Need help with finding my first customer
Hello to fellow indiehackers,
This is for the first time I am straight forward asking for something.
I've been working on this product for over 6 months now. I already had a few customers when I started working on this product but then crypto market crashed and they put a hold on their projects but I kept working on mine.
Now, I am closer to finish the MVP. I decided to get 1 customer now with with whom I would closely work, be like their dedicated developer and finish the MVP but this time somehow I am finding it hard to find the people to pitch.
About the Product
MetaRings for over 6 months now.
This landing page is bit outdated as I iterated a lot during the actual product dev but overall I am building a fun to use platform where anyone can create beautiful interfaces and smart contracts without any code and design skills.
I am mainly
looking for people who wants to launch their NFT collections or require smart contract mints. in next couple of months.
I Intend to work closely with you as I finish the MVP. If you require anything which is not in my roadmap i will dev and ship it.
Any suggestion or ideas or help will be hugely appreciated it.
Apart from this, if anyone wants my help, let me know. I am good with product design, UI/UX and coding. Always happy to help.
I've curated an Airtable of different growth strategies from Indie founders.
I believe you can find some strategies unde "Pre-sales/Launch" and "Monetization" from other indie hackers to help you with converting free users to paid.
You can download it for free. Cheers and all the best!
Thank you Yun :)
Hey Apurva,
Landing page looks great. Concept is really interesting. This is something I struggle with myself. I have been attending the DMZ's (a Toronto incubator) online lectures for early stage startups, and they recommended I start reaching out to people directly on Linkedin.
Maybe you could look for people have released small NFT collections and then see if you can find them on Linkedin or an email/contact. Ask how they experience difficulty bringing their projects to life, and maybe open the door to your product relieving that difficulty.
I'm working on a project in the crypto space, and I think ease of developer adoption is really important. You should keep hacking and talking to users!
Hey, thanks for liking the landing page and concept :)
I actually never thought reaching out to people who have already minted their large NFT collections. I am not sure if they would still require my help (As their collection is already minted) but I guess it will still be worth talking to them. Thank you for this. I can def reach out to them. Already follow many of them.
Working solo somehow makes us invisible to lots of simple things. Thank you again, Mikaal.
I wouldn't even limit to large NFT collection. Maybe people tried minting a few, or just even a single one, and got discouraged or roadblocked.
There are lots of good options already available if you want to mint just few or single piece. But you are correct, I should just stop making assumptions here and reach out and see where I can help them with.
Who do you know that wants to Build NFT and WEB3 Apps? If you don't know anyone, honestly why did you pick this as your product idea?
I already had few customers ready to pay when I started working on this project but then market crash happened but they put a hold on their projects.
Ask them who they know who is building. Good luck!
Note: I've shared this advice before, so I'll paraphrase it below:
First, you need to understand WHO is struggling most to solve the problem you want to address with your business idea. Be as absurdly specific as possible. What demographics, geographics, psychographics, or behaviors do they all share?
Then create a list of the watering holes where your dream customers hang out.
Armed with this information, the most promising channel strategy for YOUR business will reveal itself as the easy and obvious choice (i.e., low-hanging fruit).
From there, you can start running tests.
I did that before starting the project, I was seeing potential customers everyday on my feed but market crash has affected that a lot.
So it has become just harder now. I am not expecting a lot of traction and heavy grow this year but just a few customers will also save my product.
So, where are your dream customers hanging out?
You're posting here on Indie Hackers, but they may be congregating elsewhere.
That's where you want to be the most active (paid and/or organic).
My target audience is on mainly Twitter and on some of the discord communities.
Earlier they were in my feed almost everyday now I tried to do keyword search and explored a lot through profiles and content but found next to nothing.
If I start posting content, they will likely find me but it is s lot of time consuming (I will do that as well eventually but hoping to get just one customer as of now and focus time on finishing MVP)
Cold approach on Discord is hard in this field due to lots of scam and spams.
Now I am trying to cold approach on Twitter
and LinkedIn bit blindly who may or may not need my solution. I will see how it turns out to be in a week. But that's the only plan for me as of now.
This Indiehacker post was to get some strategies and ideas.
Gotcha. Well, a tool like EavesDrop may help you find your first customer on Twitter.
You can also perform solution validation interviews on UserInterviews. If your solution solves a problem or fulfills a desire for these people, they may become early adopters.
Thanks Erik, I am checking out these tools right now :)
Anytime! Best of luck.
Thank you :)
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Probably has nothing to do with your product. Crypto market collapsed.
Yeh, that has affected a lot but new projects are still being launched. Just the frequency is low. I expect slow growth but not zero. I think in a week I will know better as I will try more to find and talk with potential customers
I'd recommend building in public and built madepublic.io just for that.
I built it in public and dogfooded everything I did by posting on Twitter and I launched with a waiting list of 85.
New features coming soon too including following projects with notifications for updates and commenting on feeds so you might consider hosting your project on it and building in public through it
I am sorry but this is not helpful.
Really?
I'm just recommending the building in public as a way of getting a customer.
By posting about what you're building as you go, you build a rapport with potential users, gain feedback and along the way tweak your product to what your customers would want. A result of that is more people that want to use your product, which translates to your first customer.
Sorry to hear @api42 that you are struggling to gain customers. If you can afford £30/month, you can assemble a customer acquisition team from https://skilledup.life.
We provide free talent, unlimited, once subscribed. Now with 11,652 individuals from 92 countries. Do reach out if interested manoj.ranaweera@skilledup.life
Not as of now. I'll have budget for user acquisition after the beta launch.
So let me get this correct,you charge £30/month from companies to hire devs(free talent) but want the devs to work for free in the name of volunteering, so why are you charging £30/month from companies?
We provide Experience to improve people's career prospects.
We have both inexperienced, highly experienced and between.
Some join us to gain their first experienced. Some wants to transition their career. Some wants to gain more experience to do their current job batter. There are many reasons why people join us.
We a tech startup run from revenues we generate through subscriptions. We don't charge per volunteer. We charge to operate the service.
@rahul235 are you building a tech company? If so, do you plan to generate revenues? If so, why would you be different from us? All companies need to generate revenues in order to survive and grow. We can't live off thin air.