Hey Bart, this looks like a fantastic service. I could see it working well for "indie hackers" then eventually moving up-market to helping established companies do research.
One personal request / tip – I wish you'd provide a detailed explanation of your process. As someone who'd use or recommend this, I'd be a little bit skeptical over how well it works. If you could outline what you do in detail (along with a couple full examples) I think I'd be less skeptical.
2
Thank you, I think this approach is the best - focus on smaller makers communities before moving on to b2b niche.
About the scepticism - yeah, I am getting this a lot. I will create a "Process" page where I will outline step by step everything. I think this will help a lot! I was focused more on optimizing the landing page for now, but possibly this is a top priority. I will make sure to get this done once the current week is finished.
Thank you for feedback and kind words!
3
Hey Bart,
was going to respond by e-mail but thought I'd share it publicly :)
I'm very satisfied with the service, and with my particular results as well.
For those interested, I ordered the $49 package and got 42 responses.
My questions are mostly around the method, terminology, etc.;
How do you target & acquire your audience?
There are "leaders", "influencers" and regular users - how are they being classified? What makes one a leader or an influencer?
What are the actual questions you ask?
Do respondents get paid for their answers?
It would be cool if you could use the 3 days between the customer’s order and the report delivery to send some automated e-mails to educate customers about above questions. (I understand it's an early stage of the product, so see this as a suggestion for future versions).
All the best,
Andreas
2
Thank you so much, Andreas. I appreciate the reply here!
Thank you for the questions. I will be updating websites content to answer those questions next week.
Here are the answers:
How do you target & acquire your audience?
I use lead generation tools that offer search engines of leads.
I search leads with high "influence score" (being a mix of how fresh is data and what is probability if it is correct and some connections, social actions, etc.).
There are "leaders", "influencers" and regular users - how are they being classified? What makes one a leader or an influencer?
Leaders are top 1% and Influencers are top 10% most active, best-networked leads. There are dozens of metrics that determine how good is lead, how well it is networked if it has some following from other people in the niche and more. This gives access to people that matter the most in a given niche.
What are the actual questions you ask?
I present the idea and ask the audience on how they feel, would they share with friends, would they use the product/service/business once it will get released. I try to ask very natural questions, not robotic ones.
Do respondents get paid for their answers?
No, they answer because they want to help out. There is absolutely no incentive to the responders.
It would be cool if you could use the 3 days between the customer’s order and the report delivery to send some automated e-mails to educate customers about above questions.
Interesting idea! I will think about it when I will be rolling out a large update next week.
Thank you Andreas!
2
Really interesting congrats!
1
Thank you!
2
Looks great, liking the idea of this service (what's in a name ;-)).
I often wonder if any of my ideas are valid, as I tend to get caught up in my 'developer mindset' which might limit the sight of practical use of a product. It's a good thing to have many people in many niches say something about a product. Nice work! The website looks slick as well.
1
Thank you very much. I tried to dig really deep and determine an underlying problem and most fundamental part of building a startup/business/product, and it seems to be an idea. Thus the decision on working on ideas :)
2
Great post! Congratulations :)
2
Nice article! Are you paying for Quora ads?
2
Nope, I tried testing the waters with it, but it asked me to pay $3 per click (which is a way too much comparing to other methods). I have closed Quora ads after receiving 5 views and no clicks (I set the budget at $0.5 per click for a test). As of now, I have no budget to test $1-2 clicks, unfortunately. I think this would burn my savings rather quickly.
Thanks for kind words!
1
Congrats Bart, awesome post man ;)
Looking forward to following the journey!
1
Thanks Pedro, much appreciated!
1
Thanks for this great post!
Sounds like I could lear a lot from you.
I made 50$ so far, 1 month after soft-launching …
I want to hear more form you. I’ll definitely follow you along. Please keep sharing your learnings.
Which marketing communities did you promote your product to?
Since you invested 8 hours in learning about Quora, you probably know a little bit about the platform, so I have a question for you:
Do you look at questions’ stats before answering? How do you decide which question to answer?
Thanks in advance
Your service sounds great. How can one define their target audience? Just words? How is that matched to people? Edit: waiting for your process page
Also, you could add a favicon. Makes the site look more finished.
2
Which marketing communities did you promote your product to?
They are invitation-only groups and they are not public.
Do you look at questions’ stats before answering? How do you decide which question to answer?
Well, it's a mix. I do answer questions that I find extremely relevant, interesting or new with potential. But the rule of thumb is to answer ones that do not have many answers, but have quite a lot of followers (from 10 upwards for new, and 50 upwards for old ones).
Also, you could add a favicon. Makes the site look more finished.
Ah yeah, totally forgot about it. Thanks!
How can one define their target audience?
I target audience based on their interests using lead generation tools. So if you are offering a service to Tesla car owners, I target Tesla car owners. If you want to open burger joint down the block, I target people by location. And if you are doing wood carving, we need to target people interested in exactly that 😎
You should know who is your target audience before building anything, otherwise, you might be building something no one wants.
Thank you for kind words!
1
Thanks for your thorough answer!
Could I target a group as specific as: People who write answers on Quora for marketing purposes, with 50K+ answer views?
I’m building findbetterquestions.com, just in case you‘re interested in that. (Automatically generates Quora stats spreadsheets)
2
Sure, no problem.
Could I target a group as specific as: People who write answers on Quora for marketing purposes, with 50K+ answer views?
This will be a way to target. We could target people that are interested/tagged with Quora, Writing and with high social score. This should give you some good results.
I’m building findbetterquestions.com, just in case you‘re interested in that. (Automatically generates Quora stats spreadsheets)
Bookmarked. I will keep an eye on it and possibly use it if I will decide to continue with Quora. I actually wondered if there is a tool making life on Quora easier :)
1
Makes sense
Let me know if I can help at some point
I’ll also keep your site bookmarked. I still feel like I have more feedback then time to implement it at the time
1
Sure thing. Just a note, you have a typo in first sentence in "WHAT HAPPENS IF I CHANGE PLANS?" part :)
1
Thanks!
fixed
1
Hey Bart, thanks for sharing! It's really helpful reading through your process, findings, and approaches. Very much appreciate your openness with it all.
2
Thank you. To be honest I have a secret - I am semi-addicted to reading journeys like that, so since I have launched a product myself, why not give back ;)
1
Thanks for the insights Bart! Very informative :)
0
Thanks Davis :) I will try to not keep anything from the public and post regularly. Even if it can help one person - it will serve its purpose!
1
Have you thought of trying Reddit Ads - https://ads.reddit.com - it is a bit of a challenge and a bit hit and miss in my experience, but it can be a low cost method of helping you get qualified customers .
1
I will try first focus on organic outreach. I rather avoid paying for ads until the service is profitable and I can pay for ads with the extra money I will have. I will need to think about platforms to use. I want to use Reddit to promote content created by me for now. I have seen some folk from IH and PH had some success with it.
Hey Bart, this looks like a fantastic service. I could see it working well for "indie hackers" then eventually moving up-market to helping established companies do research.
One personal request / tip – I wish you'd provide a detailed explanation of your process. As someone who'd use or recommend this, I'd be a little bit skeptical over how well it works. If you could outline what you do in detail (along with a couple full examples) I think I'd be less skeptical.
Thank you, I think this approach is the best - focus on smaller makers communities before moving on to b2b niche.
About the scepticism - yeah, I am getting this a lot. I will create a "Process" page where I will outline step by step everything. I think this will help a lot! I was focused more on optimizing the landing page for now, but possibly this is a top priority. I will make sure to get this done once the current week is finished.
Thank you for feedback and kind words!
Hey Bart,
was going to respond by e-mail but thought I'd share it publicly :)
I'm very satisfied with the service, and with my particular results as well.
For those interested, I ordered the $49 package and got 42 responses.
My questions are mostly around the method, terminology, etc.;
How do you target & acquire your audience?
There are "leaders", "influencers" and regular users - how are they being classified? What makes one a leader or an influencer?
What are the actual questions you ask?
Do respondents get paid for their answers?
It would be cool if you could use the 3 days between the customer’s order and the report delivery to send some automated e-mails to educate customers about above questions. (I understand it's an early stage of the product, so see this as a suggestion for future versions).
All the best,
Andreas
Thank you so much, Andreas. I appreciate the reply here!
Thank you for the questions. I will be updating websites content to answer those questions next week.
Here are the answers:
I use lead generation tools that offer search engines of leads.
I search leads with high "influence score" (being a mix of how fresh is data and what is probability if it is correct and some connections, social actions, etc.).
Leaders are top 1% and Influencers are top 10% most active, best-networked leads. There are dozens of metrics that determine how good is lead, how well it is networked if it has some following from other people in the niche and more. This gives access to people that matter the most in a given niche.
I present the idea and ask the audience on how they feel, would they share with friends, would they use the product/service/business once it will get released. I try to ask very natural questions, not robotic ones.
No, they answer because they want to help out. There is absolutely no incentive to the responders.
Interesting idea! I will think about it when I will be rolling out a large update next week.
Thank you Andreas!
Really interesting congrats!
Thank you!
Looks great, liking the idea of this service (what's in a name ;-)).
I often wonder if any of my ideas are valid, as I tend to get caught up in my 'developer mindset' which might limit the sight of practical use of a product. It's a good thing to have many people in many niches say something about a product. Nice work! The website looks slick as well.
Thank you very much. I tried to dig really deep and determine an underlying problem and most fundamental part of building a startup/business/product, and it seems to be an idea. Thus the decision on working on ideas :)
Great post! Congratulations :)
Nice article! Are you paying for Quora ads?
Nope, I tried testing the waters with it, but it asked me to pay $3 per click (which is a way too much comparing to other methods). I have closed Quora ads after receiving 5 views and no clicks (I set the budget at $0.5 per click for a test). As of now, I have no budget to test $1-2 clicks, unfortunately. I think this would burn my savings rather quickly.
Thanks for kind words!
Congrats Bart, awesome post man ;)
Looking forward to following the journey!
Thanks Pedro, much appreciated!
Thanks for this great post!
Sounds like I could lear a lot from you.
I made 50$ so far, 1 month after soft-launching …
I want to hear more form you. I’ll definitely follow you along. Please keep sharing your learnings.
Which marketing communities did you promote your product to?
Since you invested 8 hours in learning about Quora, you probably know a little bit about the platform, so I have a question for you:
Do you look at questions’ stats before answering? How do you decide which question to answer?
Thanks in advance
Your service sounds great. How can one define their target audience? Just words? How is that matched to people? Edit: waiting for your process page
Also, you could add a favicon. Makes the site look more finished.
They are invitation-only groups and they are not public.
Well, it's a mix. I do answer questions that I find extremely relevant, interesting or new with potential. But the rule of thumb is to answer ones that do not have many answers, but have quite a lot of followers (from 10 upwards for new, and 50 upwards for old ones).
Ah yeah, totally forgot about it. Thanks!
I target audience based on their interests using lead generation tools. So if you are offering a service to Tesla car owners, I target Tesla car owners. If you want to open burger joint down the block, I target people by location. And if you are doing wood carving, we need to target people interested in exactly that 😎
You should know who is your target audience before building anything, otherwise, you might be building something no one wants.
Thank you for kind words!
Thanks for your thorough answer!
Could I target a group as specific as: People who write answers on Quora for marketing purposes, with 50K+ answer views?
I’m building findbetterquestions.com, just in case you‘re interested in that. (Automatically generates Quora stats spreadsheets)
Sure, no problem.
This will be a way to target. We could target people that are interested/tagged with Quora, Writing and with high social score. This should give you some good results.
Bookmarked. I will keep an eye on it and possibly use it if I will decide to continue with Quora. I actually wondered if there is a tool making life on Quora easier :)
Makes sense
Let me know if I can help at some point
I’ll also keep your site bookmarked. I still feel like I have more feedback then time to implement it at the time
Sure thing. Just a note, you have a typo in first sentence in "WHAT HAPPENS IF I CHANGE PLANS?" part :)
Thanks!
fixed
Hey Bart, thanks for sharing! It's really helpful reading through your process, findings, and approaches. Very much appreciate your openness with it all.
Thank you. To be honest I have a secret - I am semi-addicted to reading journeys like that, so since I have launched a product myself, why not give back ;)
Thanks for the insights Bart! Very informative :)
Thanks Davis :) I will try to not keep anything from the public and post regularly. Even if it can help one person - it will serve its purpose!
Have you thought of trying Reddit Ads - https://ads.reddit.com - it is a bit of a challenge and a bit hit and miss in my experience, but it can be a low cost method of helping you get qualified customers .
I will try first focus on organic outreach. I rather avoid paying for ads until the service is profitable and I can pay for ads with the extra money I will have. I will need to think about platforms to use. I want to use Reddit to promote content created by me for now. I have seen some folk from IH and PH had some success with it.
Thanks for suggestion, I will keep this in mind!