How are you finding your first customers?
First customers can be tough to find without a plan in place. Often we see indie hackers launch a product and then scratch their head at how to find their first customers.
For those who have started a product in the past 12 months or so:
- what has worked for bringing on board your first customers?
- did you find customers before launching and building your product?
- and what hasn't worked?
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With Moon I've found this approach is working well:
What hasn't worked:
I would say posting milestones works, because I pick up on it, Tweet it and let it spread more that way ;)
That's a good point! That did help! Will update my comment :)
Can confirm step 3 works. I found out about Moon from @rosiesherry commenting about it in a similar thread. Got a personal email from Levi shortly after signing up. Been testing it these last couple weeks!
I don't know when you got on Rosie's radar, but when people organically share your work, you're starting to swim with the current!
(Hmmm... that could be an entire subject of research - why do people share other people's work, especially when the product is still in the developmental stage)
Stoked to have you using Moon, Phil! Keep me posted on any other feedback you think of! A new version should be ready soon 👍
Looking forward to it!
I always hear advice that you need to find where your customers gather. Sometimes that's a Facebook group (perhaps the last hyper active portion of Facebook), other times it's a forum, maybe a subreddit, maybe ProductHunt, maybe IndieHackers... but unfortunately, unless you were already a member of that community, you probably haven't heard of it.
For me, I've found that starting with friends and family is extremely underrated. They say that you're only 6 degrees of separation away from anyone on the planet. If that's the case, then starting with one degree means you have only five degrees left to go to find anyone. Start with friends and family, and then ask them to refer someone who might be interested - or someone who might know someone who would.
In my experience, family, friends from real life, and second degree connections have been where we have found all of our first users. Meeting up in real life makes a big difference. When people see our app in real life, they get way more interested.
But it's definitely a game and I'm still not sure what reliably works.
TL;DR - for me, it's all about in person meetings, and asking people I know for introductions to their friends who might find the product useful/know more about the space
This is a really great, informative comment. Upvote.
I’m currently cold emailing potential clients.
Since they’re my first clients, I’m offering up to a year of free service. They seem ecstatic to be part of the building/integration of a new product.
That being said, I’m targeting a low tech industry.
Where do you find your prospects?
I've tried this and got the opposite response: This looks very promising, but we're not willing to invest our time in a tool that's not profitable and might shut down.
How do they know you aren't profitable?
We're a new service/We just launched/We are in our early stage/We are a new product
They didn't use the word profitable, they said that the product is not mature enough/they want to make sure it will be around for years.
Are you hearing this repeatedly from most companies you reach out to?
Sorry to pry but interested as I've done a lot of direct sales to validate my two co's.
No worries, I'm more than happy to help.
First of all, I'm not very good with sales. I'm trying though.
I've emailed a bunch of +$50k MRR companies but I stopped as I figured I'm just wasting my time.
I've been reaching out to SMBs ($5k-$10k MRR) and people seem more willing to give it a try.
I see that Wavve is making +$50k MRR. Would you be willing to integrate a service that is just starting out (its first year since launch)?
Got your email and will respond there!
Going to be coming back to this thread for more ideas! Traffic in the early stages has always been the biggest mystery to me. But for thegoodstartup.com, we've been playing the long game with SEO (all I can really afford right now), and after just 3 months, we've seen 40% of our traffic coming from organic search!
That is nice! how is the average of conversion from those visits into customers? We are aiming to do some content to increase the organic search.
So since The Good Startup is a blog without a revenue model yet, we haven't had actual conversions per se, but what I have seen is that out time spent onsite is increasing faster compared to our other traffic sources! It's really exciting, like today I noticed for the first time that our average time spent onsite for organic search was 2x longer than from social media, which was crazy to me
Mine, Crave, is a consumer facing product so I mostly grow from Instagram and from word of mouth. We’ve done very little marketing.
We talked to people on local news outlets and got ourselves featured which boosted our growth.
Ooh this is really cool. How did you first start your instagram account and attract followers (and eventually customers?) I've been doing the whole follow-a-bunch-of-people thing and posting ofc for one of my side gigs selling bikinis, but it's starting to get tedious. Any tips and tricks would be greatly appreciated!
I would say the biggest jumps in followers are when a website would feature us, like a local news station. It's also part of our instagram culture now where customers share a story of them opening our box, which their followers will see. Its also a good boost for my morale to see my customers to be excited to get the product.
Absolute badass. Thanks so much!
Consistency. I hope it pays off. The missing ingredient is speaking to the people. Telling the story I need to tell.
This is what I do for Zlides, and I learned a lot about how to maximize relevant channels:
what has worked for bringing on board your first customers?
I used the need-finding approach. Breakdown user needs by persona, identify the right channel and create regular content to educate people around the topic
did you find customers before launching and building your product?
I haven't... but spent time to research the right community, platform as well as early customers that could try the product and give feedback.
and what hasn't worked?
Not every channel works, and I have to twist the frequency publishing on social media.
We just launched scribbl.co and converted 3 of our 20 beta users into paying subscribers. Here is how we did it...
We started with market research to validate our problem hypothesis. We reached out to people within our network who fit the profile of who we hypothesized would be our user and asked them to take our survey. 100+ people conducted our survey. These 100+ people became our initial batch of leads
We analyzed the responses of the surveys and learned that a majority of the respondents (70+%) had a symptom of the pain we were looking to solve. We then segmented the list by those who had the pain and fit our hypothesized profile the best.
We reached out to this group to schedule meetings with them to demo an incomplete version of our product. We wanted feedback on if we were heading in the right direction. From this group we converted a handful of them to beta testers. We added additional beta testers as we went along. We got to around 20.
We set up weekly checkin discussions with our beta testers to stay on top of how things were going and what improvements needed to be made. We continued to improve the product based on user feedback. Over the beta period there were three people who completely adopted the product into their workflow. Those 3 people are now paying customers.
Here is a great podcast on Superhuman founder and how he got his first paying customers. We modeled alot of what he shared in this podcast... https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/superhuman
We also took alot of insight from the Steve Blanks book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany"
Baremetrics had a guest speaker present a webinar a couple days ago on lead sourcing, you may find it useful - https://my.demio.com/recording/4irETUJk
For Zlappo, simple: 21st century cold-calling a.k.a. "sliding into DMs."
Since I'm building a Twitter tool, it only seems logical to target prospects on Twitter itself.
I personalize each DM, and generally the response rate has been pretty good so far!
This is interesting. How are you finding the prospects?
I try to look at who signs up for my app, and then I try to find accounts of a similar profile, since they're the ones who're most likely to sign up for my app.
In my case, that would be small personal brands (public figures, influencers, bloggers, coaches, authors, course/ebook sellers, etc.).
What's your offer like?
For me, it was around my open source project. The open source project got popular and I built a managed service around it that is linked to in the README.md in the GitHub repository.
I think YC's slogan is really good and intuitive: Make something people want. If you do that, and you can get it in front of people, you should be able to get your first customer.