Tips on growing a Slack app
Hi, I was wondering if anyone had some ideas on how to grow / find customers for a Slack app? I built a Standup bot however most of my current customers have found it from the Slack directory from what I can tell. Unlike more traditional SaaS apps, I'm struggling a bit on how I should go about finding customers since there are pre-requisites in using Slack and running standups / agile processes at the company. Both pre-requisites seem difficult to prospect since it's usually not openly shared information.
Would love any suggestions or ideas! Thanks in advance
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One company I work with actually runs team standups, but (probably) doesn't know about the term "team standups".
The way they run these standups is in a separate channel where people post what they did yesterday and what their plans are for today.
Which made me wonder: How many Slack teams are out there that do something similar and aren't aware about Slack apps like yours?
I wonder if your product wording is limiting your reach. For example, instead of your headline and main offer being "Asynchronous standups forremote teams", maybe you could try broadening up to "Keep your team members accountable with asynchronous standups". And then explain what they are, etc.
Then maybe try cold emailing companies, asking that you want to do a short interview with them on how they keep team members accountable via Slack. Promise them some reach in returns; you'll be surprised to the length many companies go if you promise them exposure. After the short interview (it can be a template of a few questions), you can softly pitch your product as well.
This is amazing, thank you! I've always used the term standup so I think I just naively assumed that's what everyone refers to it as which is probably a big mistake on my part. I'm going to shuffle around that headline to better reflect what it is actually meant to solve.
Probably true for US-based companies. This is a company that's based in Eastern Europe so the term "standup meetings" is not very well-known here. I guess you'll find out the real answer if you randomly ask 10 biz owners from the US vs. from a non-English-speaking country. If it turns out that only international biz. owners are not aware of this, then making a separate landing page for them where you explain this whole concept could be a good idea.
Your product looks neat. I have one quick tip: definitely add open graph metadata to your homepage (all pages, really). I shared the link to your product in a number of Slacks I belong to and there was no lovely metadata unfurled explaining the product. That really helps when sharing links.
Thanks for the share and for pointing that out! The meta tags must have slipped through the cracks and never got added, but I've gone and added them now.
FWIW, one of the companies I shared it with really like the look of it. They wanted to know if they could customize the questions which your FAQs answered. Just thought I'd pass that along.
Just wanted to follow up in case you're still in contact with that company, but I've launched custom questions! The marketing page is in the process of being updated to reflect it, but it's fully launched in the app if they wanted to give it a try.
I appreciate passing that feedback along! It's pretty high on the list and should be out within the next couple weeks.
What about SEO and just writing content? Not sure about the niche and keywords, but maybe that is a viable long-term plan?
I think that is probably something that would work well, I could see some content marketing around standups and process being useful, thank you! I'm going to work on getting a blog setup for the site
Couple of ideas to maybe try:
Great ideas, thank you! I especially like the Twitter Lists idea, I'm going to give that one a try right away. Thanks again.
We are using an automated search for keyword combinations for our app that adds our potential customers to a "potential customer list". We use the free version of automate.io for this.
That's awesome, I'll check the tool out, thank you!