Where do you find your potential/future customers to talk to?
I'm mostly interested online, offline is kinda hard for me at the moment. Is there any particular strategy you followed that worked for you? Cold emailing, twitter etc?
I'm mostly interested online, offline is kinda hard for me at the moment. Is there any particular strategy you followed that worked for you? Cold emailing, twitter etc?
I think this really depends on your product. Find the place online where your kind of users hang out. Maybe its certain forum websites. Maybe its readers of certain bloggers that you could get to write about you. If they are people you can find directly I think cold emailing/calling is a good way to get your first customers.
For my business, CoffeePass We started with Coffee shops (our customers) near us that we could talk to in person. Started making connections to people who knew coffee shop owners personally. In person made a lot of sense for our business but it might not for yours.
Agreed. You have to go where potential customers hang out. That usually involved finding one person that bought your product, or is willing to spend time talking with you because you tackle a problem they are interested in. You ask what sites they are reading, which conferences, meetup they attend, etc. You go there, find a second person and repeat the process until you have a pretty good idea which channels you have to spend your efforts on.
I've had a lot of success reaching out to people on Linkedin and politely asking if I can interview them. I've probably conducted at least 40 or so interviews thus far and some of them have led to product demos.
This is after you built the product, correct? Have you used LinkedIn to validate your ideas? Thank you for taking the time to reply!
Both before and after -- depending on the product. In my experience -- people are willing to get on the phone with you regardless if you have a product or not. I've found that I can validate most of the idea simply by asking non-pointed questions and listening to their specific pain points. If they seem like they have the problem I am trying to solve -- I'll end up showing them a demo or wireframes and getting their raw feedback -- sometimes at that point we end up scheduling a sales call and if the product isn't built yet I ask them if I can reach out later for a demo.
Very cool!
What was your process to find the people to interview on LinkedIn?
hmm I think I should probably write a blog post on this! Short answer is I find people on Linkedin that I believe are my customers and send them connection requests. Once they accept my connection request, I'll send them an actual message asking them for a short interview.
I find that about 1 in every 10 or so people I message actually get back to me.
Here is an example of a message I've been using recently. You'll need to tweak this to make sense for your audience...
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{firstname}, thanks for connecting.
I lead a healthcare technology startup focused on making it easier for nursing facilities to work with physicians.
Given your experience in this area, it would be great to get your input on a product we're developing.
Would you be open to a 15-minute call?