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Every step about building our marketing startup. From day zero to present.
What you should expect here:
Please use comments form at the bottom to ask questions, suggest us marketing ideas, give feedback and anything else.
Startup goals
Goal 1: Reach 100 customers
Goal 2: Reach $10k MRR
Startup activity timeline
While we do have big development plans for 2018, marketing is also very important. We started working on SEO, created Adwords and Facebook campaigns.
Added survey campaigns with public URL's and lots of account notifications
Changed logo and site colors because it looked too silly.
Invested lots of money and research into tablet and beacons standers that can be rented by offline shops. Those are integrated with the rest of the services and can track behaviour and run apps: new subscribers, surveys, registration forms, contests or catalogues.
Added new features regarding PUSH notifications (with product recommendations) and Facebook Share that also uses product recommendations. All can be setup and will automatically deliver dynamic and personalized messages.
We've boosted 12 posts on Facebook in the last 4 months, with an average budget of $10. It's wasted money, only a few clicks (2-3 page likes in total) and always less people reached than initially said.
Our partner agency started working on rebuilding integration modules with most common ecommerce platforms: wordpress, woocommerce, prestashop, magento, opencart, shopify.
A completely redesigned website was launched. Made entirely on HTML, ready for translations and custom pages. Got rid of Wordpress, one of the best decisions.
We launched in May another self-service solution with the same product in Romania. The idea is to use it as a test market for find bugs, testing pricing options, build a team around a SaaS solution.
We also did A/B tests on the platform and presentation website. We lost some time because of this, but afterwards is considered a good idea.
First account was made using registration form. Their website is not a real online store, not even a realwebsite (just a blank page). But let's celebrate anyway
Created new accounts for MARA: Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. Zero promotion, which is definitely not good: You need to get Facebook likes, twitter followers and Youtube subscribers.
After reading lots of startup growth articles, we decided to follow those 2. They have plenty of information depending on the stage you're in.
The founder is very technical so the product was built over years internally. Being hard to find very good engineers we decided to outsource some of the development and to implement monthly dev cycles.
Later edit: This was a good move, as we move faster now and have a better overview of the product
We created a wordpress website using Divi theme. Was pretty easy to create it, but if you want something custom very hard to modify. I won't recommend for good quality design.
We had designed a first version of registration form. Too ugly to have anyone signup.
While doing our daily tasks at the agency, MARA was put on hold. However we were planning how the self-service will work, because the system didn't allow for self-registration and related stuff.
Our solution is technical, so we need some integration with our clients websites. Rather then building ourselves, we've decided to have them built by a company we are very close to, devant.ro. Devant was the initial agency one our founder started in 2005 as a digital marketing agency.
After a short brainstorming on "marketing automation" related names we decided that MARA is the best to go with. The only free domain we liked was getMARA.com, so we bought it.
The startup is based on a techonology we've built under another name. The reasons we decided to start from zero with another brand:
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YES, I want more sales