I’m writing this on the last day of my second month as a solo founder. Read about my first month if you haven’t already. This month was a month with much less coding and more marketing. The most important pieces of Callcounter were finished last month, so this month I more actively started promoting it.

Attracting More Visitors

Besides using Bing Ads to attract visitors to the website, I also started to do this with Google Ads. Before starting my new business I had a strong objection against this, but this was just the simplest way to get visitors to the site.

This was also the month where I started a blog on the Callcounter domain. I wrote something about Ruby XML serializers there for example, which attracted quite some visitors from Reddit. The total unique visitor count for that post count was somewhere around 200.

I came up with a fun experiment after reading the book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg (founder of Duckduckgo) and Justin Mares. To originally grow Duckduckgo Weinberg created a karma widget, with a backlink to his new search engine. In a few hours I created something like that to show of your API usage as well.

Converting Visitors to Trial Users

To improve conversion rate I switched from having no trial at all, to having a trial which required a credit card. This didn’t result in trial users signups either, so I modified that to a 7 day trial without credit card requirements. So far this has resulted in a number of trial user signups. One of which was just after the “show off your api statistics widget” was published.

Furthermore I added an interactive demo that showcases the Callcounter API statistics itself. Visitors can now interactively see how Callcounter works without creating an account.

This month I also added a live chat solution to the public website. I originally didn’t intend to add one, but the low conversion rates got me doubting the quality of the website. So far I haven’t had the ability to chat with a stranger.

Converting Trial Users to Customers

Unfortunately none of the trial users have created a project to actually test Callcounter. Very strange, why would you create an account and then stop there? Creating a project requires just a one field form submission. I’ve asked all trial users, but none have responded. When creating the trial functionality I expected the integration installation to become an obstacle, but none of the trial users have even reached that state.

Second Month Summary

I’m starting to doubt whether visitors understand why Callcounter could help them. I’m furthering improving texts and images hoping that helps. I’ve achieved quite some things this month though:

• Added a free trial with credit card requirement.
• Modified the free trial to not require a credit card at all.
• An average of 30-40 unique visitors per day.
• 5% of the visitors opened the trial sign up page.
• Converted 0.7% of all visitors to trial users after removing the credit card required.
• Launched a .NET integration thanks to Jesse Tilro and Jeroen Meijer.
• Added an interactive demo.
• Added a simple blog and wrote some content for it.
• Published a guest post on Nordic APIs about the GDPR and API client tracking.
• Improved Bing Ads.
• Created and tested Google Ads.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of my next blog post!