Interview with Founder of Howzzthat.com
Interview with Ninju Narang, founder and CEO Howzzthat.com
Howzzthat.com is a comparison shopping engine that compares products on popular online shopping websites and shows customers the lowest price. Ninju Narang founded the company and currently serves as the CEO.
Can you tell me about yourself and Howzzthat?
I was hit by the entrepreneur bug and have recently founded a company called — Howzzthat. I am still working in my day job and dedicating 50% of my bandwidth to Howzzthat. My education background is Postgraduate in International Business.
What are the primary channels you use to reach customers?
When it comes to startups, almost all entrepreneurs are able to create the product but most fail to get [market] traction. The usual cycle is [as follows]:
a) they focus on developing the product, and only once they launch, think about ways to make the product reach the customers.
b) they try a bunch of stuff like SEO, social and display ads, targeting blogs, content marketing, etc.
c) the result is they may get a bit of traction or no traction at all. Resulting in running out of money, since startups are usually low on budget.
In most cases the product is not the problem, it is not being able to discover the right marketing channel to reach the customers.
We use the bullseye framework developed by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares in their book Traction. To give you a background.
There are 19 channels for growth like SEO, Viral Marketing, Publicity, and others.
In step 1 we brainstorm ideas and strategies per channel
In step 2 we identify a few channels with which we think will give us the maximum result. And run a few inexpensive tests to test the channel. For example, instead of running 40 ads on social platforms, we run only 4.
In step 3, one of the channels will show promising results in step 2, so we focus on the one channel which is our bullseye, and refine it further.
If none of the channels are fruitful we run the steps again. We will need to look at our ad copywriting or maybe the issue is with the product.
How do you use your company’s social media profiles?
We tried running some tests on our social media profile (shortlisted in step 2) but the bounce rate of traffic coming from social media was very high, therefore we have presently stopped it altogether and are focusing on SEO which is giving us the maximum results. At different stages of the company different traction channels work, ultimately you reach a saturation point and then you need to switch the channel by running the bullseye framework.
Once we reach our traffic saturation point with SEO, we may try social media platforms again.
What marketing technology platforms are you using or have you used in the past that you would recommend to other founders?
There are various platforms available and most of them offer a free trial. Try a couple of them and see which one suits you best. As for us, we are presently using none.
Do you have a book, YouTube channel, or podcast you recommend to other marketers?
We would definitely recommend the book Traction by Gabriel and Justin and the Lean Startup framework by Eric Ries.
What is the best way for people to learn about your company and find you online?
You can read about us on our website or message us on our social pages: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
