Mine was via Twitter.
You are very right about this…
But there is a huge difference between paying to use and paying to try.
Take Uber in Lagos for example, its exactly what they did.
They use to pay N40,000 per new driver you send to them…
Then they gave several free rides to potential customers…
The two examples above and what I did are analogous to each other.
Here is what I mean
Firstly Target customers already use an alternative service to meet the same need we were trying to meet.
People were taking regular taxis before Uber came around, so Uber “paid” them to try out their service… hoping that when you try it, you get stuck on it.
In my case, the bloggers where already using social media and word of mouth to promote their blogs, I was building a free ad network and I wanted them to try it, feel the impact on their traffic and get stuck on me
Secondly for the case of Uber, the entire model fails when sufficient drivers and passengers do not join the system at about the same time. If there are so many drivers without passengers, the drivers leave. Likewise if there are so many passengers without drivers, the passengers get frustrated and leave too. The only way is pay both parties to remain until the system becomes self sustaining… ie. give the drivers hourly guarantees and free rides to the riders.
For my case, if the network is not large enough or takes too slow to grow, people get frustrated and start to feel that they are giving more than they are getting. The only way to keep them till the network is bigger than any one blog is to “encourage” them to get as many people that they can on board.
The truth is that the value of some ideas is only seen when it operates at scale. For such ideas, waiting for traction to slowly pickup will kill the idea. The only way for such ideas to succeed is to ramp up growth quickly… and such ramp-up costs money
You have to spend millions if you want to make any tangible(life changing) progress.
I had built decent loyal followership on Facebook and Nairaland years before launching my venture, and they were my customers for the services/products (books sale, CV review, interview coaching and other career services) we sell at JarusHub.
@easibor Are you sure? You might be working on a wrong idea if the value of the idea can’t be easily identified even at an early stage. Perhaps, what you had in mind was the Potential of the idea?
If I could recall correctly, the product which you spent a million naira to acquire its first 1000 users was adblabla ad exchange network right? Please, can you provide updates on this product? Do you feel the 1M was well spent?
The truth is that some products, especially products that require a high level of public approval and trust to reach its peak, can never be executed independently. To a large extent, such product requires a large support and collaboration from influencers and this also includes raising money from top VC’s despite having 1M naira to test the water. It is part of the growth strategy.
On a different note, I thought you guys conversations were very educational and interesting. Thanks for sharing.
@manifest I believe that when it comes to the formation stages of any startup, the words “value” and “potential” may be used interchangeably.
This is because very very few ideas have any value at the conceptualization stage. All they have is just potential. Unless off course your idea is dig for gold where gold was already been established to be present.
Identification and actualization are two different things. If you cannot identify the idea then its a complete waste of time. What i meant by my statement is that some ideas have no chance of survival if you do not rush them through the formative years. This is typical of any marketplace-like idea. Marketplace-like meaning you need a symbiotic relationship between two parties for it to suceed. If one party is not available or insufficient in number, then the other party cannot survive alone and the idea dies.
Just like my product http://wasamar.com.ng without us growing the tailors users http://ts.wasamar.com.ng, so that they can create a collection of styles of their previous attires for their customers, and grow the number of styles in our catalogue http://wasamar.com.ng/catalogue, else wasamar dies.
@udemesamuel
Good Product but…
The relationship between an individual and their tailor is personal and strong. How do you hope to combat this? I must confess. All I thought about while browsing your website is stealing styles to take to my tailor to sew.
@Lord_Commander [quote=“Lord_Commander, post:28, topic:12523”]
All I thought about while browsing your website is stealing styles to take to my tailor to sew.
[/quote]
Yeah that is the glitch about the product true but it will be left to customer to decide to make the attire from the tailor who designed the style. what we will do is the show the customer some reasons why he/she should make an attire with a particular tailor that uploaded the style, thank you you for that insight.
@easibor what app or platform are we talking about that you dashed 1M to acquire just 1K users? would like to test it for free (unpaid)
hahahahaha… its Adblabla.com a free online advertisement network that targets businesses with extremely low marketing budgets.
The concepts works by trade by barter. If you place our ad widget on your website so that ads from other users can show on your site? we will activate your ads to show on all the sites on the entire network for free…
Furthermore, our Adblabla Launch product is basically a sponsored post marketplace. From just N500 per blog, we can get your sponsored posts featured on hundreds of websites on the network.
Compared to any ad on facebook or google adsense, the adblabla launch product is 10X cheaper because the posts and all the links in it are permanent features on the internet and the clicks keep coming for as long as the article is properly worded to keep showing up on google search…
Please try and share your feedback.
Cheers
I created a blog, wrote SEO contents around accounting software 4-5 months before launching my online store…talk about d product, wet your audience appetite before selling, or else one might struggle.
Adword is very powerful.
Free advice
The only reasons that will make me buy
A combination of 1 and 2 or standalone of 1 or 2 will help. Anything else na OYO
What an ugly name to give to a service in 21st century? its synonymous with abrakadabra " the more you look the less you see" > Adblabla.com
Hahahahahaha who cares about the beauty of a name… the most important thing is that it sticks!
Funny enough the name was inspired by blah blah blah… I wanted to register a domain that says Ad****** and every thing after Ad that I could think of was already registered… Adnetwork, Adswap, Adbank, practically everything… any thing Ad blah blah was taken…and somehow i liked the sound of Ad blah blah… lol so i registered Adblabla
To me and you, maybe not to him.