you are not facebook. talk to your customers.
Okay, one free tip. The long version. You’re not selling because you don’t talk to your customers. You hope people will sign up, figure it out alone, fall in love and pay. You are not Facebook. This is the first of eight weekend posts about selling when you’re small, and it starts with the thing everyone skips.
facebook could skip the talking. you can’t.
People onboarded themselves into Facebook because their friends were already there. The product sold itself because everyone else was in it.
You have a landing page, a purple gradient and a signup button. Nobody’s friends are there. Nobody is coming because everyone else is.
So someone has to explain the thing. That someone is you.
what actually happens on your site
Someone lands on your page. They’re interested. They have exactly one question.
“Does it work with my setup?” “Can I cancel anytime?” “Is this a real company or one person in a hoodie?” (It’s one person in a hoodie. That’s fine. Say so.)
The page doesn’t answer it. The contact form looks like a black hole. “Book a demo” means a calendar, a call and three days of waiting.
So they close the tab. You never find out they existed. Your analytics calls it a bounce, and you go back to tweaking the hero headline.
That wasn’t a bounce. It was a customer with a question and nobody to ask.
the lies we tell ourselves
“If the product is good, people figure it out.” They won’t. They have 40 other tabs open.
“I’ll add support later, when we have users.” You don’t have users because nobody can reach you. That’s the whole loop.
“I’m an engineer, not a salesperson.” You don’t need to sell. Just answer the question. It takes about as long as the commit you’re avoiding.
what talking gets you
The sale. People who ask questions are the ones about to buy. Answer them and a lot of them do.
The roadmap, for free. They tell you what’s missing, what’s confusing and what they’d pay more for. No survey tool needed.
Better copy. Your customers explain your product better than you do. Copy their words straight into your landing page.
The “oh, a real human” moment. A big company can’t have the founder answer in five minutes. You can. That’s an unfair advantage, so use it.
how to start this week
- Give people a way to ask on every page. Not only on /contact. Every page.
- Answer fast, not perfect. “Good question, checking” beats a perfect reply two days later.
- Answer from wherever you already are. If it’s one more app to check, you’ll stop checking by Friday.
- Write every question down. When the same one comes up three times, fix the page.
- Onboard your first ten users by hand. Message each signup and ask what almost stopped them.
None of this is growth hacking. It’s just being there.
why we built spookat
Because of this exact problem. Nobody wants to book a demo to ask one question. People want an answer right away.
Spookat is a small chat for your site. A visitor writes, and you reply in a Slack or Discord thread, or in our inbox and its phone app. No new tab to babysit. It loads nothing until someone clicks and sets no cookies, so your cookie banner doesn’t grow.
It’s $4.99 a site a month, with 14 days of cool guy and no card. See how it works.
You are not Facebook. Talk to your customers.