TechTalks - How do I take my next steps?
I'm looking for advice, on my side-project turned business. In May I started work building TechTalks.io a product for building tech communities, sharing talks/slides and tips with some power tools for event organisers.
It launched it on 28th May and I'm super proud of what I've managed to build in a short period. Since then I've been iterating and shipping (mostly) daily.
I decided it's something I want to commit to longer term so I left my job, and started contracting a couple of weeks ago to allow me to spend at least 1 day per week on it longer term.
I know how to build products and I've been involved in building tech communities for about 13 years. What I'm stuck on though is how to get adoption on the platform. I've got a ton of things on my roadmap for features but I'm starting to worry that I'm putting a lot of work into something people won't discover.
The growth side of things isn't exactly something I've had much experience with. If you were me how would you proceed? Should I just continue to develop the thing that I want to use and hope other people discover it and find it useful too or should I take a step back from developing the product and start to focus more on growth marketing it, if so where do I start?
Really like your website - looks great! Having validated several ideas now, I've finally struck an idea which seems to resonate and which has a decent niche. I've not had experience in growing a community but during the last year I have sent thousands of emails in order to find out if my idea was useful to someone.
So, from this I would say stop developing asap and start looking for customers. Something which took me a lot of time to realise is, it's not about having a fancy growth strategy, it's purely about reaching your audience. Find them and email them. I use linkedin, Skrapp.io and trypigeon.co in order to do this. It takes a bloody age to find contacts but it's worth it for the feedback you get. Some people are particularly helpful (surprisingly so) - for instance the last idea I worked on, I emailed someone I had spoken to months before for another idea and he gave me well over a hour of time to talk through his problems and how my idea might solve them. On other projects I have also been surprised at who responds - sometimes it's worth messaging the highest ranking person you can find - a lot of them love to talk to people with new ideas!
The likelihood 'people discover it' without hustle on your part is minimal. It might happen but your product looks great and now you are in the perfect position to just reach out to people to chat. When approaching people I would focus on 'getting advice' / 'doing research' whilst also dropping in your value prop. Be human and some people will respond and help you either pivot your idea towards growth or become a user and validate your current model.
Sorry if that's quite rambling.. It took me coding my first idea to completion before checking in with my audience to realise that customers need to be a part of the development process. It is certainly not scalable to talk to every user but in the early days, it just has to be so in order to fully understand what people want. Then down the line, look for scalable solutions. I think one of the podcasts once said, initially focus on one to one sales, mass marketing comes later.
Good luck!