Hi everybody, Today I posted my product to Show HN and while it didn't make it to the front-page…
Hi everybody,
Today I posted my product to Show HN and while it didn't make it to the front-page, it did drive a little spike in traffic to my site that resulted in a couple of new users signed up. These are the first users to sign up for my service (albeit free accounts).
My question is the following, what is the best way to reach out to these users for feedback? I have their email addresses. Should I try to get them on the phone or should I just ask for their feedback over email?
I'd love to hear how others nurture their early users and collect feedback without scaring them off.
Don't overthink it. Just send an email introducing yourself and state exactly what you're hoping to get from them (please spend time thinking about this first). Keep it low friction, short and sweet. You can leave them optionality of phone or email if you're uncertain (personally I'd try for a phone call if possible at this stage).
Later stages:
It helps if you know something about the target, for example is this b2b, are they warm, is a decision-maker, or gatekeeper? Those and other factors help define the approach. Since you probably don't have any of that, or a clear market segment - you'll be fairly generic in just introducing yourself and asking them to kindly answer some survey questions or provide 10 minutes of their time for feedback.
Knowing HN, it's probably a couple curious people. You might get more feedback from PH.
Since you're looking for feedback, I checked out the product and my first thought was it looks cool. There's something interesting there. But I wasn't sure who the target market was. If it's non-technical, my immediate thoughts go to people operating in regulated environments or dealing with sensitive information. I was shocked to discover a couple of credit card companies in this region asking for docs via plain email for example. I'm not saying that's your market, but you need to do a bit of exploration. Then you'll discover nuances needed for the MVP.
Thanks for checking it out. Yeah I'd like to post to PH soon but I need to put together the images for the post. HN required less legwork to get initial feedback/exposure and I figured the userbase would understand the value proposition being more technical in nature.
I'm still trying to pin down the target market as well. It's a bit paradoxical in the sense that the customers who have the most need (financial companies, accountants, lawyers, etc) are probably the least likely to understand the technical value proposition. I talked to someone at a large business lending company and their entire sales staff collects documents over email. They tried to raise the issue to their head of product who brushed the issue off which is pretty scary. I suspect I'll need to put together some very clear landing pages in order to convert these customers. In the best case scenario, I'd like to reach the technical decision makers at places like banks or other financial companies. I originally had the idea while building a tool like this for a fintech startup. It would have just been cheaper for them to purchase a product like this than to pay my salary while I built it custom for them (not to mention the time spent maintaining it).
I'll use your tips to reach out to my current users and try to get some more information from them. Thanks again for the help!