How did you get your first customer?
I am curious to know how you guys have gotten your first customer whether it was from content marketing, blogging, Reddit, IndieHackers, HN, referrals from friends, etc., etc.,?
I am curious to know how you guys have gotten your first customer whether it was from content marketing, blogging, Reddit, IndieHackers, HN, referrals from friends, etc., etc.,?
I talk about this topic here in first1000.substack.com. I do a case study about how each company got its first 1000 customers. If anyone would like to share their stories.....LEMME KNW please at aboul3ata@gmail.com
Yeah, sure
I will check it out, mate
Edit: I did, I like your case studies. Some of the companies started with extremely limited spots for beta that look of high value to their first customers.
Thanks
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I do sometimes when they get back to me. Sometimes (which is a lot) they don't, I imagine Travis Kalanick has more important things to do with his time than contribute to my newsletter 😅
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About the 1'st customer we got it through Facebook. Story behind that is we added the FB chat plugins in our website & got conversion through it.
After that in 2 years we got 30K customers but with different techniques through Google ads, FB ads, backlink, blogging.
site - https://codedthemes.com
We got also users from our community markets like dribble, uplabs, github etc...
We mostly give our products trial version ie. freebies & convert it to premium one through email campaign.
Hope this will help to others who also selling digital products like plugins, templates, UI kits etc...
The main thing I mention here is, Backlink is the key of sale.
Relentless support and outreach to users. Delight and impress your users, and eventually they will become paying fans.
Nice, patience is the key from what it looks like
Launched on Reddit and ProductHunt.
Nice, that's awesome
How did it go from there? What was your next move?
Then the subreddit banned self-promotions but the apps got ranked on a few keywords so it's got 10K+ users over a few times.
Then I can talk to them and improve the apps to hopefully get PMF.
Dang, 10k+ users!
Haha, I had a similar experience with the subreddit I posted at. They didn't have any rules about self-promotion so I posted an article with a text link referring back to my software and the post got removed
Takes a bunch of tries. Many indiehackers here also utilized those subreddits.
Yup, we gotta hustle and grind
It's been a long time now, but I'm pretty sure it came via social. (Twitter)
https://twitter.com/ys
Nice
You got a customer through social media, pretty interesting!
I noticed that some Indie Hackers, like Adrian from Simple Analytics and Riley from Hostifi, successfully used a very specific Twitter strategy of finding people who are talking about the problem their product solves. So I built customerfind.net to help people do this too. If you get a chance to try it out I would love your feedback!
There's potential in it
When I search for "How to find new customers?", it showed a max of 5 tweets with the word customers and it wasn't relevant to context of the question.
So maybe add new filters and better tracking?
Thanks for the feedback! This is what I am working on right now.
Yeah, sure
Let me check it out soon enough
I just shared insights for a long time, and then when I had my offer, people were more open to paying. Make a full-time income from social now.
Oh, snap
That's neat
What would you say be the pros and cons making a full-time income from social now?
Financial freedom, independence, etc., etc..?
While I make a full-time income from social, I don't make all my income from social. So, that's nice.
One thing about making money from social media under your own name, is that you do sometimes end up just playing to the crowd. Which is fine, and has some advantages, but it's not the same as when you sell a product or work with individual clients.
As for financial freedom and independence, I've been pretty much financially free and independence for the last 15+ years.
Personally, I don't believe in having an employer as I think you work at their pleasure, and they can fire you in a second and then where are you?
I prefer the security of multiple personally owned income streams.
I went where they were. In my case, it's makers -- I run Makerlog.
So what I did was I went to the existing maker communities. At the time, it was Slack chats - there used to be a chat called Makers Kitchen with thousands of members.
I wasn't spammy, I just contributed stuff and helped other makers (had a URL to the site on my Slack tag).
I feel the best way is to provide value to others where they are.
Yes, that would be a good approach instead of spamming others, you provide value to the community members and members seeing those values.
Interesting story, thanks
that was a Product Hunt launch :)
Oh, that's neat
I heard PH was a snowball for some of the IndieHackers as getting their first and subsequent customers afterwards.
it is exactly like that!
I released the exact conversations I had in my notion template I share for others to validate ideas! It includes the exact conversations I had that led to my first 10 sales, out of 35 customer interviews.
Also worth noting that these were pre-sales, I didn't even have an official product yet!
Ahh, I see
It was cold leads by directly emailing them
For Pinger I asked for user feedback on product hunt. One guy gave me extensive feedback and then we talked on Twitter. After that he decided to support me and got subscription :)
Hey, Victor
What have you done to increase revenue after getting your first customer?
Haha, that's cool
It's the first customer that is always the hardest
For https://bullish.email my strategy was to send an email to existing subscribers to introduce a paid plan. It worked ok and I got my first 10 customers from that. This is the email I wrote. https://preview.mailerlite.com/o2y8k1
That's pretty neat
I'd also love to hear about those kind of stories, especially from people who started not long ago !
first1000.substack.com
Same here
It's like the hardest sale you have to perform.
You gotta convince someone why they should buy this pencil?