How would you grow this?
Need a bit of help or inspiration to help grow your thing?
- Post your product below.
- Give us some context of where you are what you've tried.
- Then await feedback and ideas from other indie hackers.
And of course, support other people's products by giving feedback and ideas too.
zohunt.com - An applicant tracking software that helps companies attract, manage and hire staff.
I have been cold emailing hiring managers, recruiters, and HRs. Out of 10 emails, I often get 4 "NO "and 6 ignored. I try to follow up but that hasn't helped. I am very active on LinkedIn but that hasn't helped.
One of my startups is in the HR Tech space and we sell to HR, Recruiters, Talent Acquisition teams. It's a hard sale with a long sales cycle and a lot of no's.
But lucky for you, the ATS is something that people understand how to buy, and have been in the business of buying for years.
The challenge is that it is really hard to get companies off of their existing ATS, for a lot of reasons:
1.) the perceived work of data migration is almost immediately a showstopper.
2.) there is a tremendous amount of social proofing in our industry that is needed to build trust.
3.) The ATS market is really fragmented, but the big players (Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, SmartRecruiters, Jobvite, etc) have a lot of brand recognition and it is hard to compete at times against that.
4.) Changing ATS's usually means changing their business processes, which most companies are hesitant to do.
5.) ATS's at companies of a certain size need to be compliant with a lot of data storage, and EEOC initiatives
6.) If you're targeting really small companies (often times without an ATS right now), they're not at the scale to where they need to buy an ATS to manage their process.
But all this said, it doesn't mean you're out of luck when it comes to bootstrapping an ATS company--it will be hard, but here are a few things you might consider doing:
1.) Pick a niche--don't build an ATS for every type of company. For example, find the unique hiring and funnel challenges for a CPA's office and build an ATS that helps a CPA's office hire their team with unique features for that niche.
2.) Provide data migration as a free service for switching to your ATS. This is one of the big hurdles a lot of ATS vendors face in getting people to switch ATS's (even the bigger ones).
3.) Rather than emailing about your product, offer to provide a 15-30 minute consultation for their hiring process (use this to learn their unique challenges)
4.) Tie your product back to ROI--HR practitioners like seeing this
5.) Check out my business partner's other business which helps HR practitioners buy HR Tech, to get the perspective from the other side of the table. Here's a link to his "Buying an ATS" page: https://www.selectsoftwarereviews.com/applicant-tracking-systems
If you'd like to chat more, I'm happy to. Send me an email at yash@nextwavehire.com
Do you have a blog? Maybe you could make a free screencast series on Youtube, showcasing the software?
I don't have a blog yet. On my list is to start using Ghost this month. I will also try to do screencast but how do I get the right audience to share with them?
My best advice would be to use industry jargon for SEO purposes and posting your content to places where HR managers meet online.
How many emails have you sent? I think you need to send 50-100 to get 1-5 qualified leads.
What is your target geographical market? Are recruiters already using popular ATS software or is the market still underpenetrated?
Can you share your cold email here?
Hi Louis,
Nice to e-meet you. I saw multiple job openings on your website and decided to reach out.
I run Zohunt, a recruitment software that helps companies attract, manage and hire top talent. At my previous workplace, I got fed up with managing hundreds of applicants via email and spreadsheet and decided to build something simple and efficient.
I'm curious, how are you managing dozens of jobs and probably thousands of candidates? Would you consider switching?
I'm looking for all the feedback I can get to make sure we are building the right product. Even if you don't think our solution hits the spot, I'd love it if you could tell me why.
Thank you so much in advance
--
Emeka Onu
zohunt.com
Right. You could definitely improve that email.
Here are the two main problems with it...
You'll want to reverse both of those points...
Good luck!
100%. This email looks like 99.9% of the cold emails I get, which get ignored or marked as spam.
Compare to this one:
https://twitter.com/alexhillman/status/1112019060181659648?s=21
In addition to everything Louis mentions in the previous comment, he proves that he's done a bit of very real research and proved it within the first line. Not generic info like "I saw you had jobs posted" but things unique to me that prove this email was actually written for me (or at least the first few sentences were!)
He also gets very clear that he understands my problem, and shows exactly how he can solve it. No questions to take up my time or "start the conversation" but direct, clear value to me.
I responded to this email within a few hours.
I love whenever you dig out that email example. It's brilliant.
Have you considered offering a free 30 day trial, as well as a limited offer for a discount for the first year?
As it stands, your email does not offer anything to the viewer except more work.For this reason I would also personally scrap the last to paragraphs.
You have to make trying out your service an urgent priority. They have to get something right now if they sign up, or they have to lose something very soon if they don't.
As for feedback, if you can get people to sign up for a trial, you can also get them to give you feedback; if they don't convert to paying customers, you can always email them and ask them why.
Prospects don't want to hear you're still building the product or asking for feedback. You need to sound like you know what you're doing. You can ask for feedback much later in the conversation.
If you're still very early stage, you might want to focus on people who like to use software, eg typically people in tech.
Try to change the "I"/"You" ratio to like 0.2 or something.
GG| - Letterboxd/Goodreads for Video Games. Keep track of everything you want to play, see what friends are playing, discover new games.
Pretty much the only thing I've done for growth is followed advanced searches on Twitter and interact with as many people as I can. I've currently got 9000+ users, but I haven't officially launched premium yet so I'm sitting at about $27 MRR with 12 subscribers.
I'm not a big gamer, but my kids are.
Do you have groups? I could see that being useful.
As a parent I'd love something to help find suitable games for my different aged/abled kids.
Admittedly, I haven't done a ton on the social side of things (features) yet. But those are coming. I know that will help a lot.
This is very cool! I used to spend the majority of my time making games and always excited to see gaming related IH projects 😎
Have you considered content marketing? This seems like a natural way of promotion where you talk about some of the trending games (blog, videos, twitch)
I have thought about it but I haven't really explored what kinds of things I'd like to do. I know blogs are good for SEO but I don't like writing... and I know videos/twitch are great in the gaming community but I'm a bit camera shy haha. I think I just need to suck it up and try some things and see what works
@theBrandonWu I just checked out your profile and website :D Are you still heavily involved in the gaming community or are you more hands off now? I see that you started a game production company. That's super rad! I'd love to make some more connections with people who run studios
@sircharleswatson Still involved in the community but definitely not as much as I used to now that I am focusing on markd.co. Feel free to email me at brandon.wu.com[at]gmail.com - happy to connect! I definitely see potential for distribution and discovery with GG| , particularly for indie games that might not get as much press as AAA titles.
ex. a friend of mine grew their gaming community primarily on Facebook Live
Ideas for https://trackmylift.app welcome. Haven't yet released it. 31st August 2019.
My ideas are;
Facebook ads
Product Hunt
Hacker News
Word of Mouth
Contacting local gyms for local exposure
Flyers for local exposure
Forums where my audience live (like fitness forums, bodybuilding forums etc)
Lots of fitness people on Instagram too. I would give that a look.
Yeah on Instagram now, will make more effort to properly connect with people in my post-launch plan, which i'm so excited for! 👏🏻 Thanks @rosiesherry You've been great help across a few posts recently!
IMO, you have two major different target groups, 1. Users and 2. Promoters.
Users would be people actually tracking their own lifts.
Promoters would be people who won't use the app themselves, but could give highly qualified recommendations. That would be gym owners, personal trainers, community moderators (like Bodybuilding forums, fitness forums, bloggers, podcasters, etc.).
Unless your product is so much better than the competitors that promoters start pushing it on their own through word of mouth, you'll need to ask them do so, and that will require you to pay them.
On the other hand, it's really difficult to stand out in the App store without paid advertising.
So I would then think... which group is the biggest bang for your buck? Maybe you could give an affiliate code to personal trainers that gives them £1 for every signup that uses their code... they could have their new clients sign up, and watch them put in their code. Or maybe you ask to be the "official" app of a local gym, and they'd charge you £XXX for the sponsorship. Or maybe PPC ads directed at users will work out cheaper per install for you. You definitely can't know for sure unless you try both!
Thanks for the input!
I've already taken the Promoter option onboard and have 10 PT's onboard to push my app out to their clients and this is just local. I have a coaching portal in the making as well which I have marketed to my potential PT's who are onboard which will be useful for them pushing workouts out to their clients and their clients then tracking their lifts through the app and giving the PT a "client dashboard".
But that's another story 🤣I do believe, yes, my product will beat the top gym workout apps on the market at the moment, I've developed this with 6+months of research into market leading apps and also being a competitive bodybuilder myself and working alongside a pro and beginner for mixed input it's been amazing.
I think Facebook ads will be amazing for this as it's a real easy audience to target and bring potential traffic to the website, which i'm excited for. It'll keep the fire burning after the initial launch i'm hoping.
What about starting by talking to people face to face ? your friends or wait out of the gym.
Yeah that's a brilliant bit of advice. Will definitely be doing this anyway 💪🏻
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Hello 👋
https://sentienhq.com/ - our first product is an all-day wearable audio headset.
We're making a HW product that will come with and App. Currently, we're at the development phase and plan to launch pre-order and on sites like PH this fall.
All the tips on successful launches include: have a community to support you before your launch. At first we thought that you build the community through for example the launch on PH...
From the efforts we've tried so far we have a bit of traction but not enough. How would you go about growing a product that uses technology that is not well known so people have difficulties imagining how it will function in reality?
Perhaps a video would help but we don't have the actual product in our hands just yet.
Any tips are much appreciated! 🤗
I think a video would definitely help. I think it'd be good to move up some of the photos / infographic on the homepage up to the top - the ocean picture confused me a bit when I first arrived on the site.
I am also thinking a more description headline/tagline might help people understand the product. My first reaction to an "all-day wearable audio interface" is: What is this and why should I be interested? I'd want to see the benefit/value as soon as I land on the page.
I follow a few youtube creators who talk about consumer electronic devices and gadgets - perhaps you can do a preview with a few of these influencers to raise awareness? Some of them have massive reach!
thank you for the feedback Brandon! Would you mind sharing the youtube creators you follow? I have a few in mind but I haven't devoted proper time to this topic, yet.
I mostly follow https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee for mobile news and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVYamHliCI9rw1tHR1xbkfw for general computer/laptop news. They talk about headphones some times too - and you can probably find more from related videos that YouTube suggests :-)
I don't have much experience to give you real advice in the business side but I am sure that you have to put much efforts in your landing page :) .
emojihunt.io - Emoji domain generator. Monetizes via affiliate links.
I haven't done much to get it to work, honestly. Now I'm more interested in selling it than I am in getting it off the ground because I don't have time for it.
https://userships.com - Affordable user experience solution (session replay + web and behavior analytics)
In Beta for 3 weeks (saw some great traction through PH and IH). We went live a week ago and have just started doing small bits of outreach.
Would love to hear any ideas or pointers :)
Offer to do a free consultancy and service using your tool so that you can write about the experience afterwards.
pagefate.com - free, customisable, hosted status pages & incident management software.
Listing on software comparison pages & WoM. I didn't start growing it and still wonder what would be the best strategy here. What do you think?
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Thanks for your tips! I definitely agree that a demo / some examples on the home page would be a good idea. I'm currently collecting 2-3 bigger organisations for a case study. So far there are a lot of hosters using it. Even a university & a bank signed up. I'm really thrilled about the response so far.
followgithub.org - Extension that allows you to follow GitHub organizations and receive notifications in the main feed whenever a new repository is created.
I have recently finished developing the first version. After that, I have been trying to interact with potential users (those who had interacted with a no-code version of the current setup), have decided to open-source the extension after realizing in those discussions that people don't trust browser extensions easily.
I want to launch the tool and increase its adoption out of the current user network, have tried putting on /r/sideprojects but it didn't catch up.
Would love to receive any ideas for https://podboxer.com a newsletter recommending podcast episodes for entrepreneurs. I give my 3 takeaways on each episode I recommend. Send out 2x per week with 3 recommendations in each.
I’m at approx 200 subscribers as only recently committed to make it work as something that could earn revenue.
Been testing various channels but spread too thin. Cold outreach on LinkedIn works but not so scaleable. Have recently started making an effort on twitter posting content. Also started posting the content on LinkedIn today. Will see how that works.
The biggest driver has been “sponsoring” another newsletter I recently acquired.
Tweet about each newsletter and tag the podcasts that you mention into a threaded Tweet. Leave a link to your newsletter in your last tweet.
Exactly what I’ve started doing. Thanks for confirming I’m doing the right thing 🙏
event1.io - Launch your event, engage attendees, and get actionable insights with a modern mobile event app and simple event registration software
Mostly I have just been cold emailing conventions/conferences without much success. The customers I have, I got via referrals from my first customer. I have a referral program but since creating it I have not gotten any customer from it.
Yeah, it's hard. I often get pitches from all sorts of services related to events, most of them come too late as we already have made our choice in what we will use and it's too much hassle to change.
Perhaps try targeting meetups that are big and have a chance of turning into real/paying events?
Yeah, I've found that I need to catch them when they are just starting to plan for the next year. That timing is hard to determine.
Targeting large meetups is an interesting idea. I'll have to try that out!
https://letterfromyou.com - Service where we mail handwritten letter for businesses with handmade paper and wax seal.
I have been just reaching out to businesses writing cold emails. So far, most of my customers discovered me somehow through browsing through the web.
I think I've mentioned this to you before at some point - what about cold letters sent to prospects?
"discovered me somehow" I would ask current customers how they found you.
designremotely.co - Helping designers break into the world of Remote Design
I've been sending out a weekly newsletter every Tuesday for the last 8 months. Currently sitting on 500+ highly engaged subscribers. I've nearly doubled this from 280+ in recently weeks by messaging into various Slack Groups and other communities.
Looking for other ways to grow this list whilst maintaining the quality of the audience?
Also looking for friendly ways to get companies intersting in Posting a Jobs directly to the community?
The feature is there but I've not been actively pushing it out of fear of the unknown more than anything else: designremotely.co/post-a-job
Content/articles to help improve it from an SEO perspective? Interviews with designers who work remotely?
moviemedium.io - Predict Rotten Tomatoes scores against your coworkers in Slack
I'm way deep down, hidden in the Slack app directory. I've spoken with friends and colleagues to get about 50 people playing. I've reached out to one movie commentator/influencer and considered that avenue, but haven't explored deeply yet.
I still love the idea of this, I meant to start using it but haven't.
Maybe focusing on the idea that it is a network that people own themselves and are in control and write some articles on that concept?
Thanks @rosiesherry. We are exploring some come content topics at the moment. Going to focus on content + viral features going forward and test these to see if they are effective - fingers-crossed!
360feedbackpro.com - It's a site that lest you perform a 360 feedback review on yourself without having to wait for someone else to do it. You setup a feedback request with the people you want to give you feedback and we email them to get them to complete a review.
I've just finished building out the functionality and have been making some tweaks based on feedback from others.
I'm thinking my next steps are probably going to be cold calling/emailing HR reps to see if I can on board a business customer. I'm not sure the best way but since it can save HR time by taking the load of managing 360 feedback off of them, they may be the best ones to go through.
Any thoughts?
Give away some free access in return for them sharing feedback/results on LinkedIn.
can't load the CSS, looks messy https://imgur.com/a/k6HCLk2
Thanks for letting me know! I didn't realize firefox handled preloads differently than other browsers but should be fixed now.
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I find it strange that clicking on locations/images that it takes me to a map. I'd want to see more info about the place with comments from people.
I think for these kind of things long term content is important for SEO, you want to capture people wanting to head over to Bali. So any kind of articles or more descriptive listings will really benefit.
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Participate in local online communities, do those exist? Bali for expats type forum?
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Do you have a link?
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