Review My Simple Lead Generating Business Marketing Site

[Deleted member 281732]

Hey folks,

I'm building a service that helps people grow their businesses. You sign up to my service, and every morning I send you a list of UK companies incorporated in the last 24 hours. You can use that list to then reach out to those new companies directly, and win their business!

I put together a simple marketing site. The goal of the site is to convince business owners to pull out their credit card and sign up.

https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/

What do you think?

 

[Erno Horvath]

Hi Jezen,

It's a bold move to put the form to capture credit card details on the landing page. The service you provide seems good and you might get interest, but the landing page as it is now is quite different from the 'best practice'. A few thing that you might consider:

- Nowadays people demand a sample or free trial or at least money-back guarantee, without these I think it will be very hard to get people pay for the service from day 1. If you can offer a free trial then you can start building an email list, it's still better to have 5 paying customers & 500 email addresses then just having 5 paying customers, so I strongly suggest to remove the instant pay option & give the first few days for free.
- Move the CTA (call-to-action) above the fold, now the user has to scroll down, which has a bad impact on conversion rate.
- You have two different message/option on the landing page, a proper landing page has 'one' very specific goal.
- The price is basically hidden inside the text, even if you choose to proceed with the current instant credit card capture process you must mention the price near the 'Sign up' button so the visitors don't have to scan through the whole page to find it.
- '99.99% uptime' is basically irrelevant, because you are sending out emails you might focus more on core advantages.
- etc.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

Erno,

That's great feedback. Thanks so much.

Demanding payment upfront is essentially market validation. It's one thing to ask people “would you pay for this service?”, and another to ask “here's the service; can you pay now?”.

I'm not so concerned with placing the CTA above the fold. Studies have shown there is no fold, and users are happy to scroll. Moving the CTA above the fold might work if the CTA were just “give me your email address”, and not “pay now”, but I think if the first thing a user sees is a hard sell, they may be turned off.

You're right about the price being hidden. I should make that clearer. I also mention a money back guarantee, but certainly not as clearly as I should. I will make both of those things clearer, and group it with the CTA.

You're right also about the contact form. I should omit that, and instead have some footer with company details, T&Cs, and a support email address.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

 

[fisicx]

I would want to see sample data. and I don't want every company, I only want the ones that match my target profile.

Contact details are vital as are a lot more information about the services.

So give me a free sample and let me decide if the data is worth paying £20/month for. I'd also want a SAAS solution rather than a daily email. Ideally I want to be able to import that data into my CRM

And an account not a CC payment

 

[downsouth]

Is the site deliberatly just text on a white background? seems very plain to me

To add to Fisicx point about filtering, perhaps you could show a simple counter or similar of companies incorporated in specific sectors? again i'd be interested in the filtering aspect and if something caught my eye i'd be more inclined to pay

 

[The Resolver]

But isn't the problem you have that this information, excluding the officers' details, is available free of charge from CompaniesHouse.gov.uk. In fact they give you all companies not just the latest (some 2.5m). Every month they provide a downloadable cvs with latest formations. Your offer to sort companies by geographical distance is an extra although of course the spreadsheet can be sorted by town etc. So if people just wanted to mail out to the R/O then its free at CH,

What I would pay for is that list but with the email addresses for the directors. That information is of course not on the register. It would need an App that crawled the net to try to locate websites of the companies and searching for email addresses of the directors. If anyone can do that for me please get in touch!

 

[The Resolver]

..and to pre-empt the privacy warriors, unsolicited marketing e-mails to business addresses is lawful in the UK.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

@The Resolver You raise a couple of interesting points.

But isn't the problem you have that this information, excluding the officers' details, is available free of charge from CompaniesHouse.gov.uk. In fact they give you all companies not just the latest (some 2.5m). Every month they provide a downloadable cvs with latest formations. Your offer to sort companies by geographical distance is an extra although of course the spreadsheet can be sorted by town etc. So if people just wanted to mail out to the R/O then its free at CH

That's correct; this is public information. However if you go straight to Companies House, then you need to do a large amount of tedious work, sorting out which companies are good potential clients for your business. This is hours of work that a business owner could instead be spending on what they do best.

Going directly to Companies House would be like drinking from a fire hose. The idea with NewBusinessMonitor is that you can filter companies by geographical location, and market sector. I'll update this on the landing page to make it all clearer.

Also, if they are providing a CSV every month, then it's a long time between a director opens their business and you reach out to them. If you have a report of the newest businesses every morning, your company can stay on top of growth marketing constantly. You brush your teeth every day, and you grow your business every day

What I would pay for is that list but with the email addresses for the directors. That information is of course not on the register. It would need an App that crawled the net to try to locate websites of the companies and searching for email addresses of the directors. If anyone can do that for me please get in touch!

This is doable, to an extent. I have written many crawlers, but my [small amount of] initial research suggests the hit rate is pretty low — you can start a business without a website or email address. It may or may not be a strong suggestion from Companies House that you do have a website or email address, but I don't think anyone is enforcing this.

There's also the legality of email marketing in the UK — which you rightly bring up. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the potential ramifications are of me providing you with data that you would use to break a spam law.

Perhaps even with a low hit rate and legality issue, it's still an avenue worth exploring. I'll look into it.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

I would want to see sample data. and I don't want every company, I only want the ones that match my target profile.

That's fair. I think I should emphasise the possibility to filter the data more. Would you need more filters than geographical location and market sector?

Contact details are vital as are a lot more information about the services.

I think this isn't possible in every case. All results would include registered office address so you can market to them by post. Some results could also include a telephone number and/or email address, but there is of course the issue with legality as @The Resolver mentioned previously.

Could you be more specific with “a lot more information about the services”? Do you mean services that NewBusinessMonitor provides? Or services that each of the new UK companies provide?

So give me a free sample and let me decide if the data is worth paying £20/month for. I'd also want a SAAS solution rather than a daily email. Ideally I want to be able to import that data into my CRM

A static free sample of data is reasonable. I'll do that, and add it to the landing page in a few different formats.

I had intended for the service to run as a SaaS, so you can log into the app and see current and previous reports, and export them in a number of formats (CSV, JSON, XML, XLS, etc.) I'll make that clearer on the landing page.

And an account not a CC payment

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. My intention is to bill each customer's credit card monthly. Do you mean you would rather pay with some other method?

Thanks for the great feedback!

 

[The Resolver]

Thanks Jezen.

The CH spreadsheet does have a column for type of business so it is possible to re-order the list or search for companies in certain industries without hours of work. Ditto search against certain post code areas/towns etc. Yes a bit of work but not hours of work.

I agree it is updated once month and that some will thus be one month old but others less than a day old.

As you say you can start a company without opening a website - in fact mostly before starting up in the business. Thats an argument for focusing on ones a month old rather than todays formations. If what you sell is commonly sold by others eg insurance, telephone answering services etc then there may be value in being the first marketing letter on the doormat, but my service is fairly unique and so I am not bothered if the company was formed some while ago.

Brexit supporters may be surprised to learn that when we implemented the European law which outlawed unsolicited email- we changed it in the UK by limiting the law to email addresses on non-business accounts. It has thus always been ok to send mail outside these rules to business email addresses. The exclusion applies if either the email address uses the domain of the website or , if not, the email account is paid for by the business. There is therefore a risk with gmail/hotmail etc web mail accounts in that you do not know if the company pays and uses it.If it is displayed on the website to invite mail then that might put it in the exclusion.

The crawler would be of interest even if the hit rate is low. Th point is that the data set is huge - I don't just need recent formations.

PM ne to talk further if you wish

 

[Deleted member 281732]

Is the site deliberatly just text on a white background? seems very plain to me

To add to Fisicx point about filtering, perhaps you could show a simple counter or similar of companies incorporated in specific sectors? again i'd be interested in the filtering aspect and if something caught my eye i'd be more inclined to pay

Thanks for the feedback. You're right; it does look plain. I'm a programmer, so I like plain, but most people are not programmers. I'll revise the design, and make it look more colourful and shiny. I'll also more interactive filtering examples to the landing page

 

[fisicx]

The layout is plain but that's not always a bad thing. What it doesn't do is sell the service. People will not find your website by chance, they will only arrive via marketing or referrals. It follows therefore that the focus needs to be the service you offer. Show people the data, show the quality of the information, show the detail, show how it can be filtered.

Don't even bother with the email. Make it saas that I can access when I want to filter and download.

Employ someone who knows how to structure a website and someone else to do the copywriting. You also need to sort out how you are going to market the business. Forget Google and social media, it's almost certainly going to need advertising. What's your marketing budget?

When I asked about an account not CC I meant being able to pay by DD or standing order, or just make a single payment as and when I need data.

And unless I have the contact details for the new business your list is of little value. If I have to go find a contact number or email myself I might just as well go get the list from CH for free.

 

[UKSBD]

Would people really give out their card details just like that or is that just for demonstration purposes?

 

[Alan]

There is some scope in your proposition. I used to buy monthly new firms within 20 miles. Cost £6 per month. So I could send out letters. The conversation rates didn't warrant it, but it was a form of test, and many companies will at least test.

For me, it would need more value add, the addresses are often accountants so letters go in the bin. Problem with looking for websites and company rather than personal email, is most companies register before creating a web presence.

If however, you found the founders on linked in or other social media now I can see value

 

[UKSBD]

Is the current site just for demonstration purposes and testing?

 

[Deleted member 281732]

The layout is plain but that's not always a bad thing. What it doesn't do is sell the service. People will not find your website by chance, they will only arrive via marketing or referrals. It follows therefore that the focus needs to be the service you offer. Show people the data, show the quality of the information, show the detail, show how it can be filtered.

I am putting more effort into the design and copy. You'll see the changes go live shortly; perhaps later today or tomorrow.

Don't even bother with the email. Make it saas that I can access when I want to filter and download.

It'll be both. The user can choose what works best for them.

Employ someone who knows how to structure a website and someone else to do the copywriting. You also need to sort out how you are going to market the business. Forget Google and social media, it's almost certainly going to need advertising. What's your marketing budget?

I'd rather not pay anyone at this time. There is no point investing money in this until it has been validated by the market.

When I asked about an account not CC I meant being able to pay by DD or standing order, or just make a single payment as and when I need data.

I'm not going to do this any time soon. For a £20 p/m service, offering more payment methods than monthly recurring card payments over Stripe is more hassle than it's worth.

And unless I have the contact details for the new business your list is of little value. If I have to go find a contact number or email myself I might just as well go get the list from CH for free.

That's fine. You're a WordPress developer, so you're likely not my target audience

 

[Deleted member 281732]

Is the current site just for demonstration purposes and testing?

The current landing page is purely for market validation. If people pull out their credit card and sign up, then it validates the market.

 

[UKSBD]

I'm not saying it is a scam - but as it is at the moment it has scam written all over it.

You ask for full name, email address, credit card details without providing any info about you.

Your contact form appears to go through to a site that is hiding behind privacy protection, was only registered a few months ago and is obviously registered to the same person your site is registered to.

People would be crazy to use it as it is, can't you just not bother getting card details and use a payment processor that people would trust?

Or alternatively let people sign up before having to give any payment details.

 

[fisicx]

That's fine. You're a WordPress developer, so you're likely not my target audience

You have no idea what I do for a living. All you know is I do Wordpress stuff. I already use a service similar to that which you are offering. They provide me with more information than you appear to do.

Changing the design won't make things any better. It's the content that matters. Once that is sorted you will still need to invest a reasonable sum in advertising, without this you won't get enough traffic to test the viability of the business model.

Conversions will be very low to begin with which will mean you need thousands of targeted visitors to test the model.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

I'm not saying it is a scam - but as it is at the moment it has scam written all over it.

You ask for full name, email address, credit card details without providing any info about you.

Your contact form appears to go through to a site that is hiding behind privacy protection, was only registered a few months ago and is obviously registered to the same person your site is registered to.

People would be crazy to use it as it is, can't you just not bother getting card details and use a payment processor that people would trust?

Or alternatively let people sign up before having to give any payment details.

Of course, there's no scam here, but the feedback is fair. I could take the user's email address, and then direct them to pay externally on Stripe. I'm not sure whether or not that would skew market validation data. Perhaps as long as I make it clear that the next step is to pay money.

I should definitely add some more information that makes the page appear more trustworthy

 

[Ekim Saribardak]

A good business idea but the landing page definitely needs some visuals.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

@downsouth @Ekim Saribardak You're both right. The page looked too plain for most people's tastes. I've now updated it with a bunch of colours, more interesting typography, graphics, animations, etc.

I've also removed the contact form, and removed the credit card fields from the sign up form.

So, once again: https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/

 

[fisicx]

Remove the animations and remove the 'Starting a business is hard' bit (I'm already in business and I need new leads).

Keep it simple: you just need to tell me what's on offer and show me the data. You don't need the top two sections as you will be getting warm leads.

You still need the free trial though. At the moment it looks like I give you my email address and you will send me a bill for £20/month. That's going to happen until I've had a chance to see a sample and tested the filters.

I've just tried to sign up an got the warning message. You need to decide if this a prelaunch site or just a plaything. Not allowing me to even register my interest is really annoying.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

Remove the animations and remove the 'Starting a business is hard' bit (I'm already in business and I need new leads).

Perhaps the narrative with the ‘starting a business is hard’ part is backward, since I'm asking the reader to think about how their target market is thinking. I'll have another think there.

Keep it simple: you just need to tell me what's on offer and show me the data. You don't need the top two sections as you will be getting warm leads.

Warm leads, from where?

You still need the free trial though. At the moment it looks like I give you my email address and you will send me a bill for £20/month. That's going to happen until I've had a chance to see a sample and tested the filters.

I'm not really interested in building a product without validating there's a market for it. That, or at least validating a marketing approach.

I've just tried to sign up an got the warning message. You need to decide if this a prelaunch site or just a plaything. Not allowing me to even register my interest is really annoying.

By giving me your email address, you did register your interest. Did you miss the part where it says “We'll notify you when it's ready”?

 

[fisicx]

Warm leads, from where?

As I said in an earlier post, people aren't going to stumble across your site. They will see marketing material, an advert and the occasional referral. This means they will arrive on your site already knowing what service you offer. It follows therefore that don't need to be sold on the idea of company data, they just need to sold on your delivery of that data.

Think of it like a plumber's website. People will only be on the site because they need a plumber so he doesn't need to explain what a plumber does, he just needs to tell people what plumbing services he offers and how to get them.

By giving me your email address, you did register your interest. Did you miss the part where it says “We'll notify you when it's ready”?

But you told me this AFTER I had signed up. Tell me before I fill in my email address that the service is still in development.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

As I said in an earlier post, people aren't going to stumble across your site. They will see marketing material, an advert and the occasional referral. This means they will arrive on your site already knowing what service you offer. It follows therefore that don't need to be sold on the idea of company data, they just need to sold on your delivery of that data.

Think of it like a plumber's website. People will only be on the site because they need a plumber so he doesn't need to explain what a plumber does, he just needs to tell people what plumbing services he offers and how to get them.

Point taken. You're right. I'll revise that part.

But you told me this AFTER I had signed up. Tell me before I fill in my email address that the service is still in development.

What do you think the difference amounts to? Not being sarcastic; genuinely interested in your point of view here. I could see people registering their interest, knowing the service is not ready, as less likely to part with their money when the service is ready. I'm trying to prove that people will pay money for this. OTOH, perhaps initially misleading people leave's a bad taste in their mouth. I'm not sure; I think there are two sides to this.

 

[Ekim Saribardak]

Is this thing going to have a user panel, where people can log in and search new businesses based on niche, city, owner and some other specifications? That would look more professional and would be more useful. The design looks much better now, but it still has too much empty space between elements for my taste

 

[Steve Alphabet]

Cool concept – and a nice, clean layout.

You need to show who it's for though. At the moment it's not clear who, eg agencies, individuals, multinationals, debt collectors etc. Testimonials help to do this, but for pre-launch websites I recommend adding 3 use cases – example scenarios with 3 different types of user, showing why they use it, and the problems they solve as a result.

 

[UniHost2u]

Business Monitor website. good idea.
nice design.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

Thank you! The landing page seems to be working; it's drummed up a good deal of interest and people are eager to start using the product.

Development is on track. I currently have data for around 763,000 UK businesses starting from 2015/04/01, and I'm on target to be up to date with 1.1 million this weekend.

The tech stack is

• Haskell with Yesod
• Elm
• Redis
• PostgreSQL

I chose Haskell for the backend because it's one of the safest and fastest languages available. I'm investing my time into building a product business so that I have more time to enjoy my life and learn more. I'm not trying to create another full-time job for myself. My experience working for years with dynamic languages has shown that projects of all sizes and levels of complexity come to a point where someone is spending the majority of their time fighting fires.

I'm currently writing the core of the UI in Elm, which compiles to JavaScript. Again, it's safe and fast, which to me is super important. Safe, because I don't trust my customers to be patient if there are runtime errors. I think they'll want stuff to always just work. And fast, because I'm potentially rendering thousands of nodes in the DOM for a given query. Elm is significantly faster than React, for those curious.

This is my first time relying heavily on Redis, but it's working well. Because all of the data is held in memory, queries are lightning fast. I've heard rumours of data loss in Redis, but this is not a concern for me, since I'm only using it for company data, which I can reconcile at any time in a background job.

Speaking of background jobs, I'm actually not using Redis for this. Instead I'm justing using Haskell's software transactional memory so I can mutate state atomically.

All customer data (which is precious!) is stored in PostgreSQL.

I've been monitoring the system for the past week with EKG for Haskell's garbage collection runtime statistics, and collectd for system stats. All of this data is sent to Carbon, and then rendered with Grafana. Memory usage has generally been constant. The system is very stable. CPU usage is spiky because I process as much data as I can until I hit the UK government's rate limiter. I then pause for a minute, and start again.

Here's how that all looks:

 

[Scalloway]

You've missed Shetland off the map.

http://businessadvice.co.uk/busines...-survival-found-to-be-higher-in-remote-areas/

 

[fisicx]

What do you think the difference amounts to? Not being sarcastic; genuinely interested in your point of view here. I could see people registering their interest, knowing the service is not ready, as less likely to part with their money when the service is ready. I'm trying to prove that people will pay money for this. OTOH, perhaps initially misleading people leave's a bad taste in their mouth. I'm not sure; I think there are two sides to this.

Only testing will tell. But I see you now have the notice on the site so I'm assuming this is working better. I suspect thought that most will want to play with the beta once it launches so they can have a play and then decide if it;s worth £20/month.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

You've missed Shetland off the map.

http://businessadvice.co.uk/busines...-survival-found-to-be-higher-in-remote-areas/

The Shetland Islands are there, but the map isn't drawn to scale. You have to squint really hard to see them

Only testing will tell. But I see you now have the notice on the site so I'm assuming this is working better. I suspect thought that most will want to play with the beta once it launches so they can have a play and then decide if it;s worth £20/month.

It seems most people I have spoken to “get” the idea and the value it brings them straight away. Only a few have explicitly asked for a trial. Either way, I'm offering a free 7-day trial to everyone.

Is this thing going to have a user panel, where people can log in and search new businesses based on niche, city, owner and some other specifications? That would look more professional and would be more useful. The design looks much better now, but it still has too much empty space between elements for my taste

Sorry, I missed your question earlier!

Yes, with a NewBusinessMonitor account you can sign in and view your dashboard at any time, make new queries, filter and export search results, and change your notification settings.

 

[fisicx]

It seems most people I have spoken to “get” the idea and the value it brings them straight away. Only a few have explicitly asked for a trial. Either way, I'm offering a free 7-day trial to everyone.

I get the idea as well, but people aren't going to pay you anything until they have had a play. 7 days is too short, offer a 30 day free trial so people have a change to really dig into the data and see if it's worth the money. Personally I'd prefer to just pay each time I want a download. I'd sign up for that.

 

[Deleted member 281732]

I get the idea as well, but people aren't going to pay you anything until they have had a play. 7 days is too short, offer a 30 day free trial so people have a change to really dig into the data and see if it's worth the money. Personally I'd prefer to just pay each time I want a download. I'd sign up for that.

Trial length is something I can A/B test further down the line. I don't agree that “people aren't going to pay anything”, and the 50+ sales talks I've had with people support that.

I don't think I will lower prices from £20 per month. If a company can't afford to pay the equivalent of a few cups of coffee per month, then the product might not be for them just yet anyway.

 

[Alan]

I chose Haskell for the backend because it's one of the safest and fastest languages available.

One of yes, but for pure speed and Golang is in the main e.g faster http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=ghc&lang2=go

For a new app in 2017 I probably would have used Golang or Node.js mainly because of the weight of the community of devs.

 

[Alan]

In terms of pricing, I think your landing page needs to create more immediacy, as there is no compelling reason to sign up now. Its £20 take it or leave it

"All this for just £20 per month.
Payments are handled quickly and securely by Stripe.

NewBusinessMonitor is currently in a private beta. Signing up withyour email address now will put you on the invitation list to usethe system when it is ready.
"

Apart from the spacing errors

1. I don't care who your payment processor is, and I dont need to be told its secure, as I wont use it if I don't think it is.

2. The call to action is to join a private beta, but what do I get for joining the beta, nothing it seems, it even maybe you expect me to pay to do your testing. What about free during the beta and 50% off for the first year?

3. When is it likely to be ready - Mid 2017

4. What happens if I wait til its live, no compelling reason to sign up now

"All this for just £20 per month

Sign up before 31st March to request joining our private beta test and get free access during testing and 50% off for 12 months when live. Live date is planned to be before June 2017"

 

[Deleted member 281732]

One of yes, but for pure speed and Golang is in the main e.g faster http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=ghc&lang2=go

For a new app in 2017 I probably would have used Golang or Node.js mainly because of the weight of the community of devs.

Node.js is JavaScript. JavaScript is a horrendously unsafe language. JavaScript and PHP are two of the languages in my “Hell no. Absolutely not. No way. Nope.” list for this project.

“Weight of the community of devs” may be a fair point, but not applicable in my case. I do everything myself.

I don't have anything to say about Go, as I haven't used it. Though Haskell is much older than Go, and as I understand it, much safer too. Safety is my primary concern.

In terms of pricing, I think your landing page needs to create more immediacy, as there is no compelling reason to sign up now. Its £20 take it or leave it

"All this for just £20 per month.
Payments are handled quickly and securely by Stripe.

NewBusinessMonitor is currently in a private beta. Signing up withyour email address now will put you on the invitation list to usethe system when it is ready.
"

Apart from the spacing errors

1. I don't care who your payment processor is, and I dont need to be told its secure, as I wont use it if I don't think it is.

2. The call to action is to join a private beta, but what do I get for joining the beta, nothing it seems, it even maybe you expect me to pay to do your testing. What about free during the beta and 50% off for the first year?

3. When is it likely to be ready - Mid 2017

4. What happens if I wait til its live, no compelling reason to sign up now

"All this for just £20 per month

Sign up before 31st March to request joining our private beta test and get free access during testing and 50% off for 12 months when live. Live date is planned to be before June 2017"

1. Some people do.
2. That hasn't been peoples' concern so far. I could have worded it more clearly, but it seems most have interpreted it as “let me know when it's ready”.
3. On track to launch in about two weeks.
4. No difference. You can add your email address to the list to be notified when it's ready, or you can come back in a couple of weeks and just start using the product.

 

[Alan]

What do you think?

No difference. You can add your email address to the list to be notified when it's ready, or you can come back in a couple of weeks and just start using the product.

To be clear - what I think is it is ineffective as a landing page if it doesn't create a desire to take action.

I my opinion, it doesn't create a desire.

That is the purpose of a review.


... regarding Node.js exactly why I don't use it either. Regarding Go, same logic as Haskell in terms of safety, just I don't know Haskell

 

[fisicx]

That hasn't been peoples' concern so far. I could have worded it more clearly, but it seems most have interpreted it as “let me know when it's ready”.

This is a while world of difference from attracting paying clients. I'd put money on a good chunk of those who have signed up visiting once or twice and never returning. Even getting 10% to pay would be well above the norm.

But give me access to the beta (to do user testing) and a good discount for the rest of the year and you will have piqued my interest.