> I wonder if CC companies have a way of punishing companies for this.
Yes, if they get enough people doing chargebacks. The challenge is most of these big co's seem to be in the "too big to punish" camp. This is both you need a large amount of chargebacks and perhaps they may not want to fire the companies (though this is speculative).
> At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs.
I'm with you that this is still important and valuable because many companies don't blacklist you. Furthermore I'd rather have that protection and testing a service which could be no service than no service at all.
I wouldn't expect them to drop the company as a client; I don't think that really serves anyone.
My suggestion would be to levy higher transaction fees on the business, and provide refunds to customers out of that. If a company is going to ban users for filing chargebacks, raise their transaction fees by 0.5% or 1% and have the CC company issue refunds themselves out of that pool.
At the end of the day, it's really a problem for the government to solve, though. Companies being able to get away with such blatantly anti-consumer policies is indicative of a substantial distortion in the market. I don't think this is something that would happen if there were robust competition in the market.
Yes, it's a tool, as is all technology. But unlike woodshop or a metalwork class, there's no instructor. The other day I asked ChatGPT to give me a paragraph about hunting tech startups and I got back that it could not do so due to moral issues. While I get that some people have moral issues with hunting, I would venture to guess it's a small minority of people. It could easily give a statement without any big subjective bias, but it didn't do so. If it has issues with something fairly basic, how can we trust it to help senior citizens who are less tech savvy and go to it for simple unbiased medical advice?
Search is a hard problem, which increases the barriers to entry. But once a competitor has a method to crawl the Internet, that particular defensibility is gone.
I'd argue the data network effect is what gives them most of their defense. Now that they have a corner on what creates better search results, this is harder for others to defend against.
The Gap Analysis helped me get clarity on these five business questions:
Who are Decibite’s customers?
How have Decibite acquired customers?
How should Decibite be different than its competitors?
How should Decibite price their product?
To improve their product, where should Decibite focus moving forward?
After talking to Decibite's customers, I found out they are non-technical entrepreneurs. They gave me responses like, "I don't even know the technical side. I don't have the patience to learn the technical side. I’d rather do face-to-face work with the client. I'm all for outsourcing parts of the business you don't like, to do more of what you do like to do." Later on, I used this info to target Reddit's entrepreneur subreddit and use similar messaging on the website.
There wasn't much clarity how they acquired customers in the past beyond finding them on Reddit. Ideally my goal is to construct the customer journey by working backwards. One person mentioned they heard about Decibite in a Facebook Group, but I wasn't able to find which group they mentioned.
Lots of info in the article about how they different from competitors. Tl;dr - I positioned them as "Decibite offers 15% or faster hosting, guaranteed."
As for pricing the product, I found out Decibite was underpricing their hosting products. The business hosting plan was $5 CAD per month (about $3.75 USD). The data showed I could bump this up to $10 USD per month without losing growth, an increase of 167%. The VPS hosting plan was $10 CAD per month (about $7.50 USD). The data showed I could increase this to $25 USD per month without losing growth, an increase of 233%.
Wasn't much clarity on where to improve the product beyond the USP of faster hosting. Most of Decibite customers loved what they were doing. They just needed to improve their positioning and messaging.
If personal, any self-hosted platform will work (WordPress, blogger.com, or Webflow).
If business, you can post articles on your site. Some well-known marketers only post once a month. But they do a ton of promotion + optimize to rank in search. From what I've observed, it's not necessary to keep a consistent posting schedule, but it helps in other ways like building up the habit. More in-depth content tends to increase search traffic. That's why you'll see bigger brands like Shopify write a ton of articles daily.
The advantage of using another platform is it gives you the possibility you'll get some of their traffic if you understand their system.
I'm Jason, founder of GrowthRamp.io. Last April, I began working with Decibite, an early-stage web hosting startup. There's a lot of challenges growing from idea to scale, so I wanted to share my approach to early-stage product marketing for those with less than 1000 customers.
After reading the work of the ad executive Rosser Reeves, I wanted to test his theory on the power of a unique selling proposition (USP). The results were positive. In 6 months, Decibite's annualized revenue went up 127%, monthly traffic up 241%, and organic traffic 331%. In this article I am sharing everything I did to grow Decibite step-by-step. My goal is to give you a do-it-yourself manual of sorts as I know early-stage marketing can be a challenge.
I'd love to hear your feedback (pricing strategy, positioning, go-to-market strategy, etc) and personal experiences when it comes to launching a product. I'm eager to learn from others who've had success getting traction early on.
People know exactly what to expect when they speak of the company "Dementia Village." They may not hear about the "Dementia care facility" if it's just subtext.
Further, this begins to give people the impression they specialize in Dementia patients only. You can't say the same for another name like "River Falls Village," as someone else suggested.
This is all part of the trade-offs in naming a business.
No, you're absolutely correct in the traditional way of doing business - just think back to AM/FM radio in the US. The songs were advertisements to go buy the record, which made the record companies a lot of money and the musician usually pennies.
Once people didn't have to pay huge mark-up to get music they rationalized that musicians weren't getting much anyway - so, let's spend our money on live shows, merchandise, fan club stuff - and there's a lot of music lovers that I believe have spent their money from recorded music on other music related things. Not sure there's data to support it, but I've always thought of recordings as kind of the throw-away element to being in the music industry: Nobody makes money on them unless you get them in a TV commercial or a movie soundtrack.
> However, that drives serious brand awareness to the artist, who could then sell other add-ons (music tickets, t-shirts, limited edition releases, etc)
Not all genres lend to live performance. Not all audiences buy t-shirts. Not all audiences purchase music at all.
Yes, if they get enough people doing chargebacks. The challenge is most of these big co's seem to be in the "too big to punish" camp. This is both you need a large amount of chargebacks and perhaps they may not want to fire the companies (though this is speculative).
> At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs.
I'm with you that this is still important and valuable because many companies don't blacklist you. Furthermore I'd rather have that protection and testing a service which could be no service than no service at all.