Our Waitlist Had 11,000 Names. Two Percent of Them Paid.
A big pre-launch waitlist felt like proof of demand. It turned out to be mostly proof of curiosity.
Courtney Blake
@courtneyblakeI run marketing at a small Austin software startup and write about what our customers taught me the hard way.
8 articles477 clapsJoined Jun 8
Articles
What I Learned Running Marketing at a Startup That Shut Down
My first startup job ended with a two-paragraph email and a lot of lessons I only understood later.
Six Months as Employee Number Four: What Nobody Warns You About
Joining a tiny startup is exciting, exhausting, and stranger than any job description suggests.
Pricing Our Software at $49 a Month Was Our Most Expensive Mistake
Cheap pricing brought us the wrong customers, the wrong feedback, and nearly the wrong product.
Our Best-Performing Ad Was Filmed on a Cracked Phone in a Parking Lot
We spent $14,000 on a polished brand video and it lost to forty seconds of our support lead talking in her car.
One Angry Customer Email Rewrote Our Entire Homepage
A furious message from a clinic owner in Ohio did more for our conversion rate than a year of A/B tests.
We Stopped Running Webinars and Started Hosting Small Dinners
Twelve people around a table outperformed four hundred people on a webinar, and the math surprised even our CFO.
Our Attribution Dashboard Was Lying, and a Simple Survey Proved It
One question at signup showed that our most-credited channel was mostly taking credit for word of mouth.
