How to you gain new customers/leads?
Hey,
this question is probably really hard to answer, I know.
First of I would like to make a shout out to @harrydry: Anyone who likes to learn to understand or get better on marketing to visit https://marketingexamples.com/
I would like to do a thought experiment. Of course, it's always: "you have to have a good product that solves an actual problem". But let's consider for this thought experiment we have an actual product, that is awesome and solves a problem, that many people have. We just have a finished product (website, web app), and the most common pages on social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, etc...
What would you suggest doing to gain the first customers?
To get the first people on your website?
To gain the first followers on Twitter, Facebook, etc...
What is the low budget marketing tricks that everyone should know when they start?
I know there is not the perfect way to do this... But maybe we as a community can create some kind of step for step tutorial, to walk through, that can work as a golden thread.
If you can you give us real life examples on how you as an indie hacker, that does not have a lot of money for marketing, gained their first 10 customers this would also be awesome.
My first thought here is, we already took the wrong step first. Why do we have a product and no customers. Customer development first takes away product risk in building the wrong thing and usually takes less time for the first customer than building the product.
In any case, after addressing the following, I've taken the same steps multiple times to get the first customers for multiple products.
Figure out who your market would be.
a. B2B or B2C
b. What job/role are they for B2B or what do they already do/go for B2C.
c. Who do I know that might know some of these people?
Develop basic intro message.
a. This is not a sales message, its a "do you have this problem? I'd love to learn more about it." message. Basically going in saying, I'd love to learn about what your issues are, and at the end I figure if I can help them and ask if I can reach out again with potential solutions.
Have conversations
a. I would have conversations with as many people as you can in about a week. Don't want to delay your work for too long, but should also try and talk with at least 10-20 people who actually have the issue you want to solve. (Could change if working on enterprise, since your niche problem could only fit like 4-5 companies.)
b. I figure out a solution that would work for as many of them as possible.
Reach back out.
a. Once I have a solution, I reach back out. If I already had a product, I would do that at the end of the initial conversation.
Integrate Feedback with pre-payment or at least promise to pay.
a. If I hear feedback from someone and they answer yes to the following question, I would integrate it to get my first customer. (Different when I already have customers).
b. Question: "If I build that feature/do that thing, would you be willing to pay for the service?" If yes, "How much is it worth to you?" and "Would you be willing to put down $5/10/20/100 dollars now and I can get it to you by _____? If I don't deliver in any way, I'll give everything back to you."
Build the feature/service and collect on promises.
And voila, first customer.
Hey :)
thank you for your detailed answer, we all can learn a lot from that :)
I think you are right, a product without customer is pretty much the wrong idea.
I like your point 1, and 2, they pretty much describe how to get to choosing a market.
I also like your ideas about 4, 5, 6.
How to you approach point 3? I think this point is probably a black box? But I would like to unwind it a bit, so that we could get a clearer idea on how to get a customer in front of you.
How to you find people you can talk to? How (or better where) do you actually approach a new potential customer?
Great clarifying question. I missed a really important part to bridge 1 and 2 into 3.
This is probably the hardest part for a lot of people. After you've identified your market you need to reach out to them and start the conversation. A couple examples I can give.
For a company I ran in real estate for realtors. Just call/email realtors. At some point we learned that all realtors have to go to weekly meetings and yearly classes. So, then we contacted the people who ran that and asked to get featured. Realtors happen to have a thing called lunch and learns where you buy everyone lunch and they listen to your pitch. Everyone in real estate uses them. But first it was just cold emailing and cold calling. And then through that we learned about other ways to reach them.
For a product I have in the airbnb host space. I just went online and looked through every major city on google, finding websites under my search query for "Airbnb co-hosts [MAJOR CITY]" and then cold emailed all of them.
When I did that same real estate company, we were looking for people to try our virtual reality solution to test it for bugs/dizziness/ease of use. We literally set up a stand in an outdoor mall and asked people to come use it.
A long time ago, I was doing customer development in local food. So, I went to every farmer's market within an hour drive and talked to all the food vendors there or got their cards.
The product I am running right now, we help people look through their google analytics to find out how to help grow their companies. I respond to people on IndieHackers looking for help on their analytics, as well as reddit, upwork etc.
Ex. If you have some traffic and are using google analytics and want any help in terms of growing your website/price changes/what to do next to optimize your site, check out: https://insightswebanalytics.com/
So, once you find your target market. Either find their emails and phone numbers and contact them cold or if they hang out somewhere in person, go there and talk to them. It's not easy, but it's neccessary.
Thanks for the answer.
This is really awesome - these are excellent insights in how to acquire clients or customers.
Would you say that one acquisition strategy works better than another?
1.) Cold emails - how many templates would you suggest?
2.) Cold calls - do you have a phone guide for your calls?
3.) Cold acquisitions Door to Door - What's the responses like?
4.) How do you think responding on Reddit, IH works? - I mean even in this thread you brought in a lot of effort, but I am convinced :)
I'll check your site out, lets see... I am working on uptime, cron job and server monitoring, that you and most of your clients could need? Check our https://two00.com/en
Really appreciate your content in this thread.
I don't think any strategy necessarily works better than another. Just depends on your product and market.
Cold emails is great if its easy to get people's emails. Lots of my emails get between 50-70% open rate. And 5-10% response rate.
Cold calls just suck, there are plenty of strategies, but I am no expert here. I just struggle and survive through it and generally try all other methods first. But I try and work with sales people who will happily call.
In person is the easiest to ask for feedback because they can't as easily disappear from you when you ask them follow up questions.
Responding directly too someone and build trust with them is key in the forums.
For example, would you be willing to give my product a try? I'll basically help you identify where your clients are from, how to better set up your analytics, etc. I've found pricing opportunities that boosted someone's revenue by 20k/mon, identified conversion rate drop issues, helped crafted cta's for blog posts, etc. First set of analytics is free!
Alright, thanks for your insights :)
Just email me, and we can schedule a hangouts call on the weekend or next week.
So I'll start with the first thoughts:
We should talk to them about our product:
1.) You will create your own sales pitch and will get better at it the more often you talk about it.
2.) You will get instant feedback, so you will learn, what are the common doubts people have about a product, and then you will learn how to solve them, or how to improve your product if it doesn't solve the problems they have doubts about.
3.) You will get more confident about your own project. No one likes to be confronted with objections about something they build or believe in (we are probably even emotionally attached to our project at this time). But we have to learn how to handle stuff like that, and also it can give as deeper insides about the problems our potential customers have. So we can always improve our product by using the doubts and critique we get.
If you do not know who our customers are right now, then the next step should be to make a profile of ideal customers.
1.) Write down everything you know about your customers. Are they businesses? Are they real persons? Where do they work? What do these companies do? Where are they located?
2.) Make a list of ideal candidates to reach out. Make a plan to contact them. Let's start with a linked in invite? Next write a message? A follow-up message? Make a plan of how frequent we will contact them. Make a plan for 1-2 Months. We reach out to them until we get the first one who is willing to hear us, and will talk about the product.
3.) Set up a chat? Set up a video call? Set up a demonstration of the product?
// Edit 1: I just stumbled upon @coreyhaines "How to get your first $1k, 10k, & 100k MRR" I would recommend everyone to take a look at this video: https://learn.coreyhaines.co/how-to-get-your-first-1k-10k-and-100k-more