Growth? We don’t need no stinking growth

For the past three years, I’ve largely ignored the marketing, sales, and operations side of TroopTrack. I really wasn’t trying to grow my subscriber base, increase revenues, etc for a couple of reasons:

* I was concerned about application stability. I was getting lots and lots of emails. Every one of those emails meant a user had gotten a 500 error trying to use TroopTrack.

* I was concerned about my feature set. I was still getting requests for big changes from users. That bothered me because I interpreted it as meaning my feature set was not rich enough.

* My conversion rate was too low. I wasn’t happy with 1 out of 8 troops that tried TroopTrack buying it. I wanted to see that get closer to 1 out of 5.

* I already had a reasonably active user base that was helping me figure out what to change, what to fix, what to add. I didn’t need more customers to achieve my goals of stabilizing the app and rounding out the feature set

* I was already getting enough new trial customers to tell if I was improving conversion rates.

You take all these things and growing wasn’t really my priority. The new user experience was just not good enough to warrant trying to put TroopTrack in front of even more people.

The times, they are a-changin’

TroopTrack is pretty durn stable now. I don’t get anywhere near the number of emails from exceptional I used to.

Feature requests tend to be smaller and are focused on tweaking things rather than adding massive new features. My conversion rate is way up (ironically, this is partly due to me doing some non-techy stuff lately).

I am rapidly approaching what I think is a very significant milestone in the next two weeks TroopTrack will get its 100th paying customer. Everybody pause and say “Yay!”.

It took TroopTrack more than 3 years and 800 trial customers to get here we need to figure out how to get the next 100 customers in 3 months, not 3 years, if I am going to reach my goal of 5000 paying troops before I die.

I think I can do it I just need to figure out how. Since I’m no marketing genius, I started looking around me for people who are.

Learning from the BodyShopBids Team

I recently did a little work. Most of the work I did from home, but I spent a few days hanging out in their office at Lightbank while I worked on the site. It was cool to watch Brad Weissberg (President of BodyShopBids) and his team busting their butts to build their business. I saw them calling customers and body shops.

I saw them talking about the cost of customer acquisition. I watched as they argued and argued about how to drive more users to make choices and commitments.

I won’t lie. It was impressive. Brad and his team act like people who really believe in their product. This makes them ballsy and persistent. They are totally awesome.

It made me think about what I was doing, and what I wasn’t doing. I realized that I had finally gotten to the point where I believed in my product’s sale-ability and that it was high time I started acting like a person who really believes in their product.

One day, as I was driving home from the Lightbank offices, it hit me.