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Do you need any sales, business development or partnership tips?

Sales and connecting with people comes naturally to me. However, I realized that a lot of Indie Hackers here who came from a software development background found that it's not easy to sell their product. I have 3+ years of B2B sales and biz-dev/partnership experience, and happy to share how I usually do things or answer any questions about the field!

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    That’s great!
    I’m struggling quite a bit getting https://findbetterquestions.com/ into people’s hands. It’s a tool that allows you to do “keyword” research on Quora. Any ideas on how to reach people?

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      Oh wow, I can see this be very very useful. Congrats! Some quick feedbacks if you don't mind, you can take it or leave it :)

      • Quora marketing is still quite a black box for a lot of marketers. I'd recommend considering giving out your Quora Ultimate Marketing Guide for free, maybe slice and dice it into several blog posts. Try to rank for Quora marketing related keywords to drive some organic traffic.

      • On the landing page: You can maybe elaborate more on why Quora is worth spending time for marketers. Let's say if I'm a marketer considering Quora as a new distribution channel, Find Better Questions can be the final push that makes me decide to commit.

      Now on finding people:

      • Identify and create a list of people who actively market their products on Quora. For instance: https://www.quora.com/profile/Damien-Filiatrault - these people need your tools. Try to find people like this on different verticals, they'll usually lurk in product or service recommendation questions. Make sure they are the people who answer often enough

      • Reach out to them, either with e-mail, Twitter, or LinkedIn. I found that a lot of technical founders might be uncomfortable doing cold outreach. Don't be afraid! I mean you already have Si Quan Ong from Ahrefs on your landing page, might as well ping him ;) - remember that Find Better Questions is helping them

      • If you have the budget, buy Quora ads to promote this. It can be quite a funny/meta ad. Imagine a marketer spending all of his or her days finding the right questions, and boom your product shows up.

      Hope this helps!

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        Thank you so much for your thorough answer!

        The guide is already free. I guess I need to make that more obvious. Maybe something like that tagline I used on Product Hunt – “Free 86-page book 📙with all Quora marketing tactics”?

        Working on SEO, but ranking for say “Quora marketing” will still take some time …

        You can maybe elaborate more on why Quora is worth spending time for marketers

        Sounds good 👍

        I already thought about running ads on Quora. Only thing is that their ads policy says that the site you link to “Should not mention Quora unless you have obtained permission first.” I think this would be a problem

        What do you think?

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          Oops sorry, when I say free, I mean not “gated”, just turn it into normal blog posts :) - remember, the more people think that Quora is a good marketing channel, the more they’ll need your tool.

          I’m not aware that Quora has that policy. New lesson learned!

          I just realized I might be jumping the gun a little bit here since I just gave this advice without asking questions. What would you say your biggest challenge is in finding users?

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            Ah, get what you mean.
            I am actually in the process of publishing the book as blog posts :)

            Actually not an easy question … I’m simply struggling to find people who would benefit from the tool I think. But maybe the problem is that they don’t think they need it. Trial to paid conversion also isn’t great, so there also needs to be work done on the product side.

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              That's fantastic!

              The first target audience that comes to mind are marketers and small startup founders. A while ago on IH I saw someone looking for advice to outsource Quora marketing.

              But maybe the problem is that they don’t think they need it

              This is where you come in and tell them exactly why they need it ;). I honestly find this tool can be super useful for marketers.

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    Tell us about warming cold email lists? These are not bought, but not opt-in. The goal is to move the interested folks over to my newsletter mailing list. We have 145,000 made up of five targeted collections, some competitors customers, some industry followers, some industry forum participants.

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      Wow, that's a huge list! I don't know what your product is (feel free to share), so I'm giving some general advice:

      Be straightforward and personal (use your real name, not company name) on why you email them, and what value they can get by opting in your newsletter. Personal voice really matters here, put your LinkedIn or Twitter on the email signature to increase trust.

      Remember to use plain text, not HTML emails. Make it short and simple, and make it easy for them to opt-in. End it with something like "if you have a question, just reply to this email. I read and reply to every email".

      Follow up is king. Automate the follow-ups using tools like PersistIQ (persistiq.com). This is not a sales email, so don't send more than 3 emails in total.

      If you are still working on the best way to express your positioning and messaging, this is a great opportunity to do A/B test. Start with smaller subsets first.

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