Acquisition Channel Opportunities: International SEO, App Exchanges, Competitor Spying

Want to get more paying users? This week I'll cover:

• Why international SEO is a good idea for SaaS founders;
• Why YCombinator invested in a company others ridiculed;
• An approach to spy on your competitors by analyzing their public footprint.

1. Why International SEO is a Good Idea for SaaS Founders

Freddie Chatt, a marketing blogger, recently wrote an article on how international SEO (outside of the English-speaking countries) is an untapped opportunity for e-commerce brands. According to my analysis, the same is true for SaaS founders.

The analysis: I've analyzed all 497 founder interviews, and discovered which acquisition worked consistency for founders(see Zero to Users for more details). One of the strategies I've seen some founders mention is targeting international markets.

An example: Amplifr is a social media scheduling took making $16k/month. They were targeting 2 markets (Russia/US) and mentioned a few interesting stats on this on the Indie Hackers interview:

Two different language markets perform very differently, so we've had three markets to test: Russian, Europe (less saturated English), and the US. Europe is much cheaper in terms of marketing than the US, which in our niche is pretty crowded. Consider this:
Russian/European version:

• Trial-to-paying conversion is about 3% over all the acquisition channels.
• Adwords search ads and network ads work great — we get a sign up for $1.
• Facebook ads became too expensive in late 2015, but I think we can make them work too.
• Our blog has about 28k sessions monthly. Each article converts to a signup at about 2%.
• The newsletter has about 20k people with a 3% click rate. Conversions are okay-ish.
  Quora ads cost us $3-4 for a signup.

US version:

• Trial-to-paying is about 5% with much less work done to improve it. A ton of things we can still do to bump this.
• Adwords: $5 per signup.
• Facebook ads: too expensive.
• Blog: well, we had about 135 people there last week :D
• Newsletter: about 1,500 people, aka non-existent.
• Quora ads: $8 per signup.
• Guest posting: much more potential than in Russia.

Notice how some channels (like Quora and AdWords) are up to 5 times cheaper for Russia/Europe than the US.

The opportunity: SaaS, unlike books, don't take much effort to translate. It's even easier to do it than an e-commerce site; on e-commerce you need to translate product descriptions for hundreds of products, in SaaS, you have mainly the user interface and the landing page.

Freddie targeted Germany, UAE, and France, and Belgium and he was able to significantly increase his SEO traffic from those countries. Read the article on more details on how to get started by doing international keyword research, whether to use subdomains vs. subfolders, etc.

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2. Hundreds of People Were Wondering Why YCombinator Invested in This Company. Here's the Answer

There was a recent thread on both Reddit and Hacker News titled "Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?".

The answer: No. They're just being smart. One of the folks on the Hacker News thread provided a pretty good answer:

Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc.

Building an audience with a cheap tool that solves a tiny pain point for a lot of people is a great way to build a direct relationship with a market that you can then sell other services to.

Product != Product entry: Larry Kim is the founder of WordStream, a PPC management tool acquired by Gannett for $150M. A few weeks ago, I was in one of his rooms on Clubhouse and he mentioned something really interesting: on thtopic.

At the beginning, WordStream was marketing itself as a "PPC management tool" and had a low conversion rate. Larry was doing a lot of customer interviews, getting feedback and trying to figure out why this was the case.

One day, Larry decided to try an experiment and change the entry point to the product.

He created a landing page where people could get a report: They input their website, and the tool will tell them if their ads are good or not. Larry realized that people didn't want a PPC software, they wanted to know if their PPC ads were good or not, and that's why he made this tool which was the entry point to the whole PPC software.

Thanks to this, conversion rates increased from 2% to 40%.

The opportunity: If you're a tech founder, ask yourself: does the gateway to my main product suck?

For example, if you provide a project management software, rather than having a landing page where they could sign up and start using the software, think if you can provide a more relevant gateway. If people use your software to keep task in sync between teams, maybe have a quiz named "How good is your team at synchronizing tasks?"

Then ask a few questions and compare their current result to what they could achieve if they started using your software.

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3. An approach to spy on your competitors by analyzing their public footprint

BBC recently wrote a piece where they "caught" UK businesses buying five-star reviews.

How did they the shady businesses do it?

By buying reviews from various providers and analyzing their public footprint. A BBC reporter bought a few reviews for a fake company they set up, looked at the users who analyzed the reviews and saw what else those users reviewed. The findings:

• 15 reviewers who had rated both an Edinburgh search engine optimisation business and a London psychic as five stars, which it called "an unlikely coincidence"

• A stockbroker in Canary Wharf who, having had several bad reviews in mid-2020, received 30 five-star ones "in quick succession" a few months later

• A reviewer who claimed to have lived in Surrey for years while praising a local car company, and a Glasgow electric gate firm 412 miles (663 km) away for work on his home

• The same reviewer also praised a dentist in Manchester, a paving firm in Bournemouth, and a Cambridgeshire locksmith, who allegedly saved his toddler from a locked car

BBC found around 45 businesses from analyzing only 3 reviewer profiles.

What this means for you: Imagine you were a company that provided those reviews (not a recommended industry to go in, but using this for the sake of demonstrating a point).

Doing this would be a great way to uncover your competitors' customers. Just buy a few reviews from 10 different competitors, analyze the profiles and find the businesses.

Another example: 5 years ago, I tested if paid links work by buying from a few providers. Those providers had blogs where they posted an article which linked to my site.

By seeing the website of the provider, I could also see the other posts they posted for other customers and the customers' websites. You can easily imagine how can this be valuable for an SEO service company, for example.

The opportunity: Competitor analysis/spying is big, with hundreds of multi-million companies on the market like SpyFu or SEMRush. What I talked about above is an interesting tactic that might also apply to your business: See if any of your competitor leaves a 'public footprint' which may uncover some/all of their customers.

Hope you found this useful!

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