I've come across a lot of advice for how to talk to customers, but I'm wondering how Indie Hackers go about actually finding these customers. What is your process?
So far, I've tried cold messaging/connecting with folks on LinkedIn who have written content in my niche, or who have very relevant job titles. I've engaged with their posts as well. But it feels incredibly inefficient and I can feel myself burning out.
Does anyone use any LinkedIn tools/bots for finding emails? Any advice appreciated!
https://airtable.com/shrmyNNiIAIpCkizv/tblFWgjx0wLg9Z24t
You can post on all these groups
Also meetalfred is great
Try building in public (indiehacker blogs etc)
Twitter is a great game too
@veebuv that's a great resource. Thanks for sharing!
👋 I wanted to let you know that almost everybody is immediately repulsed by having their e-mail harvested from LinkedIn for spam. Consider reaching out to management/slack/inclusiveness blogs, publications and influencers or creating some kind of organic, interesting content that people are likely to share ❤️.
(See what I did there? I'm assuming this is for Allybot)
On a more serious note, I always say "think about your customer and where they live" - in your case, you might find it's more likely to be "companies running slack" than "people talking about inclusiveness"... in which case you'll want to be looking at companies that run slack and selling them on the benefit of creating a more inclusive slack.
The other thing I think people seldom do is "google your business model" - have you had a look at how other slack-based apps have done their customer acquisition? Surely someone else out there with a slack app has already written a post on how they got their first customers.
If it were me, I'd look for people that have published something on how they've used slack within their company, DM them and see if you can get a company or two just using the app (for free) to get some feedback, to generate data and to have a base customer you can reference either on your site or in a case study. I'd then create a whole bunch of cool infographics based on the data... then all the usual modern content tricks...
@RossDCurrie, hi from Katherine in the NT! 🇦🇺
This is AMAZING advice, thank you for such a thoughtful response. I think you nailed it - I need to focus more on finding companies that use Slack. Thanks!
hey @tomquirk that's exactly why we launched makesales.io! let me know if you want to talk, [email protected]
I'll check out makesales - thanks!
See the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and their "Bullseye framework" (Google it) for an inspiration. You're using 1-on-1 cold email engagement which is just 1 channel (that you don't find so efficient). There are 18 more to try.
Currently reading "The Mom Test", and "Traction" is next on my list. Thanks @zerotousers!