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2 Comments

Where do you go to find your potential customers online?

Hi 👋

I created an app some time ago to scratch my own itch. The app is a weight tracker, which makes it as easy as possible to add new records, and it shows the evolution in a chart. It's quite simple, but before that I was using a spreadsheet, and then Notion, and they didn't solve the problem as I wanted.

So far only I, my wife, and my brother have been using the app for about half a year. Just recently I was showing the charts to a friend and he asked about the app, so he's going to be the 4th user.

But that got me thinking. This might be useful for other people to track their weight. And I was thinking about adding more features, like recording weight lifted (RMs), and being able to see the % of your own body mass that you lift. But I can hardly justify adding more and more features if I don't plan to make it a source of income. So I started to consider adding a few early users that I could use to grow the app in the right direction.

I'm in the middle of Arvid Kahl's "Zero to Sold", and he talks about joining your potential customers wherever they meet online, but here I am, with no clue about where that is.

I guess this is a problem that many indie hackers face at some point. Where do you go to find your potential customers when:

  • you have interest in the area but have never engaged in any online community, and
  • you really don't have much to add to the conversation other than "I made this for myself and you might find it useful" (In reddit, for example, they'd ban me for self promoting a product).

I imagine I could go to generic "launch" places like product hunt. However, I fear doing that I'll get a lot of eyes, but none of them actually interested in what my app offers. I think those places are great once I have a product in place, but not to get the first ~50 users for an MVP that's only going to be interesting for a ver small niche of people.

Niche forums or influencers might work, but cold messaging with self promotion over those places is probably not the best way to go. Even replying to other people's posts feels like shoehorning self promotion and is often disliked.

What do other indie hackers do in this kind of situation?

  1. 2

    You are still in the validation stage of the product. I would suggest replicating the following case studies to validate your product & get some paying users from the start.

    Here are some good case studies of validating an idea without a product:

    1. Getting 400 signups and 5 initial sales of a product that is yet to exist, just by uploading a video on how it works.

    2. Getting initial sales without any product, using just a landing page with a checkout process.

    I wouldn't recommend launching on Product Hunt without first building an email list of subscribers to upvote your product on launch day.

    If you're interested, you can check out more summarised growth strategies to replicate for your business over at GrowthHunt.co.

    Cheers & all the best!

    1. 1

      Hey! Thanks for your response. I thought I would get an email if I got a response here, but it looks like I don't get notifications 😅

      I'll have a look at the links you sent and the website.

      Thanks :)

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