Small business: Advertising - Henjie Wang, Notable PDF

Hengjie Wang, co-founder and CEO of Notable PDF.

Hengjie Wang is a co-founder and CEO of tech startup Notable PDF.

Can you tell me a bit about your company?

We are an Auckland-based tech startup in our second year of business. Our product, Notable PDF, is a cloud-based PDF viewer with annotation tools for your browser. Around 80 per cent of the users of our product are from the US, while other users are mainly from the UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.

Our team is composed of the founders - myself, our CTO Jordan Thoms and CMO Alliv Samson - as well as a chairman and three interns.

What is your advertising budget and how did you reach this figure?

We spend about $2000 on advertising per month. The goal is to test how much it will cost us to convert a user via online ads. We believe this is enough to get valuable data, and any less would not be enough.

Where are you spending your advertising dollars and why?

How we allocate the budget varies from month to month. Currently, we focus on Google Adwords, Facebook and LinkedIn. We chose those three channels because we are quite familiar with them and can easily track conversions. We do not have any other forms of advertising aside from online ads, as we prefer to track conversions that will help improve our user acquisition plan.

What kind of return are you seeing from your investment in advertising?

Firstly, we think it will be beneficial for our SEO. Secondly, we can easily track conversions and budget our spending day by day. We measure how much it'll cost us on each channel to acquire a user.

What advice would you have for other small startup businesses in terms of advertising?

If you are on a tight budget, focus on Google Adwords. It might be an intimidating platform but it is very useful and can also benefit your website's SEO. In our experience, we've also found you have more control over your budget and your campaign compared to Facebook or LinkedIn.

Coming up in Small Business: Employee share schemes are an increasing trend, particularly in the technology sector. Why and how have some small businesses implemented these? If you've got a good story to tell, drop me a note: nzhsmallbusiness@gmail.com