4
6 Comments

How to find your first customers...

I'm putting together interviews on this topic for my new course - who would you like to hear advice from?

And do you have any specific questions/problems you'd like answered?

  1. 2

    @louisswiss how to find your first customers, in my opinion, is the hardest part about starting any company.

    Now I know the answer is "it shouldn't be, you should be building a product to solve a problem for a community you are apart of."

    With that being said, 90% of my posts are asking for advice on how to get new users. So my question would be, where can I go to get new customers and what kind of pull through has been seen at said locations?

    For example, I have been told to post on producthunt.com, but I have also been told not to post on PH until I have a following that can boost the upvotes.

    So I should look at posting on beta user sites like betalist.com or betapage.co first to get a follow for PH post.

    But both those companies work on likes so I should run FB and Insta ads to get an early following then work the above system. I have also seen some success in Reddit, so I do I blend that into the mix?

    @louisswiss I think you found a great problem, my request would be for you to interview people that are in the process versus people who have already had success. The sucess stories never go into enough detail 😉

    1. 2

      Ha, I just went through all this earlier this week -- the PH launch and posting on Betalist and betapage.co. I had no following so I had to rely on my own personal network for the PH votes. To date I haven't been featured on betalist but neither site is driving significant traffic. I wrote up what I learned at https://medium.com/pagerteam/launching-on-product-hunt-3d4c9aaacd1d

      1. 2

        @Furchin that was a great article.
        I think I may try to get a much larger user base to email into prior to launching closeline.co. So maybe I will try some of the smaller sites first along with ads.

        I plan on posting our story on indie hackers much like you did on Medium.

    2. 1

      Thanks for the feedback!

      I definitely plan on interviewing people who are currently struggling with sales as well - but probably more in a 'teardown' format. After all, they don't have advice to give yet ;)

  2. 2

    It would be great to hear from Koichi from tofugu.com https://www.tofugu.com/about/people/koichi/

    As far as I know, he has never done interviews of this kind. I admire him for succeeding in such a niche b2c business. Tofugu has various products for learning Japanese, including a an app for learning Kanji (chinese characters).

    He is in such a dominant position, that every-time you search something online about learning Japanese, he always shows up.

    I have reached out to him via email in the past and he is quite responsive.

    1. 1

      I'll check it out - thanks Gabriel!

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments