customer-development, consultingWe opened a software consulting startup a while ago. We get a lot of visits in the website but nobody has contacted yet. We did some social media campaigns, and informed about it to the people I know who might be interested.
Could you please give some suggestions on getting customers? We are thinking about adwords. Market research is showing that this industry will worth several billion dollars in coming years. Thanks a lot.
Did you conduct presales or target market testing during development? If you did, they would make a great batch of first customers since they are already familiar with the product / service.
Getting reviewed by an industry publication (magazine, blog, tv, news) can get you more visibility and establish credibility among your target market and increase visits.
But since you are already getting visits and have informed people who might be interested, you might have a conversion problem if you are not getting clients. Talk to some of the people who have visited the site and find out if your solution fits their needs. Are the features what they want and is the price attractive, is the website easy to use and understand etc.
If you are new in a relatively new industry or with a new product category, one of your jobs should be to raise awareness of the industry/ product category. Your target market may not fully realize the benefits of your category to make a decision about using your solution.
Just in case you did not read it yet: Do things that don’t scale. Specifically you should find a potential ideal client that is respected in the industry and offer your service for free. In return ask for patience when you fix problems based on their feedback. Your goal is to make that client perfectly happy, whatever it takes. This will make your service better and lets you use that influential client as a reference to get other clients that pay.
It sounds like you have no contacts in the business whatsoever. Which wouldn’t be too surprising if you are just out of university. If you have worked in the business for 20 years and are well know to many people then consultancy is an option. You could try around to get a software contract but you would have to show you could deliver, but you can get staged payments if you are lucky.
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