18 tweets · December 2019 · 72 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
So I saw this tweet and was like huh, complice.co could use some marketing consultation. What if I get @visakanv on this? And he was like "sure, email me a braindump" and I got half a sentence in before I was like "this is weird, why am I not just writing a thread?!"
So okay, @CompliceGoals marketing braindump thread. Context for braindump is me saying to VV: > "we have a lot of ideas and it would be great to get a better sense of which ones are actually good, and also to realize things we haven't thought of."
High-level: Complice has been stable at about 300 paying customers for a few years. This is totally enough to live on but there's a sense it could easily be higher. Very little has been done towards marketing in those years. Fair bit of churn, plus new customers, & reactivations.
The Complice homepage gets ~1500 visitors (not counting logged-in users, but counting users who later log in) per month, about 5-6% of whom start a free trial, of whom 5-6% subscribe to paying. Lots of room for any of those numbers to go way up!
There's obviously a lot of work to do on inactivity, churn, etc, but that's not the focus for this moment. In any case, some fairly basic math suggests that if the visitor count or conversion rate went up 2×, the total # of paying customers would also gradually 2×
Most of the new customers are coming in via word-of-mouth, @bmndr, or (this month) a recent Scientific American article that mentions Complice twice. Or this QT:
So! Actual ideas, in no particular order. 1. Referral/affiliate program. We have this sort of half-implemented an a decent number of users have asked to be notified when there's some sort of actual rewards. Probably makes sense for this to wait until other improvements are made.
2. Add a much longer manifesto or other copy to the site. Some of this is written, some of it isn't. Some is in weird draft states. This seems like a very powerful leverage point as it would help convey the Complice philosophy to people, which is pretty unique and profound.
3. More bloggy/newslettery type stuff. I'm a pretty good writer and have lots of thoughts, but I don't like to *have* to write. Maybe an ultra-short podcast? But I've found conversion rates from audio to be absurdly dismal. Probably partially audience size...
4. Try to get Complice profiled on various sites. I've done basically none of this... I think I have ugh fields here. I tried to get on one or two sites (LifeHacker?) years ago and gave up when I didn't even get replies. Did get lots from HackerNews/IndieHackers a few years ago.
5. Try to get my *writing* featured on popular outlets. I think if I knew how to pitch I could write lots of original work for online blogs with large followings, & they might even pay me a few hundred for the article, plus there'd be whatever sorts of references to Complice.
6. Improve the coworking room experience, including the onboarding process from the rooms, and then try to get more communities/influencers etc to start coworking rooms. (The coworking rooms can be used without an account, so they're an easy thing to virally promote.)
7. Create some sort of simple micro-app that I think should exist, which people use for free, share virally, etc and then it tells them about Complice. Maybe frontend+browserstorage only, so no backend, host for free on github.io etc.
8. Add more features to the app and promote those, including promoting them to the ~600 people who used to pay for Complice and the other ~2.5k people who made an account, confirmed their email, and are thus on the "new Complice features" newsletter. This worked well in 2016.
.....I think those are the main ideas I have. Things I don't know: • am I missing whole categories? SEO I guess... • how to decide between things? • how to directly turn money into more money (eg ads or hiring someone to ____)
Marketing has long felt challenging for me. Not 100% sure why. Something about the feedback loops feeling hard. I try a bunch of stuff and the conversion rate fluctuates but..? How do I know what caused it? 🤔 Or I post links in various forums but it seems like ~nobody clicks 😟
I've found it easier with the Goal-Crafting Intensive online workshops we host around new years each year, probably because they're a discrete thing and it's easy to market to my existing audience of Complice users & newsletter subs. (🎯 landing page 👇) complice.co/event/plan2020…
Anyway, I don't know where we go from here—I'm hoping you have thoughts! 🙏 I guess probably next move is to pay you 🤑