How long did it take from launching to acquire a first paying customer?
I'm working on Highprofile alert( https://highprofilealert.com ). It's an application that notifies you when those who you're following on Twitter come to your city. This requires city keywords like San Francisco, Bay Area for searching it. You can set up only one word for free and it costs you if you are trying to set up multiple keywords.
Last week I have launched it and then shared a home link to ProductHunt,, Reddit, and Hacker News. 40 users signed up and set up a keyword. But no paying customer.
Actually, I'm working on updating it more convenient. How long did it take from launching to acquire a first paying customer? Please share your stories about how to acquire too.
Trending on Indie Hackers
Depends a lot on the product, the audience, the tactics&strategies to market...
In many of my projects, it took several months to get the 1st paying customers (4 to 9). But sure, it can be a lot quicker if you solve a real problem for somebody you know!
You have a fair point. It depends on the type of business.
Congrats on your successes so far!
Personally I've only got one customer...kind of. It's a friend of mine who's super supportive and I appreciate it. I believe he signed up within a week of me going live. I know I've got some work to do for that true cold or near cold signup! I'm working on tweaking my pricing and landing page before posting to PH, Hacker News and trying to cold email more publishers. Established platforms as mentioned here are fantastic for exposure. A previous project of mine, a Chrome extension, got thousands of downloads thanks to a Lifehacker feature. It was awesome!
My current project (Passbox) is a little bare at the moment with minimal design. I'm also in a little bit of a...grim space that requires effort to configure as well as trust.
Good luck!
Interesting idea mrdazm! I think you could write articles targeting influencers (small or big). "What if you suddenly had a serious health problem? Do you have somebody and a place to secure all your social accounts?" You could tap into fear, which is powerful ^^
Thank you for the compliment and suggestion! What kind of influencers do you have in mind? Just wondering what space/industry you think makes sense.
Thanks for sharing your story. That's fun and exciting absolutely.
How did your product feature on famous coverages? Curious!
I just thought of sites I knew and liked, looked for possibly similar stories then tried to contact the authors directly. Could take time but having one publish your project is cool!
Fantastic! I'll try it :)
Hi, congrats on your new project. Personally, it took me about a week after I launched https://www.festivilia.com to get my first paying customer. (Well, technically I got 4 paying customers in a single day). It was surreal!
I wanted to find out what caused the spike and then I realised a blog post was written about Festivilia that morning on a popular news platform down here. (https://disrupt-africa.com/2018/07/film-festival-distribution-startup-launched-in-nigeria/) I had sent out a cold email to the publisher a day after we launched and was hoping to get a response, I didn't but instead got something better! A direct feature! Festivilia has grown from there.
So what I am trying to say is that blog features worked for me, maybe it can too for you. Wish you luck!
Congrats on acquiring your paying customers! That sounds so exciting!
This episode encourages me :)
Glad it did!