Marketing doesn't have to be hard. Here's how to get started.
From my short time in the community here, I've come to realize that many Indie Hackers have got no clue about how to market their products or SaaS.
You might even be one of them.
Others dread marketing. They don't like it. They would rather implement useless and pointless features that don't matter rather than showing their work to the world.
Maybe that's you.
But here's the thing, if you don't make any sales, you don't have a business. You've got a hobby. To make sales, you need to do some marketing. It can be easy. You just need to figure out a way that works for you.
If your product can be helpful to others, it deserves to be found. If it solves a problem, you deserve to get paid.
So let's get started. Grab a piece of paper and a pen. Take some notes. We're going to make your marketing plan.
The first step is to figure out who Who you want to work with?
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Find an audience, observe and/or interview members of that audience
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Build a persona based on data from those observations. This persona will guide all your interactions with your customers. It will help you choose the voice and tone you use in your communications. It will also tell you where to go to reach them. The more complete it is, the better. Base it on real and observed data.
Here is what your persona should contain:- A name
- A photo
- The demographics (gender, age, location, marital status, family)
- Their goals and needs
- Their frustrations
- Their common behaviors
- Their personality
- Their preferred channels
- The brands they like
Note: You might need more than one persona. For instance, if you're building a marketplace, you'll have sellers and buyers.
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Now that you know who you're talking to and what are their pains, marketing will be much easier. The next step is to find a platform that works for you that is also used by your audience. In terms of platform, aim for one that has recommendations and discoverability (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Medium, Reddit, Quora).
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Go where members of your audience are. Put a link to your product in your profile description on that platform. Then, be helpful. Be kind. Answer members of that community's questions. Contribute. Create content. If the problem you're solving is important enough, members of that community will mention it. This is where you mention your product while providing value.
TLDR;
▶️ Find who you sell to and how you solve their problems
▶️ Go where they hang out online
▶️ Show up and help them
▶️ Offer your solution
Make money. 💰💰💰💰💰💰
In case you've gone through all that and you're still not sure how to go about marketing your product/startup, you can reach out to me on twitter.
If you want, I am also building a tiny SaaS called Marketing Cards. My goal with it, is to help founders like you to get your feet wet with Marketing.
The hardest step is the first one. Just take it.
So the mantra I keep reading and hearing: “you can’t just build you gotta talk to people.” “It’s not good products that win its well marketed ones”…etc
I’ve consumed tons of marketing content, and read similar to your post in a book called the 1 page marketing plan.
in theory it all sounds good and straightforward, but when I came to apply it on my first product, doing the sales and talking to people was mentally tiring. I didn’t feel as good as when I was architecting and creating.
I just wished I could get back into the workshop and have someone else do the talking.
I was building a solution to a problem I didn’t personally have, for a niche I knew but no longer was a part of, so maybe I couldn’t resonate well with them, or I was forcing a wrong solution.
I ended up shutting the thing down, and it made me a bit averse to marketing, where I just wish I could find the right marketing partner and they could do the selling while I focus on what I enjoy, building.
I also find myself thinking “can’t you just get so good at building solutions that people can’t ignore it ?”
But writing this right now was eye-opening, I realised that this one time failure I had in marketing has made me afraid to fail again.
I’m currently building solutions to problems I face, and a voice keeps popping in my head “you need to create a landing page and start collecting leads early” “you need to learn about/validate your market” “you need to go out and talk to people” but I keep ignoring it and continue coding.
That’s the comfort zone though, I need to push myself to get out of it, and not be scared to fail again.
I wasn’t going to post this and was going to delete it since just writing it was therapeutic and reflective enough for me, but what the heck might as well click “post comment”
cheers martdi
You don't need to be all out either.
But you've got to get discovered somehow.
The Twitter #buildinpublic community is great and supportive.
Show what you're doing, screenshots, lessons learned and share your challenges.
Interact with people from the community.
A lot of founders make their first marketing steps this way. Find something that works for you.
If you like doing videos, do that. If you prefer writing, write. If you're good at reaching out, find people that could love your product and show them.
Marketing takes time. Don't expect to see results overnight. It's like coding. It takes time to build the perfect feature.
At first, the product sucks. That's ok. Your first marketing moves might fall short. That's also ok.
But if you want a chance at success, you need to at least do a little bit of it.
Right right yeah that makes a lotta sense, I’ll take it, thank you
Hi there,
As someone who loves the marketing aspect but lacks entirely in engineering/creating products, I totally feel where you're coming from. Marketing CAN seem tiring and even scary when you'd rather be focusing on your passion of building the thing, but I hope it hasn't put you off trying again.
I wonder, have you thought about journaling your progress AS you build your products? That way, it doesn't have to take too much of your time, instead you're just sharing the regular screenshot or progress report on twitter/a blog - maybe you could drum up interest that way.
Ultimately I think partnering up with someone who is good at the marketing side probably is your best option -- interacting with your target audience is really important.
Either way, good luck :)
Lifetime deals are incredible momentum generators that’ll help launch and scale your SaaS company. However, as has been repeated time and again, you should take the time to research it properly. Choose a platform which doesn't steal your profits but offers a founder-friendly deal terms with audit and advisory to helps you improve your product. And not just that but does launch marketing and outreach for your deals too. All the other giants out there charge a huge amount of share on the profit some goes to 80/90%. But out of all these market giant I came across RocketHub.com, they grow your business with you. They have a deal partner, elai.io and after a successful deal launch they ended up closing a pre seed funding round. They couldn't have done it without there help.
Hi @Rachna, I am not looking to offer lifetime deals. Not now and possibly not ever. I'm not even charging yet, and not looking to do it in the short term.
From the wall of text you pasted as a comment, I am pretty sure you haven't even took a single look at my SaaS. You probably even haven't read this post.
This is absolutely not a good way to market or offer a product. You should go back and read this article. The basics of good marketing is to make a connection. On a human level.
A generic copy/pasted message is not about being helpful. It is not about being genuine. This is purely spammy and won't get anywhere near the results you're looking for.
At least, tune and edit your message so that your prospect feels like you actually care.
The sharing is very good and suggests cooperation.
I'm Marketing 1 Saas on Shopify
Fordeer: Invoice Order Printer
Link: https://pdfinvoices.fordeer.io/
I'm preparing a big marketing plan for the product, I'm in the early stages of collecting data on social platforms and Email mkt.
I use the cold approach with product offers as well as Cold Email.
What needs to be done now is to ask for advice from experienced people to complete the product, then other marketing steps.
Thank you for sharing this. I have noticed that link to your website marketing card isn’t work. Not trusted page. Have a look.
I have discontinued it.
You can find the details here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/marketing-cards/today-i-decided-to-kill-my-side-project--NAMnpjkGwIvwpiSnPQk?utm_campaign=top-milestones-daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=indie-hackers-emails
Thank you for your advice! I will definitely keep it in mind as I start my marketing journey.
I am owner of talent as a service we match vetted and highly professional freelancer with client
How we are different from another talent as service
https://www.linkedin.com/company/rescue-insiders/
We not only source and screen talent from our available pool , we have contracts with multiple agencies and other talent as service companies so client have one place to search/hire all talent in one place
client can search/hire freelance talent all across globe from our pool across another talent as service
3 one payment and one contract
4. Free trail for top freelancer
subscription model
You can subscribe for services and get unlimited matching and unlimited swapping of talent
We recently got one big client that is generating 70k USD /month as MRR,
i need help with marketing can anyone here suggest any good books or resources to read or watch for learning about marketing?
I am 0% in marketing i need someone who is expert in marketing can guide me through the curated marketing for agencies , or can suggest me resource
i can pay for the same
Hi! We are Spade (https://spade.tools), a chrome extension that allows you to annotate and share it with others. We are currently very new to marketing and are having a hard time getting in contact with users. For Step 1, we have a target audience in mind. We tried to reach out to people via email, but our response rate is very low. What do you think we can do to get more audience interviews?
Cold e-mailing can work. I hear many people are successful with it.
If your succes rate is low, are a few things to consider:
Twitter and cold messages can also be an avenue you could explore. It makes it easy to find people in your target niche, you can connect in a more personal level.
You can also try recording a video showing your product. Maybe people don't book a call but seeing a video might change their mind.
True true :) I agree with "Be helpful. Be kind. Answer members of that community's questions. Contribute. Create content" as from the long-term perspective this is what helps you grow. I will also add one hack we've found works for most of the SaaS and will help you in short term - emailing campaigns:
If you want to know more about this, feel free to reach out to me :)
Great tips! I also think it's this new culture of if "I'm not good at something and don't figure it out, it just doesn't work." No you're doing it wrong or you need to hire someone.
Then there's also this: Not wanting to hire someone bc as the solopreneur they're supposed to be the star.
Overall, I think all this talk speaks to ppl's failures in their startups being broadcasted to social media, nothing more, nothing less.
Good tips for people who don't know anything about marketing. I am sure a lot of SaaS founders can learn from this and implement it for their businesses!
It's currently shows "Not completed" instead of "Completed". I will do like "Completed" first and then user clicks the button to turn into disabled "Completed". Once user hovers display "Revert".
If you have something other plans for this card action then execute it.
Hi @rajasimon, thanks for taking the time to check it out.
I am pretty aware that the UI is not optimal and there are definitely changes coming that way further down the pipeline.
What I'm working on right now is to have cards that allow you to pick your marketing strategy and show prompts based on that instead of the generic prompts you get right now.
The goal with that feature is to align your persona as a marketer with the strategy that works best for you and your audience.
I'm hoping to land this new feature somewhere next week. I also have a few bugs and quirks to fix.
Once again, thanks for taking a look.
Have a great day!
I start a new site on a freelance job, what is the best way to marketing
https://isitwork.com/
A marketplace is one of the hardest businesses you can build. You need to market to two different groups of people: Buyers and Sellers.
Without buyers, your business is doomed.
Without sellers, you can get around it by finding contracts yourself (but that will only take you so far as it won't scale).
Next, I would try to find a niche for the marketplace. Don't try to appeal to everyone like Fiverr (which feels like it's the inspiration behind your freelance job site). Also, don't target the low end in terms of pricing. You'll end up with shit customers.
Concentrate on One core skill you want to offer. If you become a freelance place for WordPress or Graphic design for instance, getting buyers and providers is going to be much easier.
You'll know who to target and where.
Once you've identified the core skills you're looking to offer, I would go on Twitter and DM people offering those services. Find somewhere between 5-10 providers. You could offer them free gigs (where they don't have to pay a listing fee or where you waive the commission, depending on your business model), in exchange for reviews/testimonials if they find a gig through your site.
Next, for the clients, I would do the same. Find people who complain/need help with what you offer. DM them and get them on your site.
Thank you. the listing is free. I trying to increase sellers now, and also, start FB marketing. But FB marketing not getting good results.
What can you offer to have more sellers?
As I said, you should focus on one core offering and not going too broad. Approaching freelancers with "Hey, I'm building a marketplace for Freelancers in the WordPress space" (for instance) is going to be much easier than I'm building a marketplace.
There already are general market places that are huge. Niche down and find a core offering that people need.
FB marketing (or any marketing for that matter) won't yield results unless:
Once you have that, you can start trying various ads to see if something sticks. This knowledge will inform:
For FB Ads, be ready to experiment. Start with low budgets and scale gradually when you get some results. There's no point with starting with a $500+/Month on ad budget unless you know it's going to work and it does on small scale.
thank you very much. ASAP will start email marketing.
This comes under content marketing ?
we are looking for content marketing ideas for our product www.istorylive.com
any inputs?
How well do you know your audience? What info do they need? Where are they online?
First, understand your customers. Then give them the content they need. Be helpful. Provide value.
If you already have some customers, interview them. Ask them how your product helps them. Then you can create a case study. Show the benefits.
Thanks! let me give it some deep thoughts to generate ideas around this.
Will validate with you if needed.