Golden idea & simple MVP. How do I market this?
So here's my problem. I've found what I think is a huge market, and I've built an MVP, but I have no idea about channels. Can you help me figure this one out?
A few months back I was doing work for a client which led me to learn how to build Microsoft Word add-ins. While I was in the add-in store I remembered some things I'd heard on the IH podcast about looking for ways to provide value . I thought about what kind of thing might be missing from the add-in space that would bring value to a large group of people.
So I typed in a bunch of different searches. Soon I struck gold. A search with zero results, which seemed like an absolute no-brainer in terms of market size. The word I searched for was "christian", then "christ", and "bible". Nothing at all came up. Zero add-ins existed for this.
So I built this MVP: http://wordbibleaddin.com/
It's an MS Word add-in for searching the Bible. It makes it super easy to find and insert right verse into your Word document. Check out the animated gif if you want to see it in action. Simple right?
There has been some low level background passive growth of people just finding the add-in and using it. My hypothesis that there must be people out there searching for "bible" is correct, and I now have daily active users. My plan is to charge a subscription to heavy users.
The market for this seems obvious: ministers and pastors, sunday school teachers and popes.
My question is how they heck do I reach those channels?
Help me Indie Hackers, you're my only hope!
Nice find and MVP! Whew yeah this is sort of a tough one... I don't think a ton of people are searching for this explicitly. I'd probably reach out to a bunch of Christian bloggers and see if they'd be interested in using it. They are probably a good audience for this.
From there, if there's some good response from the bloggers, you might be able to ask them to share with their subscribers.
What do you think?
That's a good idea, thanks!
Chris, sometime back I found a company that creates websites for churches. They found lot of customers on church groups on Facebook and other platforms. You might want to explore those channels as well.
Thanks!
Hey Chris! Just curious about it...how is it going with your http://wordbibleaddin.com/ marketing? Any luck? Did anything work? Btw nice job! I think the concept is brilliant, It shouldn't be that hard to find someone interested in it...
Hey, thanks for following up! Very unexpected. :)
After getting the feedback in this post I did two things:
After reading those ideas I also realised I am simply not the right person to be cold calling churches and emailing bloggers. What I am thinking about now is to make a work brief from that sales ideas list and hire somebody who likes this kind of thing, to execute it.
yeah I relate, also here no time/ability to sell stuff I do :-( guess is a common problem. Where are all the IH marketing/selling guys hanging these days?? Where do you think to find someone for the job?
You can share it in Christian groups on Facebook!
How about finding some relevant subreddits? You could start by searching the same terms you did in google:
https://www.reddit.com/search/
Talk to your current customers and ask them where to find more people like them.
Ask for referrals (this is probably the best avenue).
Ask them where they hang out online.
Ask them who they follow on twitter, instagram, linkedin, etc.
Search them up on facebook, and linkedin. What do they have in common? How could you target more people like them?
Cold emails to more churches.
Great ideas, thank you!
Can you still search by job title on facebook ads? I'd try that
Go knocking up the doors of jeowas withness, they love bible citations!
People who educate christian values? I know there's a fair chunk of people who home school and value their faith, easy ways to get versus for educational purposes could be valuable for them.
This is a great idea. Kudos!
When it comes to your Landing Page, how did you manage to keep your GIF in such amazing quality while having only 195KB? What tool did you use to record it?
I use
byzanz-record. It's v legit. Tried many different gif recorders and this was the best one.Call their phone numbers.
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Wow, fellow Indie Hackers! What a great find. Will reach out to @thechurchco - thank you so much!
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