Quote: (12-12-2017 08:53 PM)Teep Wrote:  

Can anyone recommend a website builder that doesn't require a developer and doesn't look like shit?

Wordpress is making me pull my hair out. I've been looking at Squarespace?

Definitely should give Geocities a shot.

Quote: (12-12-2017 09:09 PM)Suits Wrote:  

Quote: (12-12-2017 08:53 PM)Teep Wrote:  

Can anyone recommend a website builder that doesn't require a developer and doesn't look like shit?

Wordpress is making me pull my hair out. I've been looking at Squarespace?

Definitely should give Geocities a shot.

Ha, excellent advice. For 1998.;-)

Quote: (12-12-2017 08:53 PM)Teep Wrote:  

Can anyone recommend a website builder that doesn't require a developer and doesn't look like shit?

Wordpress is making me pull my hair out. I've been looking at Squarespace?

What are your goals with the website?

What is your long term budget? Do you want to pay a hefty monthly fee for a website builder-site or would you rather pay a hefty once-off fee for a beautiful wordpress site that you can edit on your own going into the future?

Quote: (11-24-2017 06:31 AM)Suits Wrote:  

I've been wrestling in my head the last several days about product price points of my upcoming product release.

It's a digitally distributed product, meaning that it's about the easiest thing in the world to copy. My plan is to bundle it with online tools and marketing features (that can't be copied) and offer both for a monthly rate. In other words, you'd have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access the product. The risk is that folks will simply pay for one month, get all of the digital product elements and then cancel the subscription, which leaves me in a bit of a pickle.

(A) If I charge a high monthly fee, people are going to be even more likely want to steal the product, because paying the monthly fee every month may be far more than people will want to pay for the product's subscription based tools and marketing benefits.

(B) If I charge a lower monthly fee, it'll be low enough that I'll be more or less fucked if people still cancel the subscription after one month. I can deal with this by requiring them to pay a full year in advance, but this will push up the initial minimum required payment well beyond the comfortable range for impulse purchases.

Thanks for all the feedback on my original post on this topic (quoted above. The responses were very helpful for brain-storming about what approach to use when I start selling my first product soon.

I write this post to share the current direction of my thinking on the topic and to hopefully continue the discussion regarding pricing products, both in my specific case and in general.

Recently, I came to the tentative conclusion that it would be better to price each of my products higher rather than lower. I was initially thinking that a price tag of $20 per course was such a steal that I'd gain enough volume from impulse-buys to make up for the low price tag. My product cost is about $0.02 because it is a digital product.

However, with some more thought, I realized that my target consumer can't be someone who is looking or specifically motivated by a cheap product. Because the nature of the product (digital materials designed to be turned into an analogue product by the user with a desktop printer), only someone willing to invest in a decent colour photo-printer would be interested in the product (because the product is almost useless so long as it remains purely digital).

Therefore, I concluded that I should price each product at around $80 and include great value and target the dedicated professional (and companies too) that is serious about their work and willing to invest money into something that makes their job much easier.

At $80 per unit, I only need to get 1 customer to earn the same money I would at $20 per unit, so even if volume is significantly lower, it might not hurt me at all.

Better yet, at $20 per unit, it will be a lot harder to set a respect monthly fee for continued service after the included service period expired. I'm planning on including a year of service with each purchase of the course material itself.

At $20 per product, I could not reasonably charge more than $10 per year for continued service after the included period ended, but at $80 for the product itself, $5 per month is more reasonable, not money customers will miss (so they'll let the auto-credit card payments continue until the card expires), but will net me an extra $60 per year per customer.

The product is definitely worth $80 per unit. I use it myself and would happily turn over that much money (or more). For the target user, that's the same money they can make in less than two hours of work. The product will save those users dozens of hours in annoying prep work (each $80 product represents well over a hundred hours of work for me, not including product testing).

Another motivation is that pricing it at $20 per unit, would pretty much preclude the option of making non-automated sales. $20 per unit isn't bad for an online sale that requires me to just build the system and maintain it, but dedicating my time to making sales by talking to people or even corresponding by email just wouldn't be justifiable. If each sale required only one hour of effort on my part (and it would probably require more), I'd be getting just $20 of income per hour of work and I can earn far better money doing other things with my time (I bill consulting clients $50+ per hour).

Having a base product selling for $80 makes more sense when it comes to doing non-automated sales. If the basic version is selling for $80 and can have another version targeted at companies that includes more features and sells for $200. Or a bundle of several products that sells for $200. I'd be more than happy to spend a day doing sales work if it led to earning $200 and that's also a level of revenue that may justify hiring sales staff. If an advanced-featured product bundle sold for $500, then I'd only have to sell 4 per month to maintain a basic lifestyle in an affordable city, which would allow me to more or less work full-time at further building my product lines.

Thoughts?

delete

@Teep Wix is pretty nice?

Quote: (12-13-2017 03:58 AM)the-dream Wrote:  

@Teep Wix is pretty nice?

I've never seen a website built with Wix that didn't have a goofy over-done user interface that looked ridiculous.

Quote: (12-13-2017 02:24 AM)Suits Wrote:  

Quote: (11-24-2017 06:31 AM)Suits Wrote:  

I've been wrestling in my head the last several days about product price points of my upcoming product release.

It's a digitally distributed product, meaning that it's about the easiest thing in the world to copy. My plan is to bundle it with online tools and marketing features (that can't be copied) and offer both for a monthly rate. In other words, you'd have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access the product. The risk is that folks will simply pay for one month, get all of the digital product elements and then cancel the subscription, which leaves me in a bit of a pickle.

(A) If I charge a high monthly fee, people are going to be even more likely want to steal the product, because paying the monthly fee every month may be far more than people will want to pay for the product's subscription based tools and marketing benefits.

(B) If I charge a lower monthly fee, it'll be low enough that I'll be more or less fucked if people still cancel the subscription after one month. I can deal with this by requiring them to pay a full year in advance, but this will push up the initial minimum required payment well beyond the comfortable range for impulse purchases.

Thanks for all the feedback on my original post on this topic (quoted above. The responses were very helpful for brain-storming about what approach to use when I start selling my first product soon.

I write this post to share the current direction of my thinking on the topic and to hopefully continue the discussion regarding pricing products, both in my specific case and in general.

Recently, I came to the tentative conclusion that it would be better to price each of my products higher rather than lower. I was initially thinking that a price tag of $20 per course was such a steal that I'd gain enough volume from impulse-buys to make up for the low price tag. My product cost is about $0.02 because it is a digital product.

However, with some more thought, I realized that my target consumer can't be someone who is looking or specifically motivated by a cheap product. Because the nature of the product (digital materials designed to be turned into an analogue product by the user with a desktop printer), only someone willing to invest in a decent colour photo-printer would be interested in the product (because the product is almost useless so long as it remains purely digital).

Therefore, I concluded that I should price each product at around $80 and include great value and target the dedicated professional (and companies too) that is serious about their work and willing to invest money into something that makes their job much easier.

At $80 per unit, I only need to get 1 customer to earn the same money I would at $20 per unit, so even if volume is significantly lower, it might not hurt me at all.

Better yet, at $20 per unit, it will be a lot harder to set a respect monthly fee for continued service after the included service period expired. I'm planning on including a year of service with each purchase of the course material itself.

At $20 per product, I could not reasonably charge more than $10 per year for continued service after the included period ended, but at $80 for the product itself, $5 per month is more reasonable, not money customers will miss (so they'll let the auto-credit card payments continue until the card expires), but will net me an extra $60 per year per customer.

The product is definitely worth $80 per unit. I use it myself and would happily turn over that much money (or more). For the target user, that's the same money they can make in less than two hours of work. The product will save those users dozens of hours in annoying prep work (each $80 product represents well over a hundred hours of work for me, not including product testing).

Another motivation is that pricing it at $20 per unit, would pretty much preclude the option of making non-automated sales. $20 per unit isn't bad for an online sale that requires me to just build the system and maintain it, but dedicating my time to making sales by talking to people or even corresponding by email just wouldn't be justifiable. If each sale required only one hour of effort on my part (and it would probably require more), I'd be getting just $20 of income per hour of work and I can earn far better money doing other things with my time (I bill consulting clients $50+ per hour).

Having a base product selling for $80 makes more sense when it comes to doing non-automated sales. If the basic version is selling for $80 and can have another version targeted at companies that includes more features and sells for $200. Or a bundle of several products that sells for $200. I'd be more than happy to spend a day doing sales work if it led to earning $200 and that's also a level of revenue that may justify hiring sales staff. If an advanced-featured product bundle sold for $500, then I'd only have to sell 4 per month to maintain a basic lifestyle in an affordable city, which would allow me to more or less work full-time at further building my product lines.

Thoughts?

Suits, have you considered selling to the schools directly? If you can make the argument that they can replace one or two expensive teachers, you're suddenly looking at a completely different price point. Even if your product can't replace a teacher, what are they currently paying for textbooks, etc.?

I'm not familiar with foreign language teaching abroad, but if the school can merge two classes and have one teacher supervise the kids while using your product, they can potentially save one yearly teacher salary using "pioneering technology." That's a very attractive selling point and the flip-side is that they can increase class sizes (and tuition income) by using your product.

Another thing: International schools located in less desirable places are often struggling to get qualified teachers (think Eastern Europe, -Stans, Russia, etc.). They are also normally private and have fewer government restrictions on curriculum. If you can sell your product as a way to standardize teaching with very little teacher experience required, I'm sure they'd be willing to pay for that.

Schools are also less likely to rip off your product, but you might have to provide support in case they have issues. Price should then be anchored to the saved yearly salary or increase in tuition gained by filling larger classes, as well as your cost for providing support.

Anyone know a good service that allows me upload screenshots of a mobile app onto the background of a phone in order to get high res nice landing page images?.

I don't know any Photoshop or gimp, but I might have to learn the basics to get my hands on images I need.

@Suits true but I don't think I've seen any website obviously made by a website builder more simple than wordpress than looks nice.

Quote: (12-13-2017 06:24 AM)Atomic Wrote:  

Anyone know a good service that allows me upload screenshots of a mobile app onto the background of a phone in order to get high res nice landing page images?.

I don't know any Photoshop or gimp, but I might have to learn the basics to get my hands on images I need.

You mean you want the screenshot of an App to be the background of your mobile website?

https://d2zav2bjdlctd5.cloudfront.net/up.../08/o2.jpg

Something like that. A screenshot of my app overlayed on top of the "skeleton" of the phone. Would like the image, but on my phone and not sure how big it is.

Then this image, or similar ones, are used to showcase key features on the to the landing page to increase conversions.

I know a graphical designer with Photoshop can do it no problem, was just wondering if there was a service out there I could just upload the photos too and then download the images I need.

Quote: (12-13-2017 05:57 AM)Running Turtles Wrote:  

Suits, have you considered selling to the schools directly? If you can make the argument that they can replace one or two expensive teachers, you're suddenly looking at a completely different price point.

There are some good thoughts here. Actually, the ability to target schools is a big part of the reason why I think I need to have a higher price point. Unfortunately, my products will not have the ability to replace a teacher, but it will make it easier for less experienced teachers to do a good job and experienced teachers to do an even better job.

Quote: (12-13-2017 05:57 AM)Running Turtles Wrote:  

Even if your product can't replace a teacher, what are they currently paying for textbooks, etc.?

Here in China, based on who would gain the most utility, my target client schools for this first set of products should be training schools (the type that offer language classes in the evenings and on the weekend) and kindergartens (the ones that like to call themselves "international" but really aren't). Unfortunately, this particular audience is notoriously cheap when it comes to buying or even providing basic classroom materials to their teachers. They'll charge some outrageous fee per student, but still can't be bothered to even change the toner in their black and white office printer.

Therefore, my ideal target client school-wise would be a small neighbourhood training language center that needs to provide a really quality product to compete with the big brand-name schools. Many of these operate illegally out of residential apartments and such, but tend to be more likely to appreciate a good product, provided that it was affordable enough.

My strategy is to keep the price low enough that they can justify it, while charging enough that I can justify the time it will take to close each sale.

I will probably attempt to sell it based on the logic that this product will make less qualified and experience teachers far more effective, which is important in a hiring market where good native English teachers are quite hard to find.

But it will be hard to convince them that the product will save them money, as many such schools are satisfied with simply handing their teachers a stack of 20 vocabulary cards and expecting them to entertain a group of 10 eight year olds for the next 90 minutes.

I've shown product prototypes to a few school owners in my target market and their reaction has been very positive, but the true test will be whether they reach for their wallet or not. That has yet to be seen, because I'm a month or two away from having a product that I'm comfortable selling (as selling what I have now would force any buyers to go through a very time consuming upgrade process a few months down the road, as some very important features are still missing (but will be completed during the 2018 CNY holiday).

Quote: (12-13-2017 05:57 AM)Running Turtles Wrote:  

I'm not familiar with foreign language teaching abroad, but if the school can merge two classes and have one teacher supervise the kids while using your product, they can potentially save one yearly teacher salary using "pioneering technology." That's a very attractive selling point and the flip-side is that they can increase class sizes (and tuition income) by using your product.

A good suggestion, but not specifically feasible for this particular set of products. However, I have some other projects in the pipeline that will allow for this strategy.

Quote: (12-13-2017 05:57 AM)Running Turtles Wrote:  

Another thing: International schools located in less desirable places are often struggling to get qualified teachers (think Eastern Europe, -Stans, Russia, etc.). They are also normally private and have fewer government restrictions on curriculum. If you can sell your product as a way to standardize teaching with very little teacher experience required, I'm sure they'd be willing to pay for that.

My best instinct with the international school demographic is that I'll probably have to sell directly to individual teachers. My products are designed to help students quickly advance their oral language abilities, which is a little outside of the day-to-day studies conducted by most international schools. Also, the typical international school student is a little outside of the age range for which this first set of products is designed. I do have more products in the pipeline to specifically serve regular old primary schools, high schools and universities in the future, however.

There is the strong possibility that teachers at many of these bilingual primary schools who have to grapple with teaching children in a language they have little experience with will see the utility in my product and spend their own money on it. However, that won't stop me from approaching the schools directly to see if I can get any interest from the management.

Quote: (12-13-2017 05:57 AM)Running Turtles Wrote:  

Schools are also less likely to rip off your product, but you might have to provide support in case they have issues. Price should then be anchored to the saved yearly salary or increase in tuition gained by filling larger classes, as well as your cost for providing support.

Another reason to sell at a higher price point, as I'd like to be able to afford to offer quality support.

Suits, if you are targeting schools, you may want to think about creating a "official organization" sounding company that offers training, but more importantly, certification.

A certification can be used, by the school, as a way to differentiate themselves from others. In other words, it becomes a sales tool for them which means more money for you.

You can then expand by hiring trainers that go in and train the schools.

Quote: (12-07-2017 02:36 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

Quote: (10-23-2017 02:15 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

I've decided to try something different to generate leads.

Direct mail.

With everyone doing social media, email, phone calls, etc... direct mail is the zig of today's zag. I'm even putting a small QR code on my sales letter, when scanned, will lead to my landing page with a call to action for a free consultation. Tossing in a small flashlight keychain with my logo engraved on it, too...

Going to start small with about 100 people within a niche market, and see what kind of response I get.

I've already sent my first direct mail campaign to that group of people.

It was an educational experience.

First, you have to spend a lot of time making the creatives and the letters. Triple, quadriple, and quintiple check that there are no typos. Test print them first, to see whether the color comes out right. It may look somewhat different from the computer screen. Also, you have to decide what kind of paper to print it on. There are many options -- thickness, size, matte, glossy, and the list goes on.

Second, you use the mail merge wizard in Word to personalize your letters. You need a list ready for this. The list should be in a .csv format with the first name, last name, job title, address, company name, and all that information. You select those fields and they will populate from your list for each printout.

You can order your all your printouts at Staples or Office Depot or one of those big office stores, and pick them up on the same day or the next day. Or for an extra fee, you can have them delivered to your place.

Personally, I picked them up near my family's house during my US visit, plus the envelopes.

Third, to personalize my campaign a bit, I decided to order some keychains with my company logo engraved on them. They call it "lumpy mail". I hand-wrote the address on each envelope, put the creatives in along with the letter and keychain, and sealed them shut.

Finally, when I took the envelopes to the post office, they quoted me a postage of $3 per piece because each envelope contained the keychain. That was a bit of a surprise to me, but I paid anyway. However, if it were not for the keychain, each envelope would only be $1 for postage.

So for a small campaign to 100 people, it cost me almost $800, or about $8 per piece. If not for the keychain, it would have been a little over half that, or about $4.50 per piece.

Next time I'm going to hire a company to do this for me, instead of doing it myself. Knowing the DIY cost is roughly $4-8 per piece, hiring it out might cost at least $6-10 a piece? Or am I overestimating this? Using postcards might be a lot cheaper, though.

Already sent email follow ups to my list (they should have gotten my direct mail by now).

Out of 100, about 8 emails bounced.

One guy replied with one word... "remove"

One lady replied asking how I got her contact info, to which I replied with the truth.

Nobody said anything like "thanks for contacting me, yes I got your material and this sounds interesting."

Maybe I need to follow up one more time after a couple of weeks or so.

But the results look dismal and hopeless.

Frustrating.

100 pieces is a super small test campaign for direct mail.

3-4% is considered a good RESPONSE rate. So even if you're a good closer (50%), you'd be doing well to get 1 deal out of that.

Why are you following up over email instead of over the phone? Did you get them to opt in somehow, or are you just scraping emails?

Quote: (12-13-2017 10:48 PM)Teep Wrote:  

100 pieces is a super small test campaign for direct mail.

3-4% is considered a good RESPONSE rate. So even if you're a good closer (50%), you'd be doing well to get 1 deal out of that.

Why are you following up over email instead of over the phone? Did you get them to opt in somehow, or are you just scraping emails?

1. I follow up with email instead of the phone because my deafness precludes me from communicating over the phone.

2. No opt-in. I hired a VA to find the decision makers within an industry that I had previous work experience in. Got their names, addresses, and emails.

I know it's not ideal, but what else can I do? Passively wait for people to opt-in?

Quote: (12-13-2017 10:31 PM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

Already sent email follow ups to my list (they should have gotten my direct mail by now).

Out of 100, about 8 emails bounced.

One guy replied with one word... "remove"

One lady replied asking how I got her contact info, to which I replied with the truth.

Nobody said anything like "thanks for contacting me, yes I got your material and this sounds interesting."

Maybe I need to follow up one more time after a couple of weeks or so.

But the results look dismal and hopeless.

Frustrating.

I know that calling on the phone is not an option for you, but were it, I would have told you to make try to follow up with calls instead of email. With only 100 people on your list, the likelihood of a high number of people even reading your email follow up (on not simply assuming it was spam and deleting it immediately) is low, but I can imagine getting on them on the phone would be far more likely to get their attention in a positive way and convince them that they are not one of 100000000 people on a marketing list.

Have you considered teaming up with someone who can make those calls for you?

Better yet, if you find someone who offers services that are different from yours, but would accompany your offerings positively, you could make a deal where you handle the mailings and they handle the calls.

Of course, this wouldn't be scalable if you were using a list of 10,000 people, but since it might be a while before you have the budget to send mailings to that large a number of people, why not consider this less scalable, but more personal route?

Quote: (12-13-2017 10:53 PM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

Quote: (12-13-2017 10:48 PM)Teep Wrote:  

100 pieces is a super small test campaign for direct mail.

3-4% is considered a good RESPONSE rate. So even if you're a good closer (50%), you'd be doing well to get 1 deal out of that.

Why are you following up over email instead of over the phone? Did you get them to opt in somehow, or are you just scraping emails?

1. I follow up with email instead of the phone because my deafness precludes me from communicating over the phone.

2. No opt-in. I hired a VA to find the decision makers within an industry that I had previous work experience in. Got their names, addresses, and emails.

I know it's not ideal, but what else can I do? Passively wait for people to opt-in?

Email just isn't an effective channel for closing out high value clients you've never met (especially when they didn't even opt in). I'd hire a skilled phone closer to followup.

Webinars could be another option.

Replying to 2 posts above (Suits and Teep) -- looks like I have to hire a phone salesman.

Any suggestions where I can find one? Or at least point me in the right direction.

Upwork?

The trouble is its going to be hard for you to gauge their phone manner and sales skills with the deafness. Suits suggestion to partner up with somebody you trust is probably the best bet.

Come to think of it, phone sales/closing for consultants and freelancers is probably a woefully underserved market.

Everybody and their mother is offering lead generation these days, and charging a lot for it. But those leads aren't worth a dime if they don't close. Most people/business owners aren't comfortable on the phone, and can't close worth a damn.

Quote: (12-12-2017 08:53 PM)Teep Wrote:  

Can anyone recommend a website builder that doesn't require a developer and doesn't look like shit?

Wordpress is making me pull my hair out. I've been looking at Squarespace?

I used Squarespace for about a year. It is good; the only issue is it has poor SEO compared to others. It is really simple and straight forward when it comes to building a site. The only reason I switched is because I started outsourcing my internet marketing and they moved it to their platform. I recommend Squarespace. They even partner with google so you can use the domain name as email and other apps in G-Suite.

Has anyone thought of an idea for a niche retail product to sell online, seen that there are plenty of posts/tags on Twitter or Intagram related to it, and the perfect domain name for the site has a placeholder and is being sold for a few thousand.

What kind of other things would you look at before making the purchase? I am a complete noob at online retail, but think this idea has serious potential.

Quote: (12-14-2017 02:28 PM)Repo Wrote:  

Has anyone thought of an idea for a niche retail product to sell online, seen that there are plenty of posts/tags on Twitter or Intagram related to it, and the perfect domain name for the site has a placeholder and is being sold for a few thousand.

What kind of other things would you look at before making the purchase? I am a complete noob at online retail, but think this idea has serious potential.

What's the idea?

What's the product/niche?

Quote: (12-12-2017 08:53 PM)Teep Wrote:  

Can anyone recommend a website builder that doesn't require a developer and doesn't look like shit?

Wordpress is making me pull my hair out. I've been looking at Squarespace?

I like Shopify.

Quote: (12-14-2017 02:28 PM)Repo Wrote:  

Has anyone thought of an idea for a niche retail product to sell online, seen that there are plenty of posts/tags on Twitter or Intagram related to it, and the perfect domain name for the site has a placeholder and is being sold for a few thousand.

What kind of other things would you look at before making the purchase? I am a complete noob at online retail, but think this idea has serious potential.

I would want to know if you got a site up and running selling x where the traffic is going to come from? For example, are you going to self-generate traffic via social media? Are you going to rely on your site coming up in natural results so get traffic (could be difficult for first 9-12 months)? Are you going to do PPC? If so what is the PPC competition like?

For any new business online I would spend 50% of my time / resources building a site and 50% marketing it after it is built.