How to Promote a Bootstrapped Product When Your Competitors Are Getting a Lot of Money from Investors. The Talk with AdPage

— Koen, I’ve read your story on Linkedin Pulse, in which you describe how you raised your income from zero to €195K. As I understand it, you are currently promoting AdPage with the help of special “Social Media Entrepreneur” workshops. Can you tell me how that’s organized?

— Social Media Entrepreneur is another company of mine. We give the customers much more than a simple landing page builder; we also provide them with tools for business automation, holding webinars, and much more.

We also offer training videos. Since our users are novice entrepreneurs and don’t know what to do, we teach them step by step how to attract customers.

We are focused on helping them get their first clients as quickly as possible.

Three employees are engaged in all this, and they constantly promote entrepreneurs and help them to earn more.

— At what point do you start promoting AdPage among people who are signed up for the program? When do you offer to let them try the product?

— It’s not always done the same way. In most cases, they immediately start with creating a landing page using AdPage.

This is the first thing they do, because it is necessary to lead traffic somewhere. Then they create and launch ads on Facebook.

When they are faced with difficulties at any of the steps, we help to solve them.

— You’ve mentioned the number €195K. Is that annual or monthly revenue?

— Annual.

— Has anything changed now in connection with the pandemic? Are revenues decreasing or increasing?

— They are neither increasing nor decreasing. We are earning almost €16K per month now.

— What marketing channels do you use to draw visitors to your AdPage/Social Media Entrepreneur program?

— Advertising on Facebook.

— How much do you invest in Facebook advertising per month?

 — Can you share some numbers on how much you pay per lead? And how many of those leads become paying customers?

— In March, we had 343 clicks on Facebook and 20 new customers.

— Let’s imagine that I want to start some kind of business, like selling handmade items online. How can I find out about you? At what stage will you offer me AdPage?

— First, you’ll see our advertisement on your Facebook or Instagram and click on it.

You will find yourself on a big landing page, where you will find a lot of reviews from users who are members of the Social Media Entrepreneur community. This is social proof.

Then we explain how everything works.

The first step is a preliminary call and conversation with one of our experts.

The second step is the creation of your landing page on AdPage.

— Do I have to pay something after a preliminary conversation with your expert?

— Everything is free.

After the call, you begin to create a landing page and receive the next tasks by email.

Then you create an advertisement on Facebook; our expert gets in touch with you again and tells you how to optimize it.

Then our sales guys will call you and provide an offer to become a member of the community. An annual membership costs €697.

— Do you only advertise on Facebook? What about Google or some other PPC channels?

— Apart from ads on Instagram and Facebook, we’ve tried other channels but didn’t get the desired effect. Therefore, we currently use only Facebook.

— How do you manage to compete with Leadpages, Tilda, Wix? Many people know these platforms. They are well-known, popular, and have huge advertising budgets.

— We’ve focused on selling lifetime access, when a person pays once and gets access to AdPage functionality forever.

There is a point to this, even though the cost of lifetime access is quite low.

On one hand, we get less money than we could.

On the other hand, these users happily become brand advocates.

— How much do they have to pay to get lifetime access?

— We are currently selling lifetime access for Fastpages.io, a white label solution on the AdPage base. It costs $197. This is lifetime access to the tariff.

— What is the connection between this white label solution and AdPage?

— Fastpages is an agency, and AdPage is an SaaS provider.

— You mentioned how much you pay for a lead. And how much does the paying customer cost?

— For AdPage, it’s very difficult to calculate the correct price. For Social Media Entrepreneur, it is about €250.

— Do you focus solely on users from the Netherlands and Belgium or are you also present in the United States or the United Kingdom?

— As to the Social Media Entrepreneur program, they are only the Netherlands and Belgium. AdPage is sold worldwide.

— What targeting options do you use for Facebook advertising: interests, demography, geography?

— As to interests, our target is digital marketing.

We aim at men because our content does not elicit the desired level of conversion for a female audience.

For AdPage, we geographically aim at the USA.

— Who are your most famous customers? I mean brands that are familiar to a global audience.

— We have 11,000 users, and I’ve never analyzed whether they are known or not.

— Do they include both AdPage and Social Media Entrepreneur users?

— Yes, all together: both the owners of free accounts and freemium accounts.

— What is the percentage of freemium users?

— This is a hard question because for Social Media Entrepreneur there is no such thing as freemium users.

For Fastpages, about 20% of 2,500 users.

For AdPage, it’s also hard to say because we get a lot of clients with AppSumo.

I do not know whether to consider them freemium users. More likely, they are not.

For lifetime access to AdPage, they pay $49 once.

— How does AppSumo work? Why did you decide to cooperate with them?

— It has a huge audience.

AppSumo does not give too much money: they pay 50% of the number of sales.

In total, they brought us about 3,000 sales for $49.

— Do these customers use AdPage as a website builder?

— We give them a coupon for lifetime access to AdPage.

The most amazing thing is the percentage of people who activate the coupon: it’s zero.

Imagine that customers pay money and get a coupon, but never activate it.

— Wow! I wouldn’t have thought that would be the case. You have a large user base. Have you tried email marketing?

— No.

Sometimes we send out information about updates, but mostly we send letters only when users turn to us for support.

— Since you are focused mainly on the Netherlands and Belgium, have you ever tried cold calling?

— I’ve tried this method in the past, but it didn’t seem to work very well.

I prefer to attract users, and only then to call them. It is more effective.

— How big is your team now, and do you plan to expand it?

— Currently I work with 5 developers: 4 of them work full-time, one part-time.

I am not a coder, and I am engaged in marketing, seeking new employees, and developing a business.

— What about support?

— One guy in Pakistan is engaged in our support.

— Isn’t the time difference with Pakistan a problem?

— He draws another guy into the work, so the support works 8 hours a day.

They usually respond quickly because that’s important for our users.

If they are faced with difficulty or cannot quickly give an answer, we help.

— Do you work with local developers or outsource development to other countries?

— Now we have two full-time developers in the Ukraine.

This is a positive experience, but at the adaptation stage, there were difficulties due to the code quality demands that we placed upon them.

Therefore, it was a great achievement to involve them in our team.

— What are your plans for the future in terms of marketing, sales, and growth? What do you plan to do with AdPage over the next year?

— I want to follow up on the success of Social Media Entrepreneur and Fastpages.

— Don’t you plan to pull in some investors?

— No, I stay away from them.

— Many companies are created with a future exit in mind. Are you planning to sell AdPage sometime in the future?

— I don’t have such plans.