The Idea + The Research

1. The Web Design industry is alive and kicking, and generates at least $20.1Bn in the US economy alone (Source: Yahoo).
2. There are many people who face organizational issues like us. When we reached out to fellow web designers like us, we learnt that organizing of projects is a serious headache for many agencies and freelance designers.
3. Research – make sure your idea is not saturated with competitors. There’s always room for competition, but the market has to be large enough to sustain all of you competing for it.
4. If you’re going for a saturated market, make sure you have a few unique selling points which will hit the spot for the niche you’re targeting.
5. When reaching out to people like yourself – particularly with an idea for a solution, you’ll get plenty of people who are in the same problem as you are. Converse and discuss.
6. If you don’t get any feedback, or people who face the same problems as you – then you might want to rethink your “next big thing”.
7. Test the waters. Before rolling up your sleeves to develop a solution – cheat a bit. Design a page as if your solution existed and ask for an email address. If after driving traffic to your site, a significant number of people give you their email address – good! You’re on the right track. There are other great tips at The Lean Startup – get the book and read it.
8. Test the waters some more. Now that you know that some people are interested in your proposed solution – see whether they are ready to pay for it. Add a pricing tab with gut feel prices. See whether people click to see the pricing and still give your their email address. If they still give you their email address in significant numbers, then there is potential in the market for your solution.
(Hint: Use Google Analytics Click goals to monitor clicks)
9. Read, read and then read some more. There are hundreds of great people out there giving excellent advice. You’ll recognize the experts from the trash when you learn amazing stuff you would never have thought of. YCombinator how to start a startup is an excellent starting point. So is Reddit/r/startups
10. Take notes. Especially of the excellent ideas. Stickies are fine. A whiteboard. A real paper notepad. You’ll be plenty busy, and if you don’t write you’ll forgot a few good ideas.

The development of BeeWits

11. We bootstrapped (and self-funded) the development of BeeWits. Make sure your company is able to fund itself and the development of a product.
12. Identify a target demographic and build towards that demographic only. You may have plenty of ideas and see tonnes of potential – but start with laser focus on one demographic and make sure you get that right.
13. Start small. Build a Minimum Viable Product – a product which is small enough to provide value to your target demographic but not large enough to bust all your budgets.
14. Estimate a development time with your developers. Multiple the estimate by at least two and ideally three. Developers are surprisingly over optimistic. You’ll run into other problems too so prepare yourself.
15. If you’ve got a good development partner company and excellent communication with them – off sharing development is a good budget-conscious idea. Don’t offshore to people who you don’t know, unless you’re ready to dump everything and start from scratch with a new partner.
16. Make sure communication with your developers is spot on. Language barriers can create serious problems all over the place.
17. Node.js developers are severely in demand. If you have a choice, you might want to avoid it unless you’ve got a deep pocket and are prepared for turnover issues.
18. Staff turnover will severely impact your project timelines, especially for small development teams. Seriously consider making your developers founding partners.
19. Mocking up ALL screens is the best way to spec a project. Visuals with accompanying text go a long way in taking an idea from a concept to a working screen.

20.Push your suppliers for better prices. You’re a startup, use it to your advantage.

The marketing + the exposure

21. Build it and they will come is a fallacy. It *might* work if you’ve got millions of VC dollars to burn through and are super well-connected.
22. Start marketing your solution from day one. Seriously. You have to put as much work into marketing as much (if not more) as you do into development.
23. Write epic blog posts for your target demographic. Find a problem and fix it for them. Share the idea. Such as the Ultimate Web Design Checklist.

24. Google+ is not dead. It sends SEO signals too. Mark my words.
25. Good design goes a long way in establishing trust. Spend time and money on making your site, blog, and everything else which is public look pretty.
26. If you’re not spending more time promoting your great content than writing it – you’re doing it wrong.
27. Your only marketing aim whilst developing your product should be getting the email address of users in your target demographic.
28. Tools such as SumoMe go a long way in collecting email addresses. Offerring a free ebook in exchange for an email address is a surprisingly effective method.
29. Offering a download bundle which is useful for your target demographic for the “price” of an email address is also a surprisingly effective method. You might want to get our 101 Free Fonts or our Web Design Contract bundle.
30. Once you’ve got email addresses – make sure you keep your users engaged with consistent targeted mailings and content.
31. Building small free but helpful tools for your target demographic can be a very good source of driving traffic to your sites.

32. Outreach is hundreds of times more effective using these helpful tools as opposed to blog content.
33. Don’t forget to create a privacy policy and abide by it. People like to be reassured their email won’t be sold to spammers.
34. Use email outreach or Contact Us pages to get in touch with people who are likely to feature your blogs.
35. Make outreach emails all about them. Butter them up, be very contextual and topical to their sites, and be very very brief. Read about sending outreach emails and use something which works well for you.
36. Warm people up to your outreach by establishing a relationship via social networks, commenting on blogs works wonders for your outreach. Incidentally, have you joined BeeWits on Facebook and Twitter?
37. Use voilanorbert.com and Findthat.email to find the exact email address of people you want to contact.
38. Use SideKick to know when your emails have been read (and ignored).
39. Follow up after two weeks with people who have not replied.
40. Sometimes you’ll get links without getting a reply. Pat yourself on the back for all those times when you were completely ignored.
41. Do not get discouraged when you are ignored. It’s a game of numbers. Some people will reply. Some won’t. It’s a fact of life.
42. Try going for the big fish if you’ve got a very good free tool. You’ll be surprised at your success rate. We’ve been featured by Creative Bloq, LifeHacker, DesignTaxi and Fast Company Design, and Co.Drops.
43. If your success rate is abysmal – you might want to go back to the drawing board. Is your tool REALLY as good as you think or … ? Does it have awesome design?
44. Maintain a good relationship with anybody who replies to you. When you’ll need them again, it will be easier to reach out and get results.
45. Attend conferences. You’ll learn lots of stuff especially if you speak to your potential customers. You might meet investors too. Free t-shirts work wonders.

The Launch

46. Plan a viral giveaway with a prize your target demographic will kill for as part of your launch. Spend as much money as necessary getting it right.
47. Use good communication with your leads. Intercom seems to be a very nice tool for us.
48. Use onboarding tools to guide your users. There’s plenty of good libraries and services. We’re using Hopscotch but there are plenty of others.
49. Start onboarding users slowly. Don’t get overenthusiastic and invite few people at a time. Listen to what your customers say.
50. Don’t let perfect get in the way of done but don’t leave obvious ugly bugs.

The Revenue Ramp Up

51. Contrary to what you might have heard, converting clients to a recurring revenue service is harder than converting for one-off products. A 3% conversion ratio is fair, 5% and you’re doing great.
52. Make sure that your subscription prices work in favour of your clients, not in favour of your bottom-line. You’re looking to establish a long-term relationship with your clients, with minimal churn.
53. Handling subscriptions is a complex use-case which you should not endeavour to build yourself. Interface with a payment gateway or opt for a subscriptions plugin such as the ones listed here.
54. Make sure your support is absolutely top-notch. Your clients need to feel fully at ease if you want to keep them long-term. A long-term client also increases the LTV (lifetime value) average, allowing you to spend more on marketing and sales.
55. If at first you don’t succeed, iterate and improve. Get feedback from your clients and implement some of their best suggestions. You’ll find that feedback in general will return mostly the same comments, so it’s fairly easy to prioritize your development.
56. If you still don’t succeed – pivot. There are plenty of ways to monetize your service, or blog traffic, particularly if you’ve done the marketing right. As long as you provide value, your readers will be happy to take your advice.
We’ve learnt lots more, and we’ll surely be sharing more of these tips in the future. In the meantime, we’d love it if you would sign-up to the BeeWits for a 30-day trial. If you’re into web design – you’ll be happy and you’ll make us happy!
This is the sort of great stuff we do at Switch Digital, not just for us but for our clients too!

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Value

Your content must provide value to the audience you are targeting. Moreover, if you really want to make a hit and get your content shared, it must significantly exceed the expectations of the user who happened upon your content.
Value comes in all kinds of forms. Whatever your industry, website, product, or blog – your primary goal is to provide very specific value to your target audience. Creating valuable content can be done via tutorials, advice for your industry, recipes, free resources, awesome content full of information, entertainment (humour, music, video), cutting edge news value, tools, imagery, commentary, fashion advice – any website for any industry can provide lots of value via the content on their site.
Think about the websites you yourself visit and see what kind of value these sites offer. Let’s start with the big ones.
Facebook – provides entertainment value for “normal” users whilst offering marketers a very targeted audience to market to.
Google – provides exceptional informational value through giving you access to the right information when you need it. It also offers marketers a very good opportunity to market their wares at the specific point when a customer is searching for them.
YouTube – provides entertainment and informational value to the end users whilst providing very good exposure to video publishers.
Your favourite news website – provides information on international and local news value.
Your favourite daily site(s) – trending and topical news about topics which interest you.
The real reason for visiting these sites if you had to think a little bit about it – they provide essential value to your everyday life at the point which you need it.
So on to the question you need to ask yourself as a content provider…

What is the essential value your audience is looking for?

Figure this out – it may be a simple question, but the definitive right answer is probably not very simple. Once you’ve figured this out – give your audience this value in the form of your content. And if you want your content to stand out – you need to give it to your audience bigger and better than your competitor.
Let’s give a few examples of providing essential value via your website

Switch Digital

We are a digital marketing agency. Our target demographic is small businesses who want to do digital marketing. So our blog (tries to) provide essential topics and content for those who are trying to figure out digital marketing – content such as “A Social Media Primer – ”, “10 simple growth hacks for your business’ Instagram feed” and “Why are people not seeing my Facebook posts any more” provide essential reading for our demographic.

BeeWits

We are an upcoming project management service for web designers. Our target demographic is web designers. So we create and share content which provides real value for web designers. Examples of some our awesome, high value content for web designers are “101 awesome tools for web designers and developers”, a quotation generator for web designers, and “The Ultimate Web Design checklist”

Switch

Our 3D designers follow these blogs: Dezeen, Contemporist. Our graphic designers follow The Fox is Black, Bored Panda, and Blood, Sweat and Vector. The reason why they follow these blogs is because these blogs provide essential inspirational value.
Being a bit of a geek I follow XKCD.com, and also The Oatmeal. Not for their value in Product Management but for what I believe is very particular entertainment value.

Let’s go on a tangent to completely different sites.
Airbnb – AirBnB provides exceptional value to two specific kinds of people. Those people who have a room/place to rent and don’t have enough clout to attract sufficient customers to their service by themselves, and those looking for cheap accommodation in the places they are travelling to
Booking.com – again, besides being a one stop shop for all your hotel booking needs, it enables small hotels to piggy back on the popularity of the site to get additional exposure and bookings than they would have been able to get if they were going it alone
TripAdvisor – Whilst customers can be well advised about the place they are about to visit, service providers can ensure that their good service is well-rewarded by getting even more exposure and customers
Amazon – widest choice and cheapest prices for nearly anything for customers, whilst being a massive opportunity for small business selling their goods
Look around you, reflect on the sites you visit, and understand the value that site provides to you. Now – figure out how to provide that essential value to your own target audience.
The more value your content provides – the easier it is to hit the spot with your audience – and the more likely it is that they will come back to you for more… Even for offline goods and services, content of your website can still provide much value for your specific customers. Just take your specific industry, and write content about questions or concerns your customers typically have.
…and yes, they will eventually give you their money. Which brings us to our next topic.

Value in your sellable goods

Whatever you are selling, whether it is expertise, services, consultancy, freelancing, digital or physical goods – you must be providing MORE value than you are selling your product for. If you aren’t providing sufficient value at the price you are selling for – you are going to have a hard-time selling. Value in sellable goods of course comes in various forms, operational efficiency, increased productivity, entertainment value…
So the question you’ll need to figure out when you are selling goods is:

• Am I providing enough value for the price I’m selling my product?
• How do I provide more value than my competitors?

At Switch Digital / BeeWits – one of my primary concerns as the Product Manager of new SaaS products, is ensuring that the product(s) we are developing deliver value to our customers.
Whether those customers are readers of our blogs, users of our free tools, or paying customers of the services we develop – we need to ensure that we provide enough value to our customer that they come back because they want to, not because they have to. With BeeWits – a project management service for web designers – we want to offer exceptional value to web designers. Rather than provide a generic project management service, we provide a service which is specifically tuned for the needs of people designing websites. And more than anything, we want to provide the service at prices which given the improved efficiency of our customers, will make it a natural selection for our demographic.

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