It’s Better to Sell Something to 3 Users, Than to Have 1 Million Idle Visitors

The majority of startup founders that I talk to, tend to dream of having millions of visitors on their sites. I had the chance of creating a site that had 25 million visitors during its year of operations. I came to realize that having millions of visitors just pass by your site without purchasing anything, isnt as useful as having a site with 1000 visitors, of which two or three end up buying something. Creating a site that attracts millions of visitors isnt easy, optimizing a site that sells something to three people isnt easy either, but let me try to convince you of the value of focusing your time on the latter option.

If you wish to make a startup that endures and eventually ends up creating jobs, create a product where 2 out of every 1000 people who visit your site, pay you 20 dollars or more. Its not simple. Yet if you achieve that, your startup idea will have a very solid foundation that will make the customer acquisition process quite scalable. Getting 100 highly targeted prospects to visit your site, is extremely affordable nowadays. For 5 dollars you can get 500 very highly targeted visitors on your landing page. If those in turn produce 10 customers paying 20 dollars each, you’d have enough to get 10,000 new prospects. The cycle goes on and increases exponentially. Specially because with a strategy like that, A/B testing can do wonders. Every single change you make can add another percentage point to your conversion rate.

Looking at the Summer 2013 YC batch, its interesting to note that many of the startups are creating a conversion oriented product. Recently, Mattermark ranked the Summer 2013 batch and gave the number one spot to One Month Rails. Their idea was simple, helpful, and immensely profitable. They had a compelling call to action, pay 49 USD and you will become a skilled programmer. You can go out and materialize your idea with an MVP using ruby on rails. At the time, around 12k peoplepaid them the 49 dollars. It ended up being a lot of money and its based on a product that they don’t necessarily need to redevelop every day because they only needed to film the classes once.

So next time you’re out there thinking of creating the next big thing, think about something you possess that other people would pay for. Set up a beautiful landing page with a nice video describing how you will share that thing with the world and then compel them to pay you for it. If it works, you will have a solid startup from which to fund the growth of your eventual mass consumer product. Follow me on twitter at @TomDuenasUribe

All of my blog posts are on Tomas.co