How have you been finding early users?
I know some of the standard avenues for finding early users are PH, HN, IH, reddit... But there must be many more places to find your target customers online.
What about you? How have you been finding those critical early users? Don't forget to share a link to your project!
Tried a lot of fancy things (SEM, SEO etc) but the earliest traction came from cold calling people who probably don't get many tech companies pitching them (i.e. Cake shops in New Zealand, Dentists in Wyoming etc).
Grow your business without running out of money - https://www.gini.co/
I also made good experiences with just cold emailing people. Google the best fitting search queries for your product. Usually there will be some results like "The best 10 tools for doing XY" or other fitting articles. I always put some effort into writing a nice and friendly email to the author. Even if your product isn't making it into the article, you get feedback on where you should improve in order to be listed.
This is very smart, and much more elegant than anything we have done. I've not been good at cold email, but I think I need to give it another shot. I followed too many marketing best practices when I did it, and I think the end result is it looked like all the other promotional emails that filled everyones inbox. Yours is a much more bespoke and targeted approach.
Maybe I just got lucky. But I try to see it this way: If my product delivers value to my designated target group and the article is meant for these people, the author will be happy to know about my product if she/he honestly wants to deliver value as well.
I would be very interested to hear how this tactic works out for you and how you approach it 😊
Hello will you share your cold calling word? I mean, maybe some real example about this
Happy to share some experiences, but it's mostly just brute force and the law of large numbers.
I would not say I am skilled at it, or an expert, but this guy https://www.youtube.com/c/PatrickDangOfficial is.
wow, thank you giniray
I tried various channels and things and must say that with pretty much any customer acquisition channel you can get users, however with very varying degrees of time and money needed. These are my top 3, which I focus on.
What worked for me:
Direct outreach to my personal network asking them if they knew somebody who had the problem I was solving -> Yes, found several good leads, including my first beta users.
Google ads -> worked like a charm, even for early users. I knew people were having a problem and searching for a solution. Obviously a simple Google Ad (SEA, not display) and letting it run for a while worked wonders and this became one of my main acquisition channels due to its reliability. To save money I only run ads in certain countries.
SEO -> on it, but I already know it is working. Why? Because customers tell me they are looking for a solution to their problem, but can't find my SaaS via Google. It's getting better though, after a few months and lots and lots of content feeding Google I get more and more clicks from SEO.
I am building Daito (https://www.daito.io), a web-based 2FA Authenticator that enables small and large teams to share 2FA tokens.
Awesome summary, thanks for sharing!
Curious how much you had to start spending on google ads before you started to see results? Was there much optimization you had to do and how long did it take before you started to see results?
I ask because i've tried ads with small budgets on projects before (<$25 usd / day but it's probably not enough) and didn't really work well
I spend around 10USD/day, with a smart campaign, that I clicked together in like 10 minutes. I think it took a week until I saw more clicks happening, and then again some more weeks until I saw more conversions (signups) happening. I was somewhat happy with the result only after 4-8 weeks. Also important to note is that I target cheap keywords, so that 10USD/day actually gets me somewhere.
I learned from previous experience that it is not enough to spend money it, but you need to give Google/FB/etc. a chance to optimise for what you are actually trying to do. And this means that you need to be willing to commit a steady amount for quite a long time. The longer a campaign is running, the better the entire flow can optimize.
Thanks a lot for your answer. Was there a point where you felt ready to start trying paid ads? Did you wait to have successful paying customers from other non-paid channels for example?
I started with paid ads when I felt that the product was good enough and that the new-user-experience was good enough. The UX from search to click on ad to website to sign up for trial was what mattered the most for me.
I did not want to spend money on ads while the funnel while the UX was still shoddy and very MVP.
Hello jan, my I know the word you're using for direct outreach? I mean, the real example about it
For me "direct outreach" is e.g. me contacting somebody directly on LinkedIn, or a facebook friend, or somebody I hang out with on the weekend, friends I meet with physically. I have a few friends who loosely fit the target group and I simply pitched them what I am working on.
Does that answer your question?
I have tried it, but sometimes did not get the traffic/reaction I have expected, maybe because my notion of ideal customer of my product is not quite right
Reddit has been great for me. My approach to success on Reddit has been the following:
I grew my agency in just 1 year following this approach. I even had other redditors hire me to consult on their reddit strategy.
I like this simple flow!
I have read about building an engine of growth, where this engine keeps pushing out content on the internet for people to find. For https://atomcal.com/?src="ih" I have built a system of API using discord bots, that publish a changelog and features article every week based on the code commits made that week.