Need early users for a guided marketing bot
If you are building or are sitting on an existing product/service wondering how to gain traction, I'd like to invite you to try Aimo - our Slack Bot to guide you on a 21-day journey towards finding product-market fit.
It's a Slack bot which tells you every day what marketing activity to undertake on that day until you reach one of two conclusions - you have found product-market fit OR you have not. Not finding product-market fit may be because your product is not what the market wants or because you are on the wrong marketing channel. By thinking closely about your responses to the bot, you may be able to pinpoint which of the reasons is applicable to you.
To build Aimo, we have reduced each marketing activity to its most basic essence which we deliver to you every day as a Slack prompt. We track and tabulate your responses to those prompts so that, at the end of 21 days, you yourself can understand whether you are nearing product-market-fit.
To join the Aimo slack group - which is required to use the Aimo bot - follow this link or email me for an invite.
P.S.1 - joining the Aimo slack group and using the Aimo bot will not expose or reveal any information about your product or idea.
P.S.2 - you can always use the Aimo slack group to ask other members or us for help if you don't know how to interpret a certain Aimo-bot prompt.
very neat project. Really enjoy the bot giving actions to take. How many unique actions does the bot provide?
In the current iteration, it has 13 prompts divided into two sections - giving and asking.
Giving happens when you 'give' help, feedback, offer trials/discounts/etc, or advice on topics related to the product you are marketing.
Asking happens when you 'ask' for help, feedback, seek users (like this post), or views on topics related to your product.
The ideal marketing mix should be skewed towards giving, at least initially, to draw people in.
would be really something if it would do those actions itself, I would definitely pay for that, or maybe some actions.
That sounds impractical (to me). Despite this bot's existence and all the metrics you can track using web technologies, marketing is art more than science.
Only the product owner can interpret feedback, feature requests, etc. to clearly explain their vision for their product. Beyond a very basic level, no bot or uninterested third person can think on behalf the product owner. That being the case, doing those actions on behalf of the owner is not feasible, imho.
That's interesting. 21 days seems really short for product-market fit, it can easily take a couple of years to get there. Do you target a specific type of products/services?
For many combinations of digital products+marketing channels, 21 days seems to be ample.
Kickstarter, for instance, thinks 30 days is ample time to see if a project is going to be funded (aka find product-market fit)
Tbh, 21 days is a convenient hook to give people an idea of how long such a process could take. It's not like the bot will stop working for you after 21 days. Users can continue to respond to prompts until they reach the last prompt or until they feel this channel isn't doing the trick for them.
From looking at the Gif it seems to be more focused on finding the right distribution channel, am I right?
Arguably, finding the right channel will also let you finesse your product to make it better fit the market.
E.g., if you find that product people are struggling to market their product, finding a channel like IndieHackers allows me to refine AiMo simply because people on this channel are willing to grit their teeth and work with a mediocre product because it (may) solves a real problem for them.
Does this make sense or am I projecting because I built AiMo with a certain mindset? Any areas where AiMo be refined further to support product refinement itself?
I think your tackling something interesting! My only doubt were around the product-market fit promise. From my own experience, it's more a question of talking to users and iterating on the product rather than a marketing activity. Once you have something that really solves a problem, it's usually easier to find the channel to promote it. The issue is often about getting to that point where what you've built is what people want.
I do agree that finding the best distribution channels is really important too. But I would differentiate finding the channel which is a best match for my service from finding product-market fit.
Any chance I could interest you in joining the AiMo slack group? Or at least thinking of AiMo next time you have such a need?
This is what AiMo aims to do. It tries to get you think of creative ways of talking to users beyond surveys and cold calls.
Also, I appreciate this dialogue with you. Thank you for engaging with this post. IndieHackers is awesome because of good faith conversations like this and I really hope it doesn't change.
Sure I'll give it a try