How to get customers?
If you’re a indie hacker, chances are you can build a product. Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t
have are enough customers.
Can we brainstorm in this post.
What did you exactly do to get paid customers?
Having built three startups that FAILED AND HAD paid customers I have a clear idea of how to succeed.
What did I exactly do to get paid customers? I gave them a strong promise of the value they would get from my products. I COULD manage to convey the value. But I could NOT manage to deliver the value. That's why all my products failed.
Want to have paid customers? You need to do just THREE things:
3 is such a crucial element. If you don't know who your target customer is or how to reach them, almost nothing else matters. I've failed numerous times because I wanted to just build something and expected people to just find it. Just doesn't work that way.
I'm struggling a bit with (2) currently. Referencing SaaSHub. It's a competitor of Capterra, G2 Crowd and AlternativeTo. However, I want to avoid selling CPC advertisement, and offer something slightly different.
@Alexman if you had to define the value of a similar platform, what could it be :)? For example, could it be promoting the content of software vendors?
It's funny. I'm also struggling with (2). It looks like almost in every case one of the mentioned three points is quite hard to achieve :)
Regarding SaaSHub - I can't know by which parameter you decided to be different from competitors when started your project. For me, as for a SaaS owner, the value is that you can help me make sales. It doesn't matter how many similar marketplaces exist. If they all help me sell my product I'll be using all of them. I don't have to choose one.
If you are going to charge me for listing my product on SaaSHub, you should help me earn more, than I pay to you. They say it should be at least 10X more.
That all depends on your specific case, different products can leverage different channels and strategies better depending on what they are. I'm currently reading the book, Traction. It identifies 19 channels you can use, haven't finished it but recommend it so far.
For your particular product, one idea could be to offer a free widget (with a request limit per month) that could send sms messages that has a "Powered by..." link on it like how Intercom works. This channel is labelled "Engineering as Marketing".
Are you looking for advice in general or specific to your product, because I have feedback on your landing page/offering too.
Edit: Also, a fellow Irishman ;)
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