How to get my first 10 beta customers

I've been a marketing advisor to a handful of companies like Dropbox, Loom, Productboard etc. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Your website copy talks in terms of "what" and features. Consider shifting to talk about value and impact your tool will drive for the economic buyer.

2. "Even sent cold emails" - think of cold emails as something that is always on and you can leverage to accelerate your learnings around what messages resonate with certain audience segments. Once you get your subdomain setup/warmed, you should be sending 500-1000+/week automatically, and checking/adjusting frequently based on learnings.

3. Finding your first 10 customers will be much easier if you segment your total ICP down into more manageable groups. How are you approaching segmentation right now? Boiling the ocean will only lead to reduced focus and will burnout your resources.

4. Do you have a compelling "design partner" strategy? This is the best path to your first 10 ecstatic customers and industry champions.

Hope these suggestions help!

Why not quickly position into to generic usecase like a chatbot for any set of documents instead of just agent specific? We have seen many ChapGPT based products doing well in this space that just works straight on any website or any document repository. I earlier wrote about multiple ChatGPT/OpenAI products in Micro SaaS Ideas.

I also understand you are solving a bigger problem by actually helping with ticketing system too as an overall one package for agent based support systems that parse huge set of docs.

Launching a new product can be both an exciting and challenging experience, and the struggle to find your first customers can be overwhelming. It is important to remember that building a customer base takes time, patience, and perseverance, and the journey to finding your first 10 beta customers can be a valuable learning experience that will set you up for success in the long run.

It is great that you have already reached out to people in your network and asked in relevant communities. These are effective ways to get initial traction and exposure for your product. However, it is important to remember that getting beta customers can be a numbers game. You need to cast a wide net and reach out to as many people as possible to increase your chances of finding your first 10 beta customers.

One strategy that has worked for me is to engage in online communities such as Reddit and Discord. These platforms are great for finding like-minded people who are interested in your product and who are willing to try it out. Posting a semi-problematic question on Reddit that generates interest in your niche can be a great way to attract potential beta testers. Once you have identified those who are interested in testing your product, you can then invite them to join you on Discord for further communication and collaboration.

It is important to note that this approach may result in a low response rate, but don't let that discourage you. Keep going and continue to refine your strategy until you get the results you want. Another approach you can take is to use paid ads to attract potential customers to your funnel. However, it is crucial to ensure that you have a well-defined target audience and a compelling angle for your ad that will make potential customers want to try out your product.

Remember that finding your first 10 beta customers is just the beginning of your journey, and it is important to maintain a positive attitude and a growth mindset. Keep refining your product, engaging with your customers, and always be willing to learn and adapt. With persistence and patience, you will eventually build a strong customer base and achieve the success you desire. Good luck!

The website looks a little too technical, as it goes into details of what the product does, and how it does that, but without expressing the underlying problems it tries to solve. As an engineer, I'm impressed :) But as a user, I would likely struggle to understand why I might need this.

I would try to emphasize one or two major pain points that your potential customer should have in order to be interested. Maybe also add a short video demoing how the pain can be relieved. And remove the unnecessary fluff.

There is a real problem of searching for information across a scattered knowledge base (internal documents in Google Drive and other systems, public docs, conversations in Slack, etc.). I've heard multiple people from multiple companies expressing that it would be cool to have a tool that would tackle this. It looks like you're playing into that field, in which case I would actually be surprised if you don't find your users.

Since you've tried a number of different things it would be useful to understand what your campaign process looks like

• Who's your target audience?
• Where do they hang out?
• What's your pitch in cold emails and communities?
• What's the reason behind people not converting (if you know it)?
• Is the problem big enough that people already pay for an alternate solution or does the problem eat a significant portion of their time?

"We decided to start validating this problem statement further and in the last few months have spoken to 100+ enterprises"

From your site. So either you are a blatantly lying or you didn't validate enough.

Regardless, I would reach out to your old companies and see if they might be interested.

You can also reach out to customer support agencies and see if they might want it.

Great to see your efforts bearing fruit and that you have launched your product.

I can suggest a few points here:

Utilize Twitter, Indie Hackers, LinkedIn, and SaaS directory sites where you can list your product. Quora and Reddit are great options too, but reddit has strict promotion restrictions but if you do it will give you awesome result.

You can also run paid ads. If you have a large budget, you can run Google ads. If you have a limited budget, you can run ads on social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok. Ensure that your video or graphic accurately showcases your product.

niche down and refine your messaging.

the copy on the site is not clear. who is this for? why is it beneficial?

is this for laywers? if so, why is it beneficial to them? Accountants? how will it make their life better?

there are tons of these, they all seem to be struggling in one way or another. the average layman doesn't what a lot of this copy means. that's my opinion.

Hi Saurabh, congrats on your launch. This is so exciting.

Coincidentally, I wrote a guide on how I got the first 100 users for my startup. You can check out the full article here

We found beta users by cold emailing people in our service's related fields. When we asked them to review our service, we mentioned what we liked about their content and how we could help them.
We then followed up with details about any updates to the service, making sure they were the first to know.

1. Offer free trials to anyone you know, to a limited number of team members.
2. Post about it on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter. Market your product in the comments section of relevant posts.
3. Submit your product on free app listing sites, with a discount or free option.

You can obviously do marketing to get people to go the website and look at engagement rates etc to see if how you're presenting the product is viable.

What about companies you have previously worked at?

Close friends

Getting your first few customers is generally tricky for everyone but here's what you wanna do:

Figure out your positioning statement: I help [people like this] solve [problem like that] such that [desired outcome].

Then hit up your target audience and send them a message that has an intro, the positioning statement, and a call to action.

That's the first thing you're gonna wanna do. Opt for anything that's active over passive. So instead of posting on Twitter, send people a DM. Or better yet, if you have their number, facetime them.

The more real-time it is, the better.

Hit up everyone you got access to.

This is where many solopreneurs fuck up cuz they say no for someone else. Never reject yourself, let others reject you. Two reasons:

1. You may be wrong and they buy.
2. You may right but it can lead to unforeseen things: referrals, affiliate deals, etc.

Secondly, start building an audience of buyers if you don't have one already.

Once you've got an audience full of people that view you as an authority in your space, all it takes is a simple email to presell.

I wrote about that in more detail here.

In order to get started on building an audience of buyers, do what I'm doing right now. Show up in places where your audience hangs out and do your best to help them. A subset will join your email list and a subset of those will become buyers.

All of this takes time but if you help enough people, genuinely help them and not selfish bs, a portion will become customers.

Okay... Everything I've said so far helps you where you are right now.

But in the future, I'd strongly urge you to start marketing sooner. IHers tend to think marketing means distribution, as if it's a linear process: idea, build, launch, distribute.

But a better analogy for marketing would be to think of it as market research. Figure out who you wanna serve, find out where they hang out, go to those places and study them intensely so you can figure out what problems they have.

Then, armed with the knowledge of REAL pains they're having, you can start helping them for free.

If that resonates, you'll get email list subscribers, and that validates that you're likely on the right track.

The next logical step would be to presell a product and, if it sells, make it.

Do you see how this is the opposite approach of that of the typical solopreneur?

There are some more things you can do to further reduce risk such as looking for "proof of buying behavior," and figuring out what they're buying to solve the issue right now (which helps you inform your initial pricing).

But I don't wanna get too much in the weeds here. I cover that in my video course here, but hopefully my answer gave you enough ammo to make some changes to your marketing strategy and get results.

Good luck.

RJY

PS. apologies if typos. Didn't double-check.

Hi Saurabh,

Congrats on the work done so far, it looks like a great piece of engineering. But that compliment doesn't help you very much at the moment.

I tried to imagine myself as a prospect that stumbled across your site and my main worry was that what you present sounds interesting but remains somehow abstract. I have to "imagine" how that would work and I am unsure that what I imagine is also what your service delivers.

Perhaps you can make it more concrete? Like a video of you running your software over a customer's ticketing system to extract some recurring questions? Or browsing over a slack channel to surface information that may go into a knowledge base?

I'm not sure that my examples are even possible with your software, and I am guessing that may be part of the problem.

This is a very personal view, hope this helps.
Frans

ps. when I hover over the menus on the top right, I get a "widget didn't load message"

Hey Suman,

Have you reached out to the 100+ people you researched with to build your product?

This helped me https://founderscafe.io/post/how-to-make-a-successful-discord-5k-mrr

There's a lot that can be done to get that 10 beta users but I will try to give actionable guides; list on ProductHunt, and run email outreach campaign. The later contributes nearly 90% of our monthly growth.