What it’s like at 100 users

It’s been the first full month of having Morsel live and usable to the general public. We’re going to pass 100 users, which is beating our meager goal of 60 for the month, so we’re pretty excited.

Things that are working well this month:

1. Search Ads: As always, search ads are working well for us. Conversion rates are solid (8-12%). My background is in a lot of paid channel development, so I would hope I could find a path forward there. We’re milking all the “Spend $X get $Y” promos right now.
2. Local press: we’ve been focused on sharing our story with our hometown newspapers, local media outlets, any localized press looking for a story that has roots from our location-based backgrounds. It has worked out well; we received three inclusions this month, driving 25%-30% of the signups. The kicker, all of them have failed to provide a backlink. So this traffic is coming directly from a literal article.The key learning here is how can we scale localized media? We think there could be an opportunity here since our product plays so well to those reading the paper.
   • Was this success because we were local to the story, or was it successful because of the local nature of the channel? Still chewing on it but looking into how to test this at a bit more scale.
3. SEO: I’m a big search believer, so we’ve been hard at work trying to find our footing for content creation. We have an awesome writer helping to produce content. Still, in the upcoming month, I will be attempting to triple our output by moving her to more of an editorial role, editing content from a content production marketplace.
   • The main thing here is we’re working to figure out our content clustering, what topics are relevant enough site traffic-wise but still broad enough to get enough search volume to be worth our limited budget.
   • The SEO for B2B play is doing very well too, and we already are at the top of Google for keywords that lend themselves to larger contract license deals which have been pretty incredible. It’s been a great opportunity to help potential quickly recoup our initial investment on the product.

What I’m surprised by:

• We haven’t had nearly the amount of negative user feedback as I would have originally anticipated being this far along. We don’t have too many customer service requests either. I’m hoping this is because the product serves the purpose okay, not the opposite.
• How often people use our footer for navigation. I am realizing that perhaps our homepage (landing page) may not be giving enough information to prospects so they try to find it elsewhere once they have scrolled. I will be looking into this.

Goals for Next Month:

• Would I be a growth guy if I didn’t say our goal was to double on sign_ups, purchases, and session_starts?  😜
• Launch our animated video ad
• Launch on ProductHunt
• Test trial length
• Test landing page redesign
• 8 articles published