List your product and how you got your first 10 customers
Hey Indie Hackers! Sometimes it feels like getting the first 10 is the hardest, and we often hear stories from founders after they have hundreds or thousands of customers/users--the "I haven't spent a dime on marketing and I get a lot of inbound/word-of-mouth" can be hard for people who are struggling to get the first 10 to hear. So what's your product and what specifically did you do to get your first 10 customers?
I got my first 10 (first 50 actually) costumers for Solfej from Reddit! I posted a demo on a couple of niche communities and the rest is history. So far I'd say 800 of my current ~1300 users are from reddit.
How did you post the demo? I tried this for an app I launched and people called me a spammer...
That's awesome--I've heard a few IH really having success like this from Reddit. I asked @armgitaar above about how to balance driving people to your product on Reddit without being too salesy, and it sounds like that's the key to making the Reddit channel work.
BTW, I like your product--I've played guitar since I was 7 (a lot less these days), but I'd love to brush up on my music theory.
We got our first 10 customers for Alpas, well let's say users/contributors/community members over customers since this is an open source web framework project, mostly be reaching out to coders using Kotlin for mobile development and who are looking to persist the skills they picked up with learning Kotlin into web development. We did this mainly by watching reddit and twitter to locate our community that exists, but don't yet know we exist. 😆
Also, we added some just from the network / community we gained from doing other projects that users enjoy.
Yeah, I think subreddits can be a great starting point. How did you balance commenting on those subreddits without being salesy? Some of them are pretty quick to ban members from posting sales-related posts. Any tricks for converting or moving someone from a Reddit post/thread to another conversation around actually using your product?
A big part of it is to answer questions that people have in which your product/tool is a legitimate solution and in a way that's not pushy but is more-so informative and helpful. Honestly, my co-founder is better at answering those questions than I am (I'm not the tech brains behind the operations) and he answers very gracefully and with technical expertise.
Also, a lot of the subreddits have a 'highlight my product' day or thread periodically which is the opportunity to more blatantly highlight products while following admin rules.
In terms of getting someone to actually use your product. Well, that's the trick. We can get 100 people from a subreddit to the site, but only 1 actually tries the product. That's not uncommon. The funnel tightens quite a bit from acquisition to activation. When a target user hits the site, how quickly do they go "hmmm... ok... ohh.. Aha! yes, I want this, give me give me!"? I believe our site quickly gives the Aha moment to the types of users we are targeting - we can best gauge that by seeing if they join our slack community or clone/fork the project on GitHub. Always room for improvement though.
This is a really helpful post--I agree, that coming from a technical perspective might come across as less salesy, then.
To your point about on-page conversion and activation, I read some interesting Neil Patel posts around tripwires and "micropurchases" that build to the ultimate goal. It sounds similar to what you're saying around someone signing up for a Slack community, etc.--the signup to that community is one of those "tripwires" or "micropurchases" that is on the road of building trust with your product and brand.
I think you need to define which you're looking for as they are not both equal.
A "user" could be a free, non-paying member of your site.
A "customer" is typically a paying member of your site.
Getting someone to signup for free and signup with a credit card can be two totally different approaches when building your first 10.
Agreed--users and customers are not necessarily equal. And the strategy could be different--but at the end of the day a "user" and a "customer" need to see value in a product to become either. And getting the first 10 people (whether they are users or customers) to see that value can be a similar hurdle at the earliest stages.
I haven't experienced this. At the earliest stages to gain a paid customer (beyond a trickle) required more from me than gaining a free user.
It's been a different paradigm for me.
I got the first 10 users for divjoy.com by sharing some work-in-progress shots to Twitter and collecting private beta signups on a landing page. Was made much easier by the fact that I was actively growing my Twitter following amongst React.js devs while working on my product (specifically by sharing React code examples). As @Coffee mentioned, work on growing an audience.
I agree with you and @Coffee on the benefit of having an audience before a product launch--an extreme example of this are the Sharks on Shark Tank being able to launch products at massive scale because of the audiences they've built. I think if you are just starting out though, building an audience from scratch can feel as daunting as finding your first set of customers. I agree that the friction of someone signing up to a newsletter or following you on social is much lower than pulling out a credit card, but I still think that it's a form of a "purchase" because they're buying into what you're saying enough to want to get more info from you later.
It sounds like your combo of sharing your works-in-progress with your followers while simultaneously building your follower count was a virtuous cycle. And that it probably helped you focus on building the right stuff.
Yeah, and as always there's nuance. Audience growing initiatives can end up being a distraction if they don't actually work out and it would have been better just to focus 100% on getting your MVP finished. I think the main thing is to just keep an eye on potential opportunities that may pop up prior or during product development. If you see an opportunity to quickly build an audience of target users then jump on it. That's kind of what happened with me. See https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1220495404568993792
That succession of events sounds like the perfect storm in building the audience and the product. I really like that.
The first 10 subscribers for my silly project comes from consistent content on Instagram and Quora over weeks. While my first 10 customers converted from 99designs and referrals.
Cool insights here and thanks for sharing. How did you use 99designs to advertise? I’ve never heard of someone doing that for a product.
For CarsXE API (http://api.carsxe.com) the first 5 or 10 customers were people I reached out to personally by looking them up on LinkedIn and then emailing them.
I wasn't sure what their email was so I guessed and to verify if my guess was right I used https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/ to see if I was on the right track.
EDIT: Sorry I misread your post, it looks like you didn't have an email address so it sounds like it was cold outreach. I like the "guess and check" approach with getting the email--that's worked for me in the past too. Not sure if you also tried to personalize the outreach based on seeing something in their profile, but that worked for me too (i.e. alma mater, city they live in, a recommendation they received from a colleague, volunteer group they're a part of, etc).
MY ORIGINAL REPLY:
Awesome! Did you reach out cold or have some sort of warm intro/connection to those people?
I have also tried the LinkedIn messaging (cold outreach) approach for a couple things, with the goal of just setting up a phone call, and the hit rate is still low--but that may also be an issue with my message.
A great tool for scheduling meetings via LinkedIn is (https://linkedhelper.com/). It automatically sends invitations with messages attached.
Over a 14 day trial it sent out 840 invitations with this message (Hi (name), I would like to connect because I am interested in your feedback. I recently left my job to launch Scribbl.co)
I scheduled 36 meetings in 14 days with people from my target audience.
I don’t have ten customers yet though. We have 3.
That sounds really efficient. I’ve used a similar tool that ended up getting banned by LinkedIn years ago, but I wonder if this one is less spammy. And it sounds like you can set your target connection type (2nd, 3rd, etc), title, and the message that is used in outreach which is already better than that other tool from years ago.
I don't think LinkedIn can ban tools like this any more.. see
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/parsers/congrats-web-scraping-is-legal-us-precedent--LzkPWy1mSEMqWDyuP2q
Also LinkedHelper is very thoughtful in its approach. You can set a cadence at which actions are taken that mimic human behavior.
I actually reached out cold but the key is to reach out to as many people as possible honestly.
Some tips that helped me are mentioning the person by name, their company, how your product can benefit them directly and you can give them options. For example, you can try to set up a call or ask them to simply check out your product and let you know what they think.
BTW--one of my friends started https://tiretutor.com and I'm forwarding him a link to your site. He's currently getting some data from another large data source, but he's trying to figure out other options.
And also, I grew up in Bowie, MD--I'm super familiar with Columbia, MD.
The first 5 users of Tipalink (https://www.tipalink.com/) were people I know personally who I reached out to, asked to join, and add the plugin to their websites. I even went as far as meeting a couple in person to walk them through it.
Of the next 10 users who signed up and activated a profile (which is necessary to get assigned a Profile ID for receiving tips), a few were people I met by networking locally and the rest found me on social media - most probably from the Facebook and Instagram ads I ran for a month.
Of the dozens and dozens of people (~100?) whom I contacted via cold emailing, not a single one joined and created a Profile. Sure, I had some (small %) responses, but no conversions. I realize it's a numbers game and I need to increase by outreach by like 10x, but I thought it's worth noting.
I like that some of your next 10 signed up from bespoke, in-person networking. I think seeing a real person behind a product can help to build trust.
It's also interesting about the cold emailing numbers--have you tried starting up that channel again on a larger scale?
I'm glad you mentioned trust. I often wonder how much of a role it plays when someone is deciding whether or not to try your product/service. It seems that if they see others doing it, especially those who they know/recognize, then it lowers that barrier to entry. I've received more sign ups out of the blue and out of my geographical area that I did early on, but I still feel growth is too slow.
I absolutely plan on sending out more cold emails. But I've been working on building more features and polishing the messaging. When I get back to marketing, I want to increase the chance of conversion by making sure (1) I'm communicating what I'm selling better; (2) I'm making it as dead-easy as possible to get started; and (3) that it all looks professional.
I think social-proof and trust is huge with launching anything--even a post on social media. It seems like there is some amount of engagement a lot of people are looking for in a post, product, blog, etc before being willing to put their stamp on it with a like, signup, comment, etc.
I think something that people forget is that even free products can require switching costs or investments in changed behavior. So having trust that a product works for others makes it much easier to take a leap of faith--whether that's a free trial, signing up as a free user, or putting down a credit card.
Indeed, very well said. It's much more obvious to me now, but wasn't at the start of my journey with Tipalink. I come from a dev background and am learning marketing on the fly!
I got them via paid advertisement, but our product has a customer lifetime value of more than 5k€. So it really depends on the product/service.
You're not going to like my answer, but... build the audience first :-) once your product is built you have a group of trusting people that are more willing to buy it from you.
Haha, fair. And I appreciate your answer--but to unpack it further, if this is something you did for your product(s), how did you find the first 10 people in your audience?
I totally agree with you that it's easier to convince people to buy from you after you have an audience of trusting listeners, but building that audience is a lot like getting customers--having them join the audience is almost like a micro-sale.
I guess I am hoping that this post is more of a thread/community style post where people can get inspiration from a specific example of another founder's steps to the first 10 customers.
At first no. So I'd build it and then 3 months later I'd say "now what!?"
Not really. Friction is WAY lower. You don't need to pull out a credit card to become an audience member :-)
Look through forums (like this one) for people experiencing problems. Create a blog post that walks them through a quick and easy solution, for their exact problem. Capture the value you provide (email signup). Go back to the forum and tell them about how you solved their problem.