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10 Comments

How do you find your first users?

I'm struggling a lot with finding my first users. At the moment I'm looking for someone to try out my product, free of charge, in order to see if they will get any value out of it or not.

Do you have any tips? How did you find your first users?

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    If you are talking about Wiseer then I could see a few audiences that might be interested. Basically everyone who has to analyse a stream of user feedback:

    • social media managers
    • customer support
    • community management
    • podcasters
      ...

    So the question is where these groups meet and hang out. Linkedin? Facebook groups? Forums?

    Are there any opinion leaders in these spaces you could contact? Ideally go for multipliers who can share the product with their community.

    An idea could be to identify a few podcasters for instance...then use itunes reviews of their podcast, run an analysis and deliver the report to the podcast host. If you can produce actual insights for them then that might be a perfect start/pitch.

    There are various podcast related startup founders here...so maybe they are a good start?

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      Thank you, that's a great ideas an analysis :)

      I've thought about doing that as a marketing pitch myself, podcasters is a market I hadn't considered though 😊

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    Hey, some general feedback, and I hope I don't come off the wrong way giving you my opinion:

    • Measuring things like "sentiment" and "toxicity" is a subjective thing to do, and the data could be misleading depending on the user looking at it and could lead you to making the wrong decision (a decision that results in the opposite outcome that you wanted, putting the core of the value proposition in question) - obviously this is my opinion, and your prerogative to prove me wrong but let me throw an example.

    Example: At my old company I was on a committee to decide to implement this exact technology on bulk analysis of our emails. We already had this implemented for our social media like twitter etc., and it measures many many more metrics than just toxicity and sentiment - in fact most if not all marketing departments of top fortune 100 at least already have this at that level.

    My argument is that the consequences of doing so might be counterproductive, because if people see that their career depends on such metrics they will tailor their communications to be as PC as possible to game your system - even at the cost of "stepping" on peoples toes to drive value to the business - also measuring frequency of communications might not point of key employees but rather the ones that like to send pointless emails and waste time - and if they think that you they will be identified as a "key" employee they will send more emails with "positive sentiment", and then you have an employee pool that just sends compliments to each other en masse while efficiency plummets.

    Short term cool, you got business until they figure out inefficiency - or you do and convince them of its value, long term your going to have a tough time and be continuously re-defining subjective variables.

    More importantly though, I think the competition your up against is whats going to make it hard to succeed. There are many such fungible products already being sold to businesses that offer your exact features. The need to differentiate and prove value is paramount to break through.

    1. 1

      Much appreciated! It's a valid point, although I think the fault lies with the consumer and not the product should that situation occur. What you are saying is basically that it might be gamed or misused, in my opinion and experience so can tons of other things in a company. But it's a valid thing to consider, especially as a potential customer.

      To be fair, toxicity and sentiment is just my "proof of concept" metrics. I plan to add more. But at this point I've mostly spent time building something I enjoy and doing it with good and well tested code. Meaning that I can break out most of it and reuse for future products.

      So rather than spending more time adding more metrics and the like I'd love to get someone onboard that can guide my development a bit, so I spend time developing features that's actually relevant for the customer.

      I've planned to add code that automatically categorizes the message and tags objects, it's a fairly small feature to add. I'd love some example of other metrics that you know are often time tracked.

      My goal is to be a cheaper option targeting small- to mid-sized companies that might not have the resources to employ their own developers that develops inhouse tools that does things like this. Wiseer has the added benefit that it'll be possible to visualize the data inside the same product that generates the data. Often times the visualization is paramount since it's mostly Marketing departments and the like that wants to read the results, at least that's my understanding.

  3. 2

    Interesting product. does this use some kind of machine learning?

    If I were you, I would find small businesses and then reach out to them if they have a public email or on Twitter. Maybe 3 to 5 people. I think thats your target audience. Its got a be businesses thats doing well and have a lot of customers. Most startups and people just getting started can understand their customers by just reading their feedback by themself.

    Once you have some small businesses using it then you could try to get an in to a bigger enterprise business. I could see this tool being most useful for them.

    1. 2

      That's my idea as well. My target audience would be companies that has many customers and not too many employees or available resources.

      It's very hard finding those companies though, I'd love to get any tips I can get.

      I'm thinking that marketing firms could be a good place to start.

  4. 2

    Do you have anyone using it? What are your requirements in an ideal user? If I fit the bill, happy to try it and give you some feedback.

    1. 1

      I've had a few people try it out, but every time I've shared the project the reception has always been very good. I put the lack of users mostly on me, since I've done next to no marketing and disappeared for stretches of time since I've treated this as a side project.

      But now I aim to give it a honest chance, and I've made sure I have the resources needed to continue to develop this should it prove to be an interesting product :)

      I think my ideal user would have feedback, reviews or similar data lying around and be keen on turning that data into metrics that can be tracked and more easily read. Ideally it would be a small or medium sized company, alternatively a product that generates a lot of data.

      But I also think it could just be someone interested in tracking their personal brand, and just casually upload data. I plan to develop an integration to Twitter and other social platform in the near future.

      Write me an email or DM on twitter and lets have a chat!

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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      Honestly it started out just as a project for me to learn Go, then Kubernetes, then I got access to a few API's and because I'm always thinking in Products I decided to build this. It's a side project I've taken my time on, because I enjoyed having a challenge and a platform to try out new things for myself.

      But as I built it I started seeing the value of the product, I still believe in it but as many others I have a hard time moving out of development phase and into marketing. I'll give it an honest shot, and if it doesn't work then I guess I'll reuse most of the code for something else 🤷‍♂️

      I have a hard time reading your post though, is it meant as a genuine question or do you not think the product holds any value?

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        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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          You are absolutely right, and had I wanted to start a business I would have done it completely different from the start. At this point I'm just trying to salvage something I've spent a lot of time working on and grown passionate about :)

          Great points, thank you very much for the detailed answer 🙏

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