What is the best way to get feedback on your idea and get early adopters?
Currently, I am working on a tech education app (https://codaroo.io) - and at this stage, we are trying to get as much feedback as possible for the concept we have come up with. Our target users are developers - so there are some communities we can push the content to communities built around that.
At this stage we have tried two approaches:
- Reach out to people in our network that could be potentially users of our application - and we got feedback on daily basis by adding them as external testers
- Subreddits - we managed to get some subscribers to our mailing list, but also got a very engaged feedback by them
What are you doing to get feedback for your app? Do you have any ideas, tips, and tricks you would like to share with the indie hackers community?
Trending on Indie Hackers
You can also explore micro-communities such as Facebook groups, Slack/Discord communities - and start talking to users there.
Don't just blatantly "push" your app on them though.
Instead, engage.
Invest the genuine time with them.
Get a feel for how they think and what they feel.
It's a process, but might help give you more answers than you could be looking for.
As an engineer who doesn't much engage in social media, what do you mean when you say "engage"? Like what kind of stuff do you post/comment/do and how does that weave in your micro-saas?
Is there a way I can search for Discord communities? Like a general repository? (Sorry if noob question, haven't used Discord since my early gamer days)
The official Discord app itself has a "Explore Public Servers" feature where you can explore communities via search field. 👍
I just did a search for "developers" and there are 680+ communities listed.
Great tip, thanks
Great insight! Thank you @SaaSDesign
How did you use subreddits? Most of them have a pretty strict anti-solicitation policy.
Mostly by describing the problem that I had and how I am planning to solve it with an app - at the end, I attached a link to the website, but most of the feedback was a discussion with other users about their perspective on the problem and the solution.
Awesome, thank you. Did you get into any trouble with moderators?
Not really, no one actually complained :D
Lucky then, all the communities I have to engage were quite restrictive with promoting your own products.
One thing I would recommend is not pushing your product - but rather trying to spark a discussion around the problem that your product solves. You can get valuable feedback on it by discussing it with other users as you are targeting the subreddits where your potential users are.
If you already have a product out there, you could try to casually mention it and say that it helped you and ask if someone is maybe going to try it (or similar)
The goal is not to create an advertisement post, but to spark a discussion and raise interest in "something that is out there solving that problem" (e.g. your app)