Last week we covered the recent Product Hunt launch. What’s next for Pager Team?
User acquisition. That’s the next step. While we have a handful of signups and free trials, we are well short of where we need to be. We are trying to avoid building new features, however. There are still a lot of features that could be built (single sign on, anyone?), but it’s much smarter to build features in response to actual customer requests rather than hoping we’re building the right things. Instead we’re trying the following approaches to get customers.
Internet presence
On Tuesday after the PH launch, I kept busy by submitting to each and every single site in this list. Most of these appear to have a business model centered around maintaining a long queue of pending products to be posted in a month or two, and charging for “expedited processing”. Looking to minimize expenses, I paid for none of them. A few really stood out as exceptional experiences, including Alternativeto.net, StackShare and changelog. However, by and large, these are not driving a lot of traffic (yet). My theory is establishing a presence on the internet should help drive organic search traffic — Google Search Console indicates absolutely abysmal search result placement and impressions:
Direct outreach
We’re reaching out to small startups and their founders and asking:
- What are you using today to get notified when your site goes down in the middle of the night?
- How many incidents have you had in the past month?
These answers help guide us on feature prioritization and help us better understand the market. Most everyone we’ve reached out to has been extremely willing to be helpful, and some even offered their own advice.
Social outreach
I’ve been active on a number of maker communities as well, incl uding wip.chat, indiehackers.com, and getmakerlog.com. I’m attending a DevOps meetup this week as well.
Follow up with existing customers
For those users who’ve signed up but haven’t created a rotation, follow up and see what happened. For users with rotations, see if they have any feedback or concerns, and help guide them out of the free trial into a paid plan (which involves adding a credit card, the holy grail of SaaS).
Pager Team traffic sources
Tracfone appears to be simply Bing ads (more on advertising strategy in another post), and along with alternativeto.net has some of the highest pages/session stats. This makes sense, since people keenly interested in learning more about Pager Team will look at the most amount of content. The overall stat should be low because Pager Team doesn’t have a lot of pages that are accessible without an account, 10 total including things like the privacy policy (which is super important and yet not exactly prime marketing material). With the recent pricing compare page addition I hope those pages/session stats tick up a little but the main landing page continues to contain most content.