What are some good marketing ideas besides content marketing for small SaaS side project?
Content marketing is really time-consuming.
If I want to quickly validate product-market fit, what are some other ways?
I think there is Facebook Ads & Google Adwords. What else beside it?
Hey Milan,
I've heard good things about @mijustin and his tiny marketing wins
https://www.indiehackers.com/@mijustin/i-spent-30k-looking-for-product-market-fit-60ec0a2092
Besides that have you looked into
Thanks @patrics!
The best resource I have for generating traffic is this PDF:
https://tinymarketingwins.com/indie/
If you're looking to quickly validate your idea, you can check out this video:
https://youtu.be/IxKdPBDbdbY
Thanks. This was the answer I was expecting. I will try to partner and do some affiliate incentive.
It really depends on what market your side project is in.
There are some tactics, but to get specific would need more info about your product, the benefit and what your strengths are.
Some generic ideas:
Giveaway to a gatekeeper and their audience.
Become a poster child for a service you use.
Influencer marketing.
It depends what you're doing and who you're selling to.
I typically spin up an instance of my Side Project Marketing/Sales Checklist and start working through it. Once I find a strategy that works, I rinse and repeat.
I also like @mijustin's book/course too.
https://narrow.io
I built a product for this called Narrow. Essentially, it helps you build a Twitter following of users that are likely to be interested in your project, and it's cheap compared to running ads :)
One really great way that I've found to get initial validation is to think about where the people you are trying to target spend their time, and then go there and offer your product/service to them. Ask them for feedback, etc.
For example, if you are trying to offer a product or service for moms, where would you go to sell to them?
First, I would check out sub-reddits that might apply:
Do a little research before posting and make sure that your post works within common posts on that sub-reddit.
Then I would head to Facebook, and I see that there are a number of Facebook groups specifically for moms:
Once again, make sure that you're framing your offering in a compelling way. But, if it's compelling and people sign up or visit your site, you should be able to tell if you have some product-market fit without spending too much time or money.
Content Marketing and validating product-market fit have nothing to do with each other. What are you trying to acomplish?
The fastest way to attract some clients to use your product or service is to post it to some forums or communities. When your first clients are satisfied with your product or service, they may recommend it to people around. And, I think you should also carry on content marketing later on if you want more people to find your product or service.
Take a look at this post: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/how-did-you-get-your-first-10-customers-1f63a7e040
Sales.
How exactly?
Research companies you think may have the problem you are solving
Write a short, honest, effective cold email to the relevant person at that company, showing you understand their problem and want to help solve it. Ask for a meeting/call to chat about their experiences of the problem.
Listen, work out whether your product is a good fit for their problem and how to use their own description of the problem as a sales pitch for your product. Quantify where possible.
Use information from #3 to sell product to them. Based on feedback about problem from #3, you may have to adapt product to find product-market fit - this is fine, you're here to learn. Remember, you're selling a solution to their problem, not 'your product'.
Follow up, repeat, learn from your mistakes. It's amazing how many emails/calls it can take to sell to someone who is actually really interested in buying your product!
That's a rough and ready guide. Obviously much more to it, but that information can easily be found on the internet :)
Good luck!
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
@andreboso
Very true! Thanks for pointing us to that article/video, will definitely go through it!
This was much better than I expected. Great resource! Now if only it was super easy to make Facebook work for you like that. Facebook is a stubborn mule to marketers.
This comment was deleted a month ago