Creative Ways to Attract Customers to Your Startup

Creative Ways to Attract Customers to Your Startup

by Miscellaneous

In this post, we are going to share with you the most creative ways to attract customers for your startup business. You’ll discover that even if they don’t directly relate to your niche, they are still applicable to any marketing strategy.

Imagine your startup business having tons of customers. Imagine customers waiting in lines to purchase your products. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Well, some startup entrepreneurs may think this is a far-fetched dream. They would think this is impossible to achieve as a small business. But we say you can achieve it. Yes, you can be a brand loved by many customers. All you have to do is take the right steps. As a startup starting from scratch, it may seem like a lot of hard work. However, it isn’t all about hard work. Sure, you have to put in effort and time. But coming up with creative ways to attract customers to your startup is the trick.

What should you do to attract new customers?

Your strategies to attract new customers should be creative. However, don’t misunderstand this. It’s not all about taking a unique route for its own sake. Your marketing strategies need to be strategic too. Otherwise, they won’t be effective at attracting customers. Before planning out your creative strategies to attract customers, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Does it speak to the crowd?
  • Does it anticipate their requirements?
  • Does it have the ability to grasp the attention of the customers?

As you can understand, your creative methods need to be customized for your target audience.

Attract Customers to Your Startup
Attracting More Customers Leads to More Sales and Profits 

Creative ways to attract customers to your startup

1. Update your website

Your digital presence plays a big part in attracting customers. And your website is your main official digital residence. It is going to be the direct source that customers go to. So remember that your website needs to do the heavy lifting so customers can find you. Make sure that your site is optimized for search engines and mobile users by reviewing your SEO and SEM strategies.

Even the style of your website matters. Too many graphics might slow down your site’s load speed, which is a turnoff for customers. If you lack in-house experience, employ a website design firm and/or SEO professional to assist you with this.

2. Discounts and promotions for first-time customers

Customers cannot resist discounts. As a startup business, you have to know this and use it to your advantage. Attract customers to your brand through introductory discounts. Also, you can offer special deals. For instance, offer deals like buy 2 and get 1 free or offer a discount like 10% off for the first-ever purchase. 

Bargains as such make first-time customers want to come and check out your products. This is a very creative way to familiarize your brand with more and more customers. If you incorporate this method, make sure to keep track of what they buy and which offers they redeem. That way, you will be able to better target them with future marketing messages. That will ultimately help you gain their loyalty to your brand.

Discounts and Promotions for New Customers
Customers Find Any Discount or Promotion Attractive 

3. Create exclusive and targeted offers

If there’s one thing customers prefer over discounts, it’s exclusive, targeted offers. Even if they say no to any other discount, they cannot resist a 50 percent discount. Take it to the next level by positioning it as an exclusive offer for your target customer. Trust us—no customer can turn it down. Providing exclusive offers is an excellent approach to accessing new customers, particularly in markets you may not have been able to reach previously.

Whenever companies announce new offers as such, the word quickly spreads. There are numerous websites and social media channels dedicated to discovering these exclusive discounts, which means free publicity for your business. As a result, your organization should begin to notice a direct relationship between offering discounts and your ROI.

4. Run Instagram contests

Contests are a creative way to reach more customers. The perfect platform for this is social media platforms like Instagram. If you do this right, you will be able to grow your following rapidly.

Run giveaway contests with simple rules. For instance, you could say that anyone who follows your Instagram account, likes your posts, and shares them is eligible for a chance to win a prize. And when it comes to the prize you are offering, it needs to be worth fighting for.

Creative Ways to Attract Customers to Your Startup - Intagram Contests
Holding Contests Is an Inventive Technique to Connect with New Clients

5. Customer feedback

Hear what your customers have to say about your brand and the products. This is very important, so get their feedback constantly. At the end of the day, you are creating products for them. So, knowing what they like and dislike is essential for making necessary changes and ultimately improving your product. That’s how you get the chance to attract new customers. This not only helps you improve products but also earns you popularity as a brand that listens to customers.

6. Tell people about your brand

One of the most effective ways to raise brand awareness is by networking.You can also meet new people and tell them about your brand, your products, and your services. It would be more effective if you approached it like this: “How can my products and services help?’ 

You can be a member of your trade association, your local chamber of commerce, and networking organizations.

7. Make the most of online review sites

Consumers don’t play around with their money. They do their research before deciding to give your products a chance. One thing they do to learn about your brand is check with previous customers. For that, they turn to online ratings and review sites. This helps them familiarize themselves with your brand. 

By the end of this research, they will decide if your brand is worth it or not. So you must keep track of these sites and respond to any customer complaints. You can make the most of the positive reviews you have gotten by linking to them on your official website. Keep in mind that new customers are more likely to purchase your products and trust your brand if they see positive comments from others.

Good Customer Reviews
Having Good Customer Reviews on Review Sites Is a Plus for Any Startup

8. Make the most of your expertise

You can generate interest and even create buzz by showcasing your industry expertise, which can help you attract new customers as well as get more business from your existing client base. 

Volunteering to speak on industry panels, delivering a webinar or workshop, speaking at industry events or to groups your target customers belong to, or holding educational sessions are just a few examples of how you can make a good impression with potential new customers and clients. This technique is especially effective for B2B business owners.

Wrapping up

There you have it! We hope that this post helped you think of creative ways to attract customers to your startup business. By incorporating the methods we introduced you to, your startup will be able to pull in more and more customers. Make sure that you execute your strategies in a way that speaks to the crowd, meets their needs, and gets their attention. With that in mind, your creative edge will get you a lot of new customers sooner than you anticipate.

What Is ChatGPT

       Why Is Everyone Talking About ChatGPT?

by MiscellaneousTechnology

The chatbot designed to take things to the next level has arrived. It can understand a considerable percentage of your natural language and carry on discussions with you, answering many questions you might have. ChatGPT’s fast climb to popularity may be attributed in part to the fact that users on social media have been exhibiting the tool’s versatility throughout the past few weeks.

It reached a hallmark that other social networking sites like Meta took 10 months and streaming platforms like Netflix took three years to achieve. The reason for this is that it attracted over a million new members in only five days. OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research startup backed by Microsoft and Elon Musk, developed the chatbot system. It uses its GPT3 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3) language model, which enables humans to have natural-sounding conversations with computers on almost any subject.

Among the most advanced language processing models yet created, it can reply in many ways, even by switching between different languages. For its training, it was given access to a massive dataset.

What are Chatbots
The Definition of Chatbots

What is ChatGPT exactly?

ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI, a company that focuses on the research and advancement of artificial intelligence. There are a plethora of uses for it, such as

  • Answering questions
  • The process of debugging and fixing the code
  • Interlingual translation
  • Producing text summaries
  • For logical inferences 
  • Text writing
  • Making suggestions
  • Classifying things
  • Explaining how something works, such as a code block

Simply put, it can do a lot of different things that can simplify daily life for a large number of people.

As the most recent member of the GPT family of autoregressive language models, the chatbot created using the GPT-3 model is now in its beta testing phase. It has been called a “Google alternative” since it can do many of the same functions that Google does for its customers. That’s why we’re using these words to describe it. It can also perform other things, including creating content for websites and answering client questions.

How does it work?

First, let’s look at what chatbots are. By simulating human conversation and responding to predetermined triggers and algorithms, chatbots can do tiresome, repetitive tasks. A chatbot or voice assistant is a computer program that can carry on a conversation in place of a human user in a mobile or web app by simulating human speech and typing.

What Is the Process Behind an AI Chatbot?
What Is the Process Behind an AI Chatbot?

So, how does ChatGPT work? ChatGPT is taught using a large online knowledge library, similar to other artificial intelligence components. There are different methods of learning. The way that ChatGPT was trained (the process in which the model learns) is one (actually two) of the many different techniques belonging to two broader categories of learning called supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Using its conversational interface, it can answer follow-up questions, refuse some requests, and determine when it has malfunctioned or made a mistake (but this is not possible for all the cases.). 

Given the increasing use of chatbots for activities like customer service, these features may not seem particularly remarkable. Differentiating features include the fact that most chatbots only deliver a small set of pre-programmed, repetitive replies. Conversely, ChatGPT can respond to a query in real-time and change itself throughout a conversation as a human would.

Is there anything we’re missing in our understanding of Chat GPT?

The application’s ability to provide information and reply to questions in a way resembling a normal conversation is a direct result of its training using machine learning. Because of this, the model has a lot of practical value.

1. Techniques employed

In games like chess, go, poker, and Atari games, in particular, the results of using these methods have been nothing short of astonishing. However, in a discussion, there are no set rules or rewards, making human participation crucial.

This result was attained by first asking a model a question, then using a subset of its replies as an example, and then letting a human rate them. And the learning pipeline also includes utilizing these positions to train a reward model. A language model that has been trained using reinforcement learning to answer questions is going to be used to further improve the reward model’s output.

In the realm of more specialty games like poker, chess, go, and Atari games, the results of using these techniques have been particularly amazing. The participation of humans is necessary for this situation since a dialogue does not have constraints as we do in those games. The game contains fixed rules and rewards, regardless of any player’s actions. The method used to do this was asking the model a question, selecting some of the results it returned, and then assigning a value (called the cost which measures the error it has made) to each result.

This fed-back data was then fed into the reward model’s training procedure. By optimizing the output of the reward model, reinforcement learning has been used to teach a more complex language model how to respond to questions.

2. Open source, free to use, and based on the GPT-3.5 language model

On November 30, the public was given access to the OpenAI chatbot, which is powered by ChatGPT-3.5. For its language processing, ChatGPT employs OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model. The extensive text data used to train the sophisticated machine learning model was collected from a wide range of sources.

3. Reacts to whatever is stated or done

Computers that can “have a conversation” with a person are called “conversational agents.” ChatGPT, as described in OpenAI’s conversation model documentation, is capable of processing any kind of text, from conceptual essays to mathematical solutions to fiction. It can also address follow-up questions, and the company claims it can admit fault when it messes up. But remember that this claim is about the data not being available in the dataset it was trained on and not about being unable to interpret something.

4. Conversational communication

Distributing GPT-3 in the past has caused several issues for businesses. Because it could not generate new information on its own, the model failed to satisfactorily address many of the questions posed to it. When using a model, it is not uncommon for users to need to tweak the prompt or the content supplied to the AI to get the desired response.

In any event, having the model prompt instead of you would be ideal. If the model is having trouble understanding your inquiry, it should ask you to restate it in a way that it can understand rather than try to force you to change the meaning of your query. Therefore, this product, together with Chat GPT, is the current center of attention.

5. Modify people’s search engine behavior

If search engines could provide users with more than simply links to browse through, they would have the potential to utterly transform the way people use them by helping them find answers to complex problems. In addition to being a useful debugging companion, it may fix the problem itself if you ask it a question.

ChatGPT Benefits for Customers
ChatGPT Benefits for Customers

Tips and tricks for maximizing your ChatGPT-3 experience

Here is a set of recommendations and guidelines for working with this chatbot based on ChatGPT-3:

  • IChatGPT-3 extrapolates patterns from data.
  • The same questions will be asked again and again by different people. Chat GPT-3 can automatically create replies that are both timely and accurate.
  • Use it to learn new things and then test them out.
  • Utilization of ChatGPT-3, which enables the creation of complicated conversations consisting of many stages, will provide users with a more natural conversational experience.
  • You may make your life much easier by tapping into the power of ChatGPT-3 with the help of these tips and tricks.
  • By providing it with information on a topic, you may train ChatGPT-3 to understand and respond to questions on that topic. Improved results and more precise responses will result from doing so.
  • Integrate with the features and functionality offered by other services.
  • To make tasks like scheduling appointments or making payments more streamlined, ChatGPT-3 may be integrated with third-party services like calendars, payment processors, and databases. However, remember that there is a privacy concern over this though, similar to the concern with Google Duplex.
  • Have meaningful, in-depth discussions.

Wrapping up

OpenAI published ChatGPT, an AI chatbot system, in November to demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of a large-scale, sophisticated language model. You may ask him any number of questions, and he will usually provide a beneficial answer.

software-762486_1920-1

Software QA for a Small Organization

by MiscellaneousTechnology

Quality assurance is a crucial process in software development that can never be ignored or concern as a peripheral task. But in many small-scale organizations, QA doesn’t treat as a significant function in the development process. There may be excusable causes like a limited number of human and physical resources, financial constraints, subjected to unrealistic deadlines, paucity of experienced experts, etc. What are the consequences that may be occurred if not follow an applicable quality assurance plan? Well, the reputation of your start-up or small-scale company might be ended up in a nightmare! or valuable clients will compel to drop out of your service, then find new development teams. To emerge as an unblemished software service provider you have to allocate an adequate budget for QA activities. 

What if outsourcing? Mmm…can you outsource all the QA activities? Simply you can outsource some of the testing activities! Thereafter the company missing all the resources and experience that can be gained by doing the testing themselves. Sometimes you have to hand over the testing to a third-party organization or certified firm when it needs specialized testing services like penetration testing! But before that, your firm has to finalize the functional testing as well as essential non-functional testing on your own. Usually, a company is outsourcing the processes which don’t belong to their main business activity. If you’re are a software development firm and trying to outsource QA / Testing activities, then you must be misleading. Especially if you are a small-scale one! 

It is not practical and be worth performing all of the quality assurance activities for a project, instead should select the appropriate tasks which may suitable for it. 

Android and IOS Application Quality Assurance at Treinetic

1. Shut the Stable Door BEFORE the Horse Escape (Defect Prevention):

It needs some expertise in various technologies and previous experience on similar projects. It is costly to remove the defects that can be found in the later stages in the SDLC than identifying them and recovering in pre-stages. Identify or guess the issues and take necessary actions to prevent those before the occurrence is an excellent practice in software quality assurance. Small firms do not maintain proper documentation due to the lack of human resources. Even though it doesn’t need to maintain heavy, ISO standard documents, it is better to maintain at least the following documents in the requirements stage to avoid the requirement mismatches later on. 

A. Requirement Clarity Index (RCI) – Express the requirements in detail, Indicate the understandable percentage.

B. Requirement Traceability Matrix – Trace the system requirements with test cases. This will ensure 100% test coverage & indicates the requirement missing.

I emphasize maintaining at least above mentioned 2 documents within the lifecycle to avoid the inconveniences (not only the defects) that may be occurred in later.

2. Double Check to Avoid Mistakes (Reviews):

QA Engineer or corresponding Developer has to REVIEW all the design documents against the client requirements. Because of the limited number of human resources, this may appear as a time-consuming task from the point of view of existing team members. It should not hold multiple hours of formal meetings for these reviews. Instead, QAE or Lead Developer may conduct an informal meeting with the stakeholders. It is better to rectify the issues at the same time if those can be resolved instantly. 

A. Review the high-level architectural design document/s, diagrams.

B. Review the data design documents (ex: ERD)

C. Review the object-oriented design diagrams (ex: Class, Sequence, State Transition)

These documents must be kept in a secured repository that is related to the project as well as pointed out in the traceability matrix document. Maintaining proper documentation is mandatory from the quality assurance perspective. Since the company is a small one, these documents might not comply with the ISO standards which can be a tolerable thing. 

3. Prevent While Batting (Code Reviews, Best Practices, TDD):

Software Quality Assurance in Treinetic

This is another compulsory task that is missed by a lot of small organizations due to the lack of time & resources. Code reviews will expose the errors that may cause faults in the later stages. A lot of them may be found in the testing stage as bugs/issues, but still could have been prevented, if done with the proper reviews.

Simple examples: 

A. Expected / Actual results mismatching in the boundary values, sometimes equivalent parts as well. These could be easily detected while doing the code reviews instead of letting them find in the functional testing.

B. Issues in the SQL statements, especially in the update queries when changing the values in the database tables.

C. Calculations issues, especially in the reports or in the formulas

D. Authorization issues after the authentication happen

E. Data validation issues

Code review meetings shall be conducted at least once a month for each project to check whether all are following the coding compliances. If found any mismatches or weaknesses in the source code they must be rectified by the developers at least before the next review meeting. Although it takes more time, it is better to encourage the developers to consider the system’s maintainability when they are doing the coding.

4. Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is an experienced-based testing technique which mostly used in Agile environments where test design and test execution happen simultaneously. Testers use their intuition on testing to explore the system at the testing stage instead of following pre-defined test cases. Yes, it needs experienced and responsible resources to do this since it’s more tends to follow the extraordinary scenarios and find the bugs within the system under test. This is more suitable when the requirements are being changed rapidly or the clear requirements are not available. Also, the testing time is very limited within the given sprint/iteration that forces to test quickly.

It is the responsibility of the QAE to collaboratively work with the developers when designing test cases. It may expose the issues that may be occurred in the production and allow developers to take necessary precautions. 

5. Defect Tracking and Defect Reviewing

Using a defect tracking tool is compulsory even if your team has 3,4 people. Also, everyone in the team must have the access to them. Although the main purpose of these tools is to track the issues with the necessary information, these can be used to reduce the defects in the forthcoming development iterations. Not all the issues, at least critical issues must be reviewed by the developers & testers, then take necessary steps to not to happen similar issues in the future iterations or the projects.

For an instance, if found a Manufacturer based or OS-based issue in a mobile app, better to list the issue in a checklist and make use of that checklist for future developments. Don’t let the testers detect it again!!! 

6. Finally, the Mindset of all

Company ownership should cultivate a ‘Quality Mindedness’ among all the team members from their appointment date, thereby convincing them to develop a quality product over a simply working product. Monitor the SDLC and bring forth a ‘Bug-Free’ product is not only a responsibility of the QA people but the developers as well. 

One good practice is pair programming where one developer is coding and a peer is reviewing, then exchange their roles. Trainees or junior developers should guide to inspect the source code that was written by the senior developers and make use of their good methodologies.

Well, don’t forget “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking” – Henry Ford

At Treinetic we follow a rigorous QA process to make sure all the products that we engineer are up to the best quality. Reach us today, and let’s discuss how we can help you to make a quality product by realizing your concept

eSwabhimani 2020 | Examiner won an award

Treinetic Secured Two Prestigious Awards at eSwabhimani 2020

by Miscellaneous

Displaying signs of a promising future, Treinetic (Pvt) Ltd, an innovative Sri Lankan software product engineering company, won two awards at the eSwabhimani 2020 organized by the Information & Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka.

Each year ICTA organizes this prestigious awards ceremony to recognize excellence in digital application creation that would serve society’s needs.

Treinetic CEO Mr Imal Perera and Director Gihan Wijesinghe Receiving the Awards

The company secured two merit awards; one for their own product, “Examiner” for the Learning & Education category, and the other is for another product known as “Poth” for the Digital Entertainment category.  Mr. Imal Perera, CEO, and Mr. Gihan Wijesinghe, Director, received the awards on behalf of the company.

Examiner is a mobile application that is specifically designed to uplift the knowledge of A/L and O/L students. It was so popular that more than 10,000 students joined with Examiner during last year’s Covid-19 pandemic to prepare themselves better for the examinations.

“We all know with the pandemic large number of corporates went digital, by doing that most of them reduced their losses and some made large profits, with our technical expertise 100 years old, yet innovative publication giant M.D Gunaseana found a new venue in the publishing industry with their product “Gurulugomi”. what I believe is that only the companies with a good digital strategy will survive in the coming years, so I invite all of the corporates to join hands with us and let us empower your organization with technology.” Mr Imal Perera, CEO of Treinetic said. 

Treinetic is an award-winning software product engineering company serving both local and foreign clients since 2014. They await new opportunities to contribute to the market and society.

DailyFt, DailyNews, Sunday Island | DailyMirror | The Morning