Spring is for Growth – Ventures of Eric

Hello All,

My next installment in an attempt to maintain a quarterly cadence, will be primarily about the challenging task of getting the first customers. The TLDR is here, and the full-version is below. As always, your replies are always read!

TLDR

1 – Advertising is harder than I thought
2 – New Engineering Firm is working out well
3 – Follow the social accounts to help us grow!

Advertising Sequence

To get this business off the ground, I definitely still need the help of all of you. It’s awesome when you volunteer yourselves to become DIYers for site consultations. The feedback you’ve offered so far has been invaluable.

Inevitably, however, I need to attract my initial customers to the site. To do this, the task requires advertising to attract (previously unfamiliar) visitors to the site. And more specifically, spending money to do it. As alluded to before, this can be a costly proposition for any new startup. However, startups can also be efficient in early stages by “testing” different elements of the advertising such as the copy or the audience targeting. This is an approach to optimize the cost and the efficacy of the advertising for future investment.

The additional layer of challenge for a marketplace business such as mine, is attracting visitors on the “buy” and the “sell” side in an efficient enough sequence to scale the business. To start, I’ve tried to find ways to pursue tradespeople/experts. Craigslist ads, and specifically listing gig ads in blue-collar zip codes surrounding Metropolitan areas has yielded some success. My friend Ashish had advised me not to overlook the platform as an effective advertising platform for this segment, and I’m glad he did.

We’ve had some early success finding the archetype of tradespeople I thought I could find. Namely, more senior professionals in a career transition. The feedback from them has been motivating. Quotes like: “I’ve been looking for something like this,” “I don’t need to work anymore, but could use something to keep me busy,” “I like helping people,” “I do this anyways for my friends today.”

Advertising to DIYers

To attract the initial “buyers” (DIYers) on the platform, I’ve started with Facebook/IG advertising. In an early failure, I entrusted the first set of campaigns to an outsourced media manager. My failure was being far too laissez-faire about the management of the campaigns, which resulted in a set of strategies and creatives that were not well structured.

In learning from my early mistake, I am now much more involved in the second attempt to set up the campaigns – with a new media manager. I will also look into TikTok and Reddit as platforms for potential campaigns, each for different reasons. TikTok is the growing platform, and home to more millennials who tend to be first-time homebuyers. Reddit, generally because it’s a place where people have demonstrated a behavior for asking for help. Both may prove to be fruitful platforms for future advertising investment, so I’m interested in determining their worth sooner than later.

Other Areas

In an area that’s not quite as important at the moment, but is generally quite critical, is the engineering of my site. After the initial build, I decided to pursue finding an engineering firm that I could find more success with going forward. So far, that change has gone quite well.

Also, as a reminder, we’ve also created some social handles on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I’ll repeatedly post this, but it’s a great help if each of you can follow my social handles and even share/like posts as your charity allows. I have even hired my nephew Isaac, a college sophomore, to help create some TikTok content strategy and the related posts. So, if you don’t follow the TikTok handle, you’ll make my nephew cry.