Advice on marketing and pricing in a niche market?
We are both technical co-founders and it seems like many other engineers we feel we are stumbling around in the dark a little as we try to market this product and ourselves. I was wondering if the hacker news hordes had any advice for us. Our (somewhat informed) assumption coming in was that veterinarians would be a hard group to reach via web and social network marketing, however we have been pleasantly surprised at the amount of connections we have been able to make via twitter. (we also do adwords, ahem, and have sent out a very small physical mailing batch, as well as gone door-to-door to some local practices). However, we're not yet seeing the interest we'd hoped for, so I'm wondering if anybody has advice regarding marketing, and also pricing of our product. We started with a traditional fixed-price downloadable "boxed software" model due to some arbitrary initial circumstances, but have switched to a SaaS model with monthly pricing (and we still feel SaaS is the right long term goal). We are toying with lowering the price, and switching back to an up-front yearly subscription.
Since our ultimate goal is a more ambitious practice management system, we can also envision pricing tiers differentiated either on more whiteboard features, or further practice/records management integration. Or maybe it's time to cut the losses and pivot. I don't want to bore you to death with more background, but I'm glad to share in the comments if there are questions.
TIA for any feedback. Aaron
The links are:
http://menagerievet.com http://menagerievet.tumblr.com @menagerievet