Next steps if you don't already have an email list?
There are a ton of startup stories that are at a few thousand MRR and are all sharing how they got there - and a recurring theme seems to be that they had an already existing email list to kick start awareness.
Then I see (a few on IH in the past couple days even) startup stories where someone's built the product and is now wondering what to do - my guess is they don't have that email list (also the bucket I'm in).
Are there good examples out there of people who've gone from zero to few thousand MRR that didn't start with an email list? I feel like those are what I need to start reading... or I need to start building an email list.
The folks who went from zero to a few thousand MRR without SOME kind of audience are either people who:
a) are or got very good at direct sales
b) got lucky (not reproducible)
c) had money to burn while they got there
Indie Hackers & bootstrappers can't rely on b and c. Indie Hackers need to learn how to punch above their weight class.
Sales is a path - and it's not bad to learn how hand-to-hand combat sales works. I generally encourage people to learn this kind of sales through freelancing and consulting. The FASTEST path to MRR is selling consulting retainers, but of course that still ties your income to your time.
Selling products without an audience (email list) is possible, but it's about the hardest path to take and unlike video games, business does not award any extra points for picking the most difficult path.
So. Can you build a list? Yes you can build a list. You should build a list.
Step one: reframe what an email list is in your head. Most people think "I am building a list of people who want my product." This CAN be part of it, but it's just one small piece of the puzzle.
The REAL value of an email list is having direct access to people who trust you.
Step two: start earning peoples' trust. @davidwparker mentions content in another comment, but as he suggests, content can feel like a grind if you a) don't know what to create and b) don't know who you are creating for.
The highest converting content (incidentally, the most likely to be shared as well) is content that educates or otherwise helps the reader solve a problem.
"Content" by the way doesn't need to be blog posts.
That's just a format. You can do list building with tiny free tools that people can sign up to use.
Instead of thinking "content" think of it like a teeny tiny product.
But I think that a lot of indie hackers overlook "content" because writing a blog post seems harder than sitting down to code.
And if you don't consider yourself a writer, I get why.
But try thinking about it this way: have you ever commented on a forum post with a useful answer? Do you think you could? If so, you can write a USEFUL blog post.
The key to content isn't volume - and it's not even exactly "quality" (though it can't be total junk either).
The key to building an audience is sharing things that help them solve problems they know they have. Meeting them where they are, and helping them, and then giving them a chance to follow you back to your site where they can say "I love what I've seen so far, what else you got?"
With this approach, you're not just building a list, you're building a system that helps people:
And over time, you get the opportunity to earn their trust.
Trust makes sales.
This is very good advice.
A few points to pick up on though..
I think that's true. Unfortunately, it also requires the benefit of hindsight. If you're already working on a product and have no audience, sales will get you results faster than audience building (although obviously you can do both at the same time).
Something else worth mentioning is that - unless you are your own ideal customer - you need to do at least some sales to really understand what you should build for your customer anyway.
This is probably where I would disagree most. I've been quite successful with direct sales (without any audience whatsoever and in countries where I knew fewer than 10 people and wasn't even fluent in the language).
But I'm not very good at sales.
And with this being over a few products, it can't just have been luck either.
I'm definitely not special. Most B2B founders I know who started something in a 'traditional, boring, offline' niche (software for gyms, playgroups, hairdressers, car dealerships, you name it) got to $5k MRR with no audience at all. Obviously at a certain MRR you'll have built an audience almost by accident.
But if you think about it, $3k MRR is just 30-40 sales at $100/month. That's less than most businesses spend on toilet paper in a month.
If you're genuinely interested in solving your customers' problem and choose a really important problem to solve, literally anyone can get to a few $k in sales within a few months via direct sales.
It won't be anywhere near as easy as if you do have an audience, but you're less likely to be building something your customers don't really need (your audience will buy stuff because they like you, not the product. Strangers generally won't). You'll also know a lot more about what you should be building, a lot faster.
There's no better test of whether you're solving a real problem than ringing up a complete stranger and asking for their time and money :)
None of that takes away from your excellent advice of how to build an audience though.
When you say you've been successful with direct sales, but are not very good at sales - are you saying even though you're not good you're still seeing success? Or is there a difference between direct sales and regular sales?
Yes, that's what I mean.
After 10+ years of learning, I probably am quite good at sales now (as in, I'm an effective sales person). But I'm definitely not a natural salesperson.
You really don't need to be though.
Spend ten minutes or so reading about the basics (eg on the Close.io blog)
Be a decent human being
Listen and ask questions (be genuinely interested in the problem)
Actually ask them to buy!
Do all of that and anybody, literally anybody can get a few $k in revenue (assuming the product is good etc).
I'm glad that I came back to this comment, because I was going to say: I know lots of self-described sales people who would fail in the same situation you described.
You may not consider yourself a "natural" but you've gotten good at it.
But most importantly, you confirmed my hunch: your sales fundamentals look a lot like audience building fundamentals! Which also explains the "audience by accident" comment in your original reply ;)
I'd be willing to bet that even if you're not a natural, from everything you've described and that I can see your instincts for listening and helping are quite good even if knowing how to apply them didn't come 100% naturally.
I've spent a lot of my last several years trying to reverse engineer the things that I do that seem obvious to me but are less obvious to others. The things that I've either learned or earned an instinct for, that others haven't. That gap is almost always wider than I anticipate it to be, and I don't say that to toot my horn...I say that because things like "listen and ask questions" seemed like an obvious instruction to me until I realized how many people don't really know how!
I think we're on the same page, though. Most peoples "instincts" for both audience building and sales are not good, but can be learned more easily than people believe.
Fun discussion :) appreciate this thread a lot!
Oh, one more thing: I think the reason that GOOD sales tends to "accidentally" build an audience is because good audience building is actually a lot of 1-1 interaction that happens in public and semi-public interactions.
When people think "audience building" they start to think about attracting as many people as possible, and overlook the easiest place to start which is helping ONE PERSON in public. Doing it this way means your 1-1 effort scales the interaction to continue helping others besides the individual you just helped.
#meta
There needs to be a book of selling for engineers, I'm sure that's a huge gap 🤔
FWIW, 30x500 is fundamentally a sales-focused course (broken into component parts of understanding your audience, creating things that earn their trust, structuring language to get and keep people's attention, and keeping products in line with what customers need the most).
Close to 60% of our 1000+ students are engineers, and from the feedback we hear it's the fact that we take sales and marketing concepts and break them down into repeatable systems...the whole thing tends to resonate with engineers pretty strongly!
Even closer to your point, we're planning a minor rebrand of 30x500 to make the course more descriptive and are leaning towards something like "30x500: Products that Sell" 💡
Love it, time to take a look
Nothing in those comments I disagree with. Thanks for taking the time to come back and elaborate.
🙌
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Your detailed responses are amazing, coming from a technical background I think I've definitely been overthinking just what getting sales looks like.
very good advice, thank you!
Ahh great response! You're right an "email list" doesn't necessarily mean an actual email list, that's a really good point.
And to also put your expertise out there where you can, I definitely struggle with not knowing if I even have advice worth sharing when there's just so much out there already, but I know I do, I just need to see those opportunities.
Throw away the idea of "there's already so much out there" - it's unproductive and doesn't really matter.
The fact is, even in categories where there is already a TON of stuff, you'll still find people struggling.
Is it because they haven't found the content? Maybe, in which case part of the advice you can offer is sharing some of the best advice you've found elsewhere, or even adding your own .02.
Is it because they don't understand the other content? This is an opportunity to really figure out where they are stuck and maybe for the first time, help them have that lightbulb moment. There's a big difference between having access to information, and actually understanding.
Is it because they don't identify with the person sharing the content? This one is the most rarely talked about, but I think one of the most powerful. Sometimes people need to hear the same thing in a slightly different way, or from a different person, who has a lived experience that they believe matches theirs.
These are just three of the ways you can get over the "but everybody else...." blues.
In terms of seeing opportunities for helping people, that's exactly what Sales Safari trains you to do. ;)
Great points, as you say there must be a reason they're asking - and the in-vs-out group experience isn't one I've thought about, but makes a ton of sense 🙏
Agreed. It's all about the email list. I'm building mine out slowly by making "good" content, but wow, is it hard to do.
With the exception of buying a list (I don't think that's a good idea), I'm not sure what the right path is.
As someone who works in the email industry I would highly disadvise on the use of bought lists. Ignoring legal issues it's quite hard to sell to an audience who don't expect information from your product.
Agreed, a large company I was at did that once and I was the one dealing with Campaign Monitor locking our account for huge "marked as spam" response. Lots of apologies and promises we weren't going to do that again, but we got it unlocked
I have always heard the same. However, I do hear folks using lists they did not create. So there must be something here.
Where/how are you making good content? Blogging on your own platform?
I used to blog on my own (davidwparker.com) and hope to start again. I'm probably going to sign up for dev.to and medium or something too.
I currently (well, not in a year, but will be again soon) make videos and post them to YouTube. I finally finished my personal site for those videos and launched yesterday/today: https://www.programmingtil.com/
Oh wow, love the idea! A suggestion, maybe add the versions to some of the tech like Webpack. I'd have a hard time initially knowing if any of the videos (https://www.programmingtil.com/topics/webpack) would apply to me since Webpack and everything it ties together changes so quickly.
Yeah, I really need to do that. Thanks for the suggestion!
I think the value of building an email list yourself is that the people on that list are engaged with what you do, and you have a relationship with them. So each email is worth more to you than it would be for other people.
But you can also build an "instant" email list. It will just have to be larger to compensate for the fact that you don't have a relationship with these people. Sometimes it's more efficient to build a large list of "strangers"emails than to invest the time in building a smaller list of emails of people that know you
Check out question 2 of this AMA with Gustaf Alstromer, a YC partner who led growth at Airbnb: https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-ama-with-yc-partner-gustaf-alstromer/
Basically, send 100 emails to customers. If the email is clear and concise, getting 1-5 users is expected if the product is valuable. Find customers through linked in or through an online directory, get their email addresses using a tool like Hunter.io, then send emails.
I've been doing this the last couple weeks and it seems to be working
This is illegal as of GDPR, right? For EU citizens anyway. Not sure about the reality in the US.
You mean using tools like Hunter.io to guess email addresses is illegal, or sending cold emails to businesses using the publicly disclosed email addresses on their website?
My understanding is that sending cold emails for business reasons to individuals without a prior business relationship or their opt-in is illegal. If you send an email to info@ you're fine, but otherwise not. I'd like to be wrong, but when I spent a few hours reading into it that was what I came away with.
Thanks, that's interesting. I looked into it a bit and it seems like some countries require opt in and some require opt out, as long as you meet certain other criteria (that i don't fully understand)
So seems like the best option is to just email generic business email addresses at least for EU businesses
I can help clarify things a little here (I'm in the UK) - If the email addresses you are obtaining are publically available, i.e it's on a business website or on LinkedIn for example, then you are free to use that information - because the person the email belongs to has willingly made it available to you (and anyone).
If however, you are obtaining email addresses that are not publically available, then you must obtain express permission from the owner (if the owner is an EU resident) and ensure the owner knows exactly why you will contact them, before you do.
Failure to do this could lead to prosecution and a fine of (I can't remember for sure but I think..) 18months of your business revenues up to €40million.
100% agree on the value of an email list, I probably should've been prioritizing that a year ago 🤔
Cold contacting is also where I'm left thinking my start is, probably through LinkedIn - you're seeing ~1-5% response rate with it? That doesn't seem too bad if they're actually signing up
The 1-5% rate is from Gustaf's AMA. In the past I've done cold email campaigns to get user interviews / signups and ~5-10% seems about right.
I just started a campaign last week for a product and did 50 cold emails and will probably get 1-3 sales from that. I was sort of lazy and just emailed the default "info@domain.com" email address for a lot of them so that's probably a lower yield than actually emailing a specific person.
Is your product a physical product? Or saas? I'd love to see an example cold email you've used
It's a software product. Here's a cold email I sent to a customer that I'm currently in pricing discussions with. I sent this to the generic "info@xyz.com" on the website of a 400-person company. The CEO responded the next day and copied 3 members of the BD team:
Subject: "Partner with companies [in specific niche]
Email body:
"Hello,
I'm hoping to reach someone in your business development group. My organization, [name], maintains a database of [type of companies], and I wanted to ask if this data might be helpful to you as a source of sales or business development leads.
The database includes [feature x, y, z].
If you are interested in learning more, you can visit our website, and I'm happy to answer any questions as well. I've also attached a complimentary report on [our sector] to give you a sense of the data we can offer."
I dig the simplicity of it 👍
In the same boat. I can only share my experience.
It's tough, but the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is there. Getting from 0 to 5 was a little harder than getting from 5 to 20, the same was true for 20 to 100. Hope that trend keeps on going. Progress seems to be at least somewhat exponential, and that is pretty awesome.
But it's still a grind. For a non-marketer, a little shift in perspective is needed. This type of marketing is more of a grind game, so every single subscriber is a win.
Experimenting is huge also, I try to keep it simple and only test out two different strategies at a time and see which one works best.
One thing is certain: every email list must have had 0 subscribers at some point, right?
I think that marketing grind is what I didn't... expect (?), but I'm definitely feeling it now.
How did you experiment? Google ads vs Facebook? Or PPC vs blogging?
@satvikpendem has done a good job building an email list from scratch.
I would say that email lists are just one of many forms of content marketing. Some people blog to raise awareness about their topic and product, some people make videos, some people do webinars, the good people do all of the above. It comes down to marketing. Obviously it's a little easier if you already have an email in your back pocket to start selling your product, it's still the same idea if you don't already have it - you gotta start growing it... or doing whatever kind of content you want to make.
You could also find podcasts that might align with your product and see if they are open to having you as a guest to talk about your product, or you could sponsor an episode of the podcast, you could do some guest writing on other blogs, then there is always facebook and google ads (which would lead people to content or sites that you have created)
the possibilities are endless! now, of course this is just heresay from other things that I've read or watched. I haven't actually done it myself, but the concepts are pretty straight forward. I often think the same thing myself about getting started actually selling a thing once I have it. I've read something a few times on this site: having a SaaS business or some kind of online thing you're pushing... really if you built it yourself it's 20% coding and then 80% marketing... actually getting it in front of people is the adventure.
At the end of the day, people have come before you and done it.. so I know you can too! :D just depends on if you have the tenacity and patience to get there :)
Truth. Content marketing (maybe just all of marketing 😂) is definitely my weak spot - building a product is infinitely easier for me to walk the path to MVP.
I've also done a bit with Google ads with pretty meh success, so definitely more to explore there, but I keep reading these how-to posts hoping to find more guides on "no customers to new customers" rather than "previous customers to new customers".
I'm a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. He put this out which is basically his model for creating content and marketing himself (as a personal brand) His marketing agency does the same for the brands that they work for. May give you some ideas.
https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/the-garyvee-content-strategy-how-to-grow-and-distribute-your-brands-social-media-content/
A lot of people have made a lot of money with google and facebook ads - so they work - it's just making sure that you are executing them well! good luck!
Yeah I've read lookalike audiences are the key to conversions, but back to chicken and the egg with needing that initial seed of emails to generate that. Will take a read, thanks!
That is the problem of many startups.
What to do?
Of course, inbound and outbound marketing. Do all the best to create value and to be unique.
The way of outbound perspective is to find new connections through outreaching people in your niche those might be interested in your product.
Start from the smallest like finding people that will be glad to test your product and to leave feedback. And the influencers that can spread the word about your product. It sounds like direct contacting and direct sales. Yes, it is. Soon you'll get a result and people will share their thoughts and recommend your service to others.
I recommend you to get acquainted with the article about how to find clients. You can use this advice as well as for growing your email list:
https://snov.io/blog/how-to-find-clients-for-digital-marketing-in-2018/
Disclaimer: I work at Snovio. This platform helped many startups to find their clients. Many use us for lead gen purposes. For small companies, we have a big trial to start as we know how it's hard to start :)
I've wrestled with the idea of starting an email list for years and have recently reignited the debate in my head. I have a free game for iOS, Android, and web that makes money from ad revenue and some IAPing. It's MRR is about $3.5k. I could never see the benefit of having an email list because my product is free but if an email list could significantly increase my number of downloads, then I would certainly do it. What do you all think? Would an email list be beneficial to a free game? At the very least I figure I can reengage existing customers with emails about new features and bug fixes. Any thoughts?
It depends on what you do. I’m at ~8.5k/month, no email list whatsoever but my business is to sell my mobile app for a one-off fee. It’s been growing for a few years and obviously it’s not sustainable forever. (although the market is huge!)
I’ve just recently started thinking of building up an email list but don’t really need it at this stage considering my monetization model.
It all depends on the business. I started promoting my design service using only IH, PH and Angel List and some of my friends on FB wanted to hire my team. It is not so complicated and of course you need to offer tons of value for your subscribers and then they will be willing to sign up for your newsletters and open your emails. The success is easy when you do right things and have a good plan ))))
Promote as in advertise? Or promote as in just spreading the word?
Advertisement is like a shot into the darkness. You need to spend a certain amount of money to take control of the working processes. When you know where your TA is you can make money.
I found growth hacks to employ a group of virtual assistants who had email engagement with my target user. During the conversation they asked if the target user would like to receive tips from my company by email. And some percentage of them gave this permission. I spent two years and built a list of 19,000 to start. Since that time the growth hack has been shut down. So there are ways.
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Hmmm 🤔