What 'things that don't scale' have worked best for you?
Doing unscalable things to get initial traction and get the company going is a part of almost every early-stage project.
Two really effective ones that I've used and experienced from other companies:
Contacting unhappy competitors' users
Reach out to people that leave negative feedback about competing products on review sites like G2, Capterra etc. They'll be more than happy to hear about a better solution to their need that wasn't satisfied by your competitor. You can even go a step further and monitor the review sites for new, negative reviews using a tool like visualping.io
Personal onboarding
Doing the onboarding process personally is an invaluable way to meet and talk to your early users. It's a win-win situation - they're getting premium training and become better at using your product, and you're getting real-time feedback as they're getting to know your app.
What tactics that don't scale have worked best for you?
Definitely have found the personal onboarding to be the best use of my time and can do about 10 - 12 a week. Have learned so much more about our target market, and now have early users who we now have a personal connection with and feels like they are rooting for us and want us to succeed.
Spending time in forums/Slack groups/IH/Twitter has been hugely beneficial. It took me a while to get over the feeling that I was wasting my time hanging out just chatting with people, but that is where all of our early users have come from. At the same time, I am able to share my feedback with people and learn from them.
Related to above - offering my time/feedback to people, whether in those communities or wherever else I connect with them.
One thing that didn't work: I tried reaching out to people on Twitter complaining about Wunderlist going away as we thought they would be good target users for us. However, another product was already doing that, and we got very little traction from it so abandoned it fairly quickly.
Exactly, the personal connection is super valuable.
This is also why user testing services are not cheap - for 10-12 of these a week you'd pay at least a couple hundred bucks.
Interesting, nice work! I'm curious about the numbers behind this. Have you gotten a lot of conversions by contacting unhappy competitors? And how about personal onboarding - did you see an increase in retention? Thanks!
I wouldn't say a lot of conversions as there aren't that many negative reviews written every day. But it's much easier to convert such users than with other channels. They also are pretty valuable as they know how to use a product like yours.
As for personal onboarding, the main benefit is that you're getting insights that will allow you to optimize the product in the future. Also, when users feel that they're getting a personal treatment from the founder they value the product more. But hard to talk about improvements in retention with confidence with such a small sample size. Anyway, if you can, do it ;)
Awesome, thanks for the info!
One of the main use cases of doopoll has been live audience voting at corporate events. While it's an easy tool to use, we found that a lot of our users liked the peace of mind of having a person from doopoll go and run the live poll at their event.
We actually made quite a good chunk of our revenue of this for the first 2-3 years of the business. We'd offer it as a service.
Growth benefit: we captured a lot of new leads by being at the venues and talking to the attendees. Many of those converted into large customers for us.
I made a post here offering free videos for anybody who leaves a link. Definitely doesn't scale since i can do only a few a day with my current workload but MAN i am getting some good feedback. We are making new videos and sending them out to the people who signed up.
Brilliant, I love it!
Currently in this phase right now for a product that I've been working on.
It's a bit discouraging, but my mindset is that it's a volume game.
Currently reaching out to users in FB groups, subreddits, and cold messaging on LinkedIn and Instagram. Has anyone tried these strategies? Are they effective or am I wasting my time here?
Also for those that are curious, product is here: www.loopwith.co
After reading your whole landing page copy I'm still not 100% what your product does and who you are targeting. I'd really focus on getting the messaging right in the first place.
Thanks for the feedback @kacper.
Curious, in your opinion, what do you think the product does? I want to see where the gap is in our communication/messaging.
Thanks!
I'd say it's something like a HubSpot alternative + e-commerce + video features?
'See what other teachers, coaches, trainers, advisors, influencers, and entrepreneurs say about us'. That's so many completely different personas. Also doesn't help to understand the product. The site could do with a separate page for each of them.
That's a good point about creating multiple pages!
There's a typo in your headline "tat" => "that"
Fixed, thanks!