In fact, our first hire was someone to help with customer success. Their job was literally to go through every account, see whether it was set up properly and seeing results, and reach out and offer to help if it wasn't.

Building up an audience first, before there was even the slightest hint of this becoming a product, was a massive help.

Our approach is simple: just try to be as educational and informative as possible.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers? High touch Selling high-touch (getting on the phone with each prospective customer, giving them a demo) in the early days worked really well for us.

We made about $40k in that launch (mostly annuals). We were happy, but we knew there was still a lot of work ahead!

The landing page was some long-form copy about what we were doing, with four or five dropdown boxes where you could choose things about yourself (business type, email marketing tool you use, and so on) and see the copy update in real-time, as an example of the sort of thing personalization could do. It was simple, but it did the trick.

tweeting about the mistakes we were seeing a lot of in online marketing, the big impact personalization can have, and the cool ways you can get started with it, and then pointing them to a landing page.