Playing devils advocate here but as an “affiliate marketer”, 10 per week is more than sufficient. I reasonably will sign up for 1-2 a week, maybe a couple a month at max, and try things out. You may not be hitting the right balance between the quantity vs quality aspect of what your target audience wants. Again, maybe your audience does want more than 10 per week and the premium would work in that case, but my thoughts would differ. Another thing to consider is - how hard is it to actually onboard onto these programs? Can you make it seamless? It’s one thing to say “here’s the top 10” and another to say, “in 1 clicks
 you’ll be registered with all 10”.

Just some food for thought.

RE: B2B that sounds good but then you actually want more users and shouldn’t care much about the conversion numbers? Since your focus is getting the B2B promoted product more eyeballs / conversions.

Finally, the real answer is just to talk to as many customers from your target group, and see what they have to say (not me or anyone else here on PH)

Victor Giurgiu · Answer

@puneet_kohli Interesting reply, we actually thought that the fact that we give marketing tips, outreach scripts and insights about the target audience for every program listed on the platform would be a big enough difference and it would be worth the upgrade.

Maybe you missed those, because for the free plan you only get the daily opportunities, and 10 programs/week

Cameron Howe · Answer

@vicdevelopmently no problem! we tried turning the paid tap on too soon and had to walk back from it. If you can support the free version from your own pocket, I would stick down that path until those sticky users really develop. :)

Victor Giurgiu · Answer

@puneet_kohli Also, our main income source is actually the B2B aspect, where we list companies as the "winning product of the day", and by also giving marketing tips, outreach scripts and insights about the target audience for every program listed, the marketers will be better at actually making sales for the companies, which I think gives a small edge over the competition

Puneet Kohli · Answer

@vicdevelopmently Being super honest with you, after going through your site and pages, there’s not enough value for me to convert to paid. If you can find other levers that might be worth paying for other than 24-7 support and the other thing (forgot what it was). Even at $1/mo, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth it compared to your free tier.

Perhaps setup calls with at least 30 of your 100 customers and find out what their biggest pain points are, and how much they’d be willing to pay to solve it.

I’d treat this startup as a way for you to generate leads to potential customers for your actual startup (which may be the same idea, slightly different, or completely different).

Victor Giurgiu · Answer

@cameron_howe1 thanks so muck for the advice. I’ll definitely also check out your product:)

Victor Giurgiu · Answer

@richard_gao2 Thanks so much for being in touch with the journey of Affistash, we actually got our first paying customer after our launch today, , so I am supppper excited to see what the future reserves.

We actually try keep our customer as close as possible, since we also have the "daily opportunities"  feature, we send emails everyday to our users, so they can check out the new listed products/programs on the platform, so I hope that will keep them close for as much as possible.

Also, our main income source is actually the B2B aspect, where we list companies as the "winning product of the day", and by also giving marketing tips, outreach scripts and insights about the target audience for every program listed, the marketers will be better at actually making sales for the companies, which I think gives a small edge over the competition

Victor Giurgiu · Answer

@richard_gao2 I am also struggling a bit with marketing, since this is still one of my first tries to do SaaS, so I am not so familiar with marketing in this space, with that in mind, I will have to adapt.

Reached 100 users. What should you do next?

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