How did you get your first 10 users?
I'm grinding to get the first 10 users for my Slackbot (revelapp.io) right now and would love some stories of how others have done the same. It feels like we've got a product that people love the sound of, but getting them to actually sign up is a big hurdle.
Let me know your experiences!
Hey Rob - here's what worked well for us.
First, we hung out in Slack groups where our target audience hung out, and asked people if they'd be interested in trying out the product. We made sure to follow the rules of the Slack group, and it wasn't our first and only message in the channel. We invested time in being good community members first so we had a bit more good will. I wrote some tips on this here
Related to above, in those communities we spent time sharing insights and helping people solve problems. We'd then turn those into blog posts that we'd share in other related communities. We'd try to do it in a non-spammy way. For example, posting the key takeaways in our articles as a post, and then linking to the blog for more info.
The key learning for me has been to be a good community member, and never hard sell and you get a lot of good will and people finding your product that way. Then, ideally if it's a product for them, they sign up or tell their friends (or share your articles).
Looks like you might have a similar audience to us - here's some communities you might check out.
Great resources @mattcrail. Thanks for sharing!
np - glad it's helpful :)
Wow, this is great advice, Matt. Thanks a lot.
I'm focusing my attention on a couple of Slack communities at the moment, so that's great to hear that you've found growth there. Totally agree on giving as much as taking from the community – I like the point on turning insights into blog posts. Smart.
Thanks for the link, really useful. I'll take a good look at Taskable too ;) Best of luck with it.
Thanks - good luck to you too 🤘
Hi Rob! don't know if it can be of any help. But i acquired all of my first 10 users launching my website on ProductHunt. Have you already tried ?
Thanks for the advice, Marco. Product Hunt is definitely the next step, I was hoping to find a handful of users to test the concept on before that, but we might just have to go for it!
Product Hunt is a piece of work. A lot of preparation is needed, and you can't ask your subscribers to vote you up, it's against the rules. It's challenging. Start to work on this now... like other projects, find your Twitter friends there etc. https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt-7c1843e06399 Good luck! Also, follow me and let me know about the launch. https://www.producthunt.com/@gabrielvaraljay
The other way is Pioneer. It's a virtual YCombinator lookalike community, with weekly goals. You can find there testers/users as well. Here is our referral link: https://pioneer.app/join/r6security.com
Thanks for the tips :) Looks like I need to get going on the Product hunt work now since it takes a while. Hopefully by that point we'll be a bit surer of our product too. I'm currently running a very targeted direct message campaign with our target market in a bid to get focused feedback and first users.
Pioneer looks great. I'll check it out.
I have thought about building Slack apps previously, and by far the same apps that I’ve researched that does well do the same things.
I think in your case, you will need to experiment if people are willing to adopt your app’s workflow and break away from how they already do things.
Discovery will almost certainly all come from their App Store. If nobody installs after a few months, it may be an indication that the target group doesn’t want to change their habits and is therefore not looking for this solution. You may want to adjust your copy to reflect that your new method is actually less work and doesn’t intrude on their existing workflows.
Yer I think the workflow thing is a great point – and actually something that we hope that Revel doesn't force people to change. The idea is people can use all the great specialist tools that exist, but use Slack as a project hub with Revel's help (a bit like how you use Basecamp, if you are familiar).
As you say, the Slack app store will be the ultimate test. I'd like to test product and messaging on a small scale before launching there – but at some point we'll need to go for it!
Thanks for the advice guys. All really useful and appreciated!