How we got 3,000+ visitors in 24 hours

Running an online businesses is tough, especially in the early stages of a business.

Trying to get web visits, especially the first 1,000 web visits (let alone 3,000 web visits).

So, you’ve devoted a lot of time to your product or service and want people to check out your landing page to see whether that’s something they would be interested in. So, how do you do it?

In this post, we’ll cover the following -

1. What did we do before?

2. What did we do?

3. Conclusion

1. What did we do before?

Just a FYI, we help businesses unify their KPIs by integrating their banking, billing and accounting systems into one platform. Furthermore, we sync financial data with CRMs and product analytics. This allows businesses to bridge multiple tools to understand their users better (e.g. bridging Google Analytics with Stripe can help you see what a user did before buying), view the health of their company (you can see each tool on one dashboard to see how your company is truly doing), and keeping track of finances.

Landing Page

We’ll show you how we improved our Landing Page before we got 3,000 views in 24 hours

Old Version

1. Layout: We wanted to go for a very minimal approach to our landing page due to time and what we thought could be attractive to our target audience.

Our plan when choosing the layout

What we did wrong:

a. Each section was oversimplified and we missed out on necessary sections such as, security information.
b. We didn’t talk about the features of our platform, so the user didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

2. Gif: We wanted to make a good looking gif that explained what we do in a very simple format. However, we were trying to oversimplify the gif and ended up not communicating what we wanted.

Obsidian's old gif

3. Content: Our content was very vague and did not explain a lot of things that we do for the user. We tried to limit the number of things that we wrote on the page for “simplicity” and ended up missing out a lot of selling points for the user.

Expectations of our image vs the reality

New Version

1. Layout: We wanted our content to be easy to consume and explanatory. Moving from oversimplified text to simplified text with visuals became the strategy. To achieve this, we researched into various layouts and went with Bento Box UI.

Bento Box layout is perfect when you want all the elements to have their own focus rather than a pseudo-hierarchical approach. This helped us highlight each aspect and makes it easy for the user to consume information with ease.

Our new plan when choosing the layout

2. Gif: We wanted to make a smaller sized gif that explained exactly how we unify their business tools.

Our new gif

3. Content: We expanded on a lot of our selling points, making sure to be clear about what we do, so there is no miscommunication.

Check our Landing Page out here

2. What did we do?

Creating Personas for Calls and Emails

Its 2024 and not everyone is fond of a cold call. We wanted to make sure we are calling a small number of people who could get instant value from our product. Our personas were roughly categorised into 2 types:

a. Introverted leaders with clear dislike for cold calls
b. Extroverted leaders who could be fine for a quick conversation

Once we had the primary categories ready, we dug deep into roles and the value. All that’s left was to send out emails or call people.

If you’d like to know more about our approach, comment on our LinkedIn.

Cold Emails

We sent over 500 cold emails to different target audiences - we wanted to see who would be willing to be our early adopter based on our ideal customer persona. Of those 500 emails, we had 67% open rate, 10% reply rate, and 4 demos booked.

Its a numbers game, right? Well, we were surprised when all the 4 demos booked were from different target audience.

Food for thought - How do you even deal with something like that?

Cold Calls

For calling, all we did was choose 15 people identical to the 4 folks who booked demos (the only similarity was size of the company). The calls on average lasted 43 seconds with 2 folks being super angry on how we got their phone number.

Umm, it was on their LinkedIn profile.

We got 2 demos booked through and got 1 referral already. Here’s a “script” we had prepared:

Our Cold Call Script

Credits to Mike Gallardo for this snippet of script. Not much magic here but the next section is Hogwarts for real!

Forums and Groups

Once a wise man said - “ask for help and it shall be given”. Slack groups and Discord servers live by this. We joined and posted on Literally Helping Startups (LHS) Discord server managed by Eva Dobrzanska and team. We got a couple of folks from LHS who went on to provide consistent feedback for us.

Our feedback loops on average were 17 hours long. We’ll post soon on how we created a machine with such quick feedback loops.

Hacker News and Reddit: We posted on Hacker News and Reddit to reach a wider audience - this helped us see whether people liked how we were selling it, whether they had any reservations, and what we could improve.

Our Reddit Post on r/Saas

Conclusion

Being marketers by nature, we anticipated about 500 visitors and a conversion of 5%. We were surprised when Reddit alone drove 1.8K Visitors and the conversion rate was about 6.5% to signups.

If there’s a takeaway from this post, then that’ll be to connect with communities and ask for help. And keep optimising your landing page, message, and more to add value for the users.

If you are struggling to track KPIs or managing finance analytics, head over to Obsidian to book a demo!