After months of discussing a cross promotion tool, we’ve finally put everything together and decided to start building the platform. Best of all, we’re going to make our startup journey transparent and share all the achievements, lessons and challenges that we’ll face along the way. It will include everything from taking critical decisions, design, development, strategy, marketing, sales and more. You’ll get to see the action directly from the driver’s seat, and you can take our actionable takeaways and implement them in your startup.
We are starting the business from scratch and aim to make it sustainable without a cent of funding from outside investors. We are not saying “no” to any possible future investments, but at least for the first year, that’s not something we would take into consideration. Making the business successful is going to take a lot of work, but that’s fine, because right now we are in the Startup stage, characterized by excitement and optimism.
This is the first post of our startup journey. To make sure you don’t miss any future updates, make sure to subscribe using the form at bottom of the article.
Who’s building Cross.Promo
Cross.Promo is co-founded by:
- Razvan the entrepreneur who successfully sold two businesses and founded the SEO tool Monitor Backlinks.
- Felix, entrepreneur, and marketer. For the last three years, the CMO of Monitor Backlinks. I’m also the one that’s going to blog about Cross.Promo 🙂 Hi !!!!
- Antonia, the designer that transforms ugly designs into pieces of art. She puts the soul into heartless lines of codes.
We’re also going to have with us one experienced developer that will create the Framework of the tool and another server expert that will help us make the platform run smooth and secure. We’re a small team of five people with high ambitions, confident that we’ll change the way businesses find opportunities to do cross promotion.
Our team has already been involved in several successful projects, but this time, things are going to be different. With Cross.Promo we want to build a tool that’s going to revolutionise the way online companies get leads.
What’s Cross.Promo and why everyone will love it
To better understand our startup journey, you’ll need to know how our business will work and what will make it stand out from the crowd. Yes, we’ll be the first cross-promotion tool for online businesses, but that’s not enough to assure that we’ll be successful.
I assume you already know what is cross promotion, and you’ve already encountered it before. It looks like a simple process at first, but it’s not always like that. The basic principle is that you promote a business to your users, and they’ll promote you to their users. This way, you get more exposure to your business, and you can get more people to try your services. If you are promoting a good product, getting more leads is almost guaranteed.
With the way cross promotion works right now, you have no guarantees that your message will be sent to the right people. But Cross.Promo plans to fix that. During the first stage, our primary focus will be on newsletter cross promotion, and eventually, as we grow we’ll expand our options.
Nowadays, cross promotion is mostly built on trust. You have to trust that your partner will cross-promote your newsletter campaign only to real people and not to fake emails. Because sometimes partners tend to cheat and lie about their numbers, many business owners have been thrown away from this channel.
Here’s how Cross.Promo wants to make cross promotion the best marketing channel:
- Finding partners that are willing to do cross promotion is often challenging. Our tool will include startups and already established businesses that are interested to cross-promote their services.
- With our tool, users will have the option to segment potential partners by:
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- Industry category
- Total number of users
- Users that are actively paying a monthly or yearly subscription.
- Free users that are not paying for a service anymore
- Location of the users
- more
For example, a company can choose to cross-promote with a partner that has 100 users with an active subscription worth $100 or more per month, located in the United States. To put that in perspective, doing cross promotion before Cross.Promo did not offer any guarantees that your message will reach people that are actively spending money in your industry or are located in the country you are targeting.
We’ll be the 3rd party that will intermediate the process and automate cross promotion campaigns. We want to avoid any doubts or concerns of cheating from both partners.
Cross promoting with users that are actively paying money on subscription will increase the chances of getting more leads. Comparing the results you’ll get with Cross.Promo to what results you would get if you were to cross-promote to free users that are always on the look for cheap or free alternatives, the results are mind boggling.
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- Cross.Promo will automate everything about cross promotion so that users can spend less time but get more rewards. It will be very simple to set up and from then on, you can sit back and watch how more people will start to use your services.
What’s the goal of Cross.Promo
Goals matter.
There’s no point in starting a business without setting up several goals, including financial ones. We’re willing to make sacrifices in the first year, but eventually, we want to make the business entirely sustainable and to pay its bills as soon as possible. As the company will grow and more people will join our team, the revenue will have to grow with it. Over time, our goals will change as well.
Our ultimate objective is to have happy customers that will see sales growth from using our platform.
As for a first stage financial goal, we aim to get the business to $50.000 in monthly revenue. And then …
Cross Promo is built on these core beliefs
- Customer satisfaction, above everything else We want our users to be 100% satisfied with what they are getting, and that’s why we would like you not to hesitate to send your suggestions and feedback. Your opinion is very important to us.
- The truth and quality matters We guarantee that your cross-promotional message will reach the audience you want. Period. No lies or cheating. We’ve been involved in several businesses before, and we know how important is to have a trustworthy partner.
- Make it simple We embrace the acronym KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Our platform will be very easy to use and by all means, it will not waste your time.
Why we’ve decided to name the company Cross Promo
The company will be called Cross Promo, and it will be found on the domain www.Cross.Promo. That’s not the domain extension you come across every day, right? What mattered most for us was to find a name that will make the product sound good, have a short domain that’s easy to remember and be in some way related to our primary keyword: cross promotion.
As we are three co-founders, we’ll have to get used to the idea that not all of us will agree on certain aspects. But being three, it’s better than two, because you can quickly put everything up to a vote, right? 🙂 In our case, we had to choose between the domain Cross.Promo and CrossPromo.IO. We’ve voted to go with Cross.Promo, but we’ve also bought the domain CrossPromo.io and redirected it to Cross.Promo. That’s just in case we ever have a funny idea of changing the domain. We don’t expect that though, but the entrepreneurial life teaches you never to say never.
What’s the first step?
Our developers have already started to build the tool, and they are working like busy ants moving every piece to its right place.
Cross Promo BETA should be available to the public in just a few months. Even though we are very excited about this new project, we are all very aware that it’s not going to be easy.
Hopefully, you’ll decide to follow our journey, which will be narrated on our blog, completely FREE. Although, if you work with an online business, and you are interested to do cross promotion, you are welcomed to request an early invitation here. Early members will get benefits for life.
I mentioned above that we care about your feedback, so it’s time we make our first request to you. What do you think of our startup? Do you have any suggestions or questions for us?
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