How did you acquire your first 10 users/customers?
It is the hardest at the beginning: You don't have users, you don't have any support, and data to understand what you are doing wrong.
It is almost like a paradox, you cannot grow because you don't have enough customers to analyze your strategy and since you cannot analyze it you cannot grow.
My question is, therefore: How did you acquire your first 10 users?
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The first few customers are great for validating the product/idea. For Draftss our initial customers came from IH & PH. We had also got picked up by some newsletter then which had a got us a few customers. Search has been the best in terms for increasing our customer base and we are looking at doubling down on it.
For our new projects Prospectss and Artworkss we are planning to source the first few customers from IH & PH itself as these customers helps shape the entire product and are very good at providing feedback🙂
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Honestly, we have none but are adapting to have one now. We get traffic from SEO from some of the keywords that we are trying to rank for. Initially, we were near on the top on the first pages, but then we started getting behind all the way to the depths of the 2nd page. We did nothing wrong. We didn't change anything on our website that would have hurt us, but I guess what happened as our competitors started out perform us.
We figured out that whenever we posted any blogs on our website our ranking started going back up. We started posting blogs often. These blogs were not top quality blogs. But basics ones. We made sure it is original content. Less than 1000 words. We saw our rankings going up. We started 3 blogs per week and now putting up 4 posts every week. We came back to 1st Page 🥳.
Not the first 5 positions though. We are at #8 position.
Here is what we are doing now to improve it further.
To automate this we have found Postaga.com
We are starting with this so unfortunately, I don't have any stats to show whether this is working or not. The way we came onto this idea is because we were getting a lot of websites reaching to us to do backlink share.
We are doing a similar backlink outreach using SEMrush (Free Version). They have a tool that finds prospective blogs to whom you can reach and get a backlink.
what are some of the terms you rank best for?
I wouldn't say we rank the best. We rank #8 for our niche keyword "unlimited graphic design service"
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The majority of the initial articles were also 1000 words.
Believe it or not but LinkedIn! I started posting about Thankbox on LinkedIn while I was still working on it. A big use case for my product is for people to create office collections for their colleagues' occasions, so LinkedIn was perfect.
A lot of the early customers I got were through there. I then asked some of them to do a little post about it on their own profiles, which in turn attracted more people.
How many connections did you have on Linkedin at the time?
About 800, though most of that was probably recruiters. I've started paying a lot more attention to it now to get more high quality contacts.
ProductHunt - it was the best place for us to be discovered. I believe it's a great place for many companies that are just beginning their journey. Have you tried it?
I always had the impression PH was great for B2C in general and Makers tools in particular. How does it fare with your typical B2B Saas?
As a startup owner, I go on PH daily to find tools which could help my business. I can tell you from my experience that B2B works too. But, again, study the website yourself and see how it works. Go there daily for a week or two and see which products get the hype. What they are solving, etc. This way you will get a better feeling of what works
We are preparing for the beta at tractific.com but this was a struggle for me at my last startup so I just wanted to ask here. Product Hunt is great to be discovered and SEO but did they buy your product?
Yes. You can find anything there. From investors, beta users to customers. If your product is great and you have the appropriate flow for selling your product, you will get customers from there. If you product gets popular of course. As you still depend on how many people upvote your product.
Pro tip: when you launch on PH, try to plan a couple of days ahead of your launch. Share it with your network, newsletter or friends to get some initial upvotes. So people can see your product
Also, PH has a feature for pre-launch. It's when you announce that you will launch your product and many signup in advance.
This is really helpful. Did you use PH Ship?
Nope. But from what they offer, it seems like a great deal. But we've been a bit too limited on our budget to afford even that. We decided to spend more on servers than on other tools
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I think this has to start with providing as much value as possible up front in the places where your ideal customer is hanging out online.
This is very manual in the beginning, but it has to be. Doing things that don't scale is a necessary endeavour for most early stage startups.
Manual onboarding in the early stages will allow you to control the experience for first users and gather feedback about your process too. You can then iterate, improve and eventually automate this process once you begin to reach scale with people using your product/service.
Thank you so much @gordon
The first 3 came from HN. The post was a crude MVP launched as a page on one of my other domains. It received so much traffic that it crashed my server twice. However, at that time there was no way to create accounts, so missed all those users.
After that it was PH, where it was Number 6 and I got about 70 users over a couple of weeks.
It has also been mentioned in a few education and design related blogs, so that also gave about 10 users. I dont remember how many of these were in the first 10.
Via organic web traffic. My case is a bit of an outlier since my web app was online for almost 2 years before I turned it into a SaaS business.
I would like to add that my greatest mistake was not asking users for their emails during those 2 years. Users could access my app for free and I didn't even give them the option of signing up for an email list. That was a foolish move but my anxiety convinced me that my app was worthless and that nobody would pay for it. Now after my first month since launching I have made $1,500 🤯
I find that getting the first 10 is hard, but getting the next 10 is even harder! Be creative, find where people who might appreciate what you created are, reach out directly to them if you can. There are a lot of online communities that can help like Reddit, HN, Product Hunt, Lobste.rs... Good luck!
thanks!
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I understand your dilemma. While many may suggest a Product Hunt launch, I think you should go for a soft launch and write about your company/ product on other sites such as Indie Hacker, Subreddits to get your first 10 users.
There are 2 channels that I can acquire the first 100+ users easily:
In my case, my product was relevant, and the ad/content need to be easy to understand.
the audience of product hunt likes free products but not paid ones.
Well, your question didn't specify acquiring "paying" users.
But in that case, I've seen people doing early-bird discounts or life-time deals and get a good start.
It'd be depending on different cases of course
yeah you are right.
Thank you for the comment!
You're welcome @emiratli248
I am trying to set up Facebook Ads for customer acquisition. I understand that we have to keep trying out different ad sets/copy/targeting/ad design for performance optimization to get the best ROAS. Have a few questions troubling me, would love to know your thoughts on it.
I am targeting the founders & CEO's from US.
What's a great, good/average, bad CPC? Any ranges here?
How much should I ideally spend on a adset to know if it is doing good or not?
What is a good/average conversion rate for these ads? CPC to actual sales?
Hey @aminmemon, all the answers are dependent on your ads target.
I have never targeted founders and CEO anywhere so my answers probably incorrect.
Though, for a blurry glance, my results for targeting photographers in Vietnam, before and after optimized:
(I wrote about this in Vietnamese)
I think targeting founders and CEOs can is tough since they are more aware of ads, CPC will be higher and Conversion will be much less.
Thanks for the insight. Will go through the article.
Online communities! I don't like referring friends and family as they usually try to sugarcoat. Post on Reddit went viral and boom, 10k visits in 1 day.
Are there any other communities online that worked for you? What's your experience with Quora?
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Quora does allow links if they're placed naturally.
Last year I helped a SEO SaaS with Quora content marketing. With strategically placing their product through answers on the right questions and showing how it could be a better choice than the alternatives helped them generate over $1,000 every month.
Last time I checked they were still converting nearly 5-6 paid customers every month through those answers resulting in $500+ added revenue.
Oh right, I didn't know that. That explains everything on why they told me in the past that I violated their policy. Must be the links.
I personally haven't committed time on Quora to say whether it works or not, but I've submitted 4 answers and they got around 73 views. I imagine if you're on there long enough, you'll get enough views and profile visits (where you can put your link) and eventually website visitors.
There was an article somewhere about how Quora is great for generating website traffic, I'll link it if I find it!
Aha, so you have to build some kind of credibility first before posting some links. But if you find the article, let me know. That would be a massive help!
How did you go viral on Reddit? It is extremely hard to do imo
It just did. The product (which is now sold off) was a curated list of free design resources, posted it on a couple of design/dev subreddits and it took off.
Which subreddits did you post to?
Mainly /r/webdev /r/web_design /r/UI_Design - webdev was the one that got the most upvotes at ~240
Interesting. Would you be able to share the links to your posts?
Cold email for me. Current rate for me is 100 emails sent = $1k in ARR which is awesome.
Should I post some tips?
Yes, please. I need some tips man
The first 10 is really simple unless you're launching a rocket. Don't overthink.
Who is the product for?
Who do you already know that may have the same problem?
Talk to them.
That's what I did. Think "who is the next person to talk to?", not "who is the 10th person to talk to". And before you know it, you'd have talked to 10 people who can give you feedback.
Hey Emir,
My first 10 customers came from Twitter. I announced that I was writing an ebook, promising more information, and it got a LOT of engagement. (A lot more than I anticipated.) So in 48 hours, I set up a landing page and a pre-order link and put the formal announcement on Twitter and also added that to my original "I'm writing this ebook" thread. That one got even more engagement and through the pre-order availability was able to secure over 200 sales before launch!
This is great! But I really hate twitter xd
Not suggesting you use Twitter, of course. ;) It just so happens to be where my audience is and where I maintain my primary social media presence. Wherever your audience happens to be is a good place to start.
Twitter seems like the place-to-be for creators. I've seen more and more creators promoting their product successfully on Twitter
Can't speak for all creators, but it's been a mixed bag for me personally. I needed to build a modest enough audience to get my tweets seen/retweeted/liked by people with big enough networks to get my tweets visible on other people's timelines. I released other things many years ago and got very little traction. It helps that tech folks, a group I'm a part of, use Twitter heavily and I'm very comfortable using it. :)
I built a free product that got a lot of shares and links around the internet. My site was receiving 3000 users a week, and some decided to pay for more access. My first attempt got help from product hunt, this time, PH failed so I'm reaching out to the best traffic sources according to my analytics.
Betalist is amazing. Its a great place to start off with. Your products are actually identified by entrepreneurs and actualy customers
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Find the customers who are most desperate for your solution.
Where ever they are located, reach them.
It is great if you are building something you desperately need on your own, because then you can be your own first customer. At http://orgpad.com, we were the first three users. We were iterating around our needs, and we can be quite picky about UX so when we think something is good, usually it is. After 6 months in development, we got another 5 testing users from our friends and families, with whom we were interacting frequently. OrgPad is growing ever since, we now reached to almost 1000 users.
I wouldn't put much value into data, if you have a small number of people, there is nothing to measure anyway. As an enterpreneur, one should understand the problems and the needs little bit. First target users should be clear and one can either find them between friends, or in some online communities.
add me on discord, I have a script I use for simple outreach that got my calender booked for 3 different products. Profit on day one, would be open to sharing :-)
do#3695
In my case, online colleges/coding bootcamps is who we list on our site. I just emailed them and asked them if I could list them on our site. This is how I got the Colleges/bootcamps listed. Email works for me.
For https://creft.io, we relied heavily on professionals in our network, because our startup customers are top professionals, we had to rely on our network to get the best top professionals from there.
You can check https://creft.io too!
Featured on Hackernews.
Depending on your product/solution.
Best to start in your own network.
For us what worked by far the very best was having an experienced entrepreneur with a massive network as a mentor. You'll have to be a bit lucky to find the right person. But try to reach out to people who are decades ahead of you in your industry, you won't regret it.
For LegUp Health, we got our first 10 users from our initial customer interviews with people in my immediate network.
Basically, we just leveraged the Mom Test framework.
I went to meetups, hosted workshops, and did as many speaking events at conferences and hackathons as I could to try and get the word out about how I was building things. I found it hard to get through the noise online and event marketing worked well for promoting my studio FourthWaveStudios.com
Cold hard email! 🥶📧
Oh really? How many emails did you send to acquire your first customer?
Around 5 actually. After having 30 customers, I calculated that I have a 10% chance of getting a sale from my next email :)
Nice! I expected a 50 or 60 honestly. I will send cold emails too, do you have any tips/advice?
Sure!
[I just reached 30 customers] so this is all new to me too. Hope this helps :)
thanks!
With my last startup, I ended up cold emails with a discount code and it never worked. Maybe I should offer free help then on the second mail give a discount code.
Cool! Let me know if you need help!
thank you! Do you have a Twitter acc?
Sorry, I don't.
ProductHunt drove over 200 visits on snippetshot.com on the launch there despite not even making the top 10. Pretty happy with that. Also got some steady traffic after that (obviously much lower).
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I think that you are just angry that your posts don't get attention and you see my posts on the top, it is understandable. In fact, my last 5 posts weren't about my product. Look carefully before you actually comment.
Why would I tell that my product was built no-code on my landing page? You think that analytics services are already no-code and it is clear that you haven't used one so you are not in our target audience which also makes your comment a little bit more clear.
Finally, the legendary pitch deck blog post was the most successful blog post actually, 1000+ views in 3 hours. Our target audience is other founders so these posts are for them.
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We are preparing to launch the beta for the 141 users you mentioned :)
I posted that post twice because someone asked me to post it on SEO+Content Group. IH has moderators so you can relax :)
My last 5 posts:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-was-your-initial-idea-a7459af5ed
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/1-landing-page-inspiration-monday-6d82ffe4b4
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/which-part-of-indie-hacking-do-you-like-the-most-155e1eb542
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/seo-process-i-use-step-by-step-67c80d1f11