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7 Comments

Who's your target market and how'd you find their hangout?

Who is your target market?

Have you found a good way of reaching them? If so, how did you find it?

My target market are stock traders who use brokers like Robinhood or TDAmeritrade. I have yet to find "the place" for reaching them and building a following, but thinking about this problem led me to wonder how other indie hackers went about it.

How did you find where your target market hangs out?

I'm currently working on Sluicebox, an app
to help stock traders improve their trading. Starting a following from zero is tough!

  1. 2

    This will be either not helpful at all or super helpful for those who can read between the lines:

    You find your target audience by searching for it. 🤷‍♂️

    1. 1

      Looking forward to it and have started doing this! Going to improve my landing page so it's more helpful to visitors and continue down this path 🙇‍♂️

  2. 2

    Our target market is IT admins. The first place we found them was on /r/sysadmin, and then the related discord.

    If I were looking for stock traders, you might find them on a relevant reddit or discord. Seems like your product would be ideal for content marketing + SEO to slowly build an audience over time (you give away a taste of your content and then upsell more premium content, I imagine).

    I'm not sure if your product is ready yet, but I think it's novel enough that you could get a decent amount of users just by showing it to your target audience.

    Influencer marketing might be another good angle, if you targeted some Youtubers who genuinely understood and liked your product (I.e. they actually thought your app would help their viewers improve).

    I'd certainly try it, not sure if there are any other barriers to entry I'd hit (price, ease of setup), but it's interesting.

    1. 1

      Thank you for sharing a bit of your story! Discord is something I hadn't yet considered, since I am not too active in those communities myself. Seems like some potentially low-hanging fruit though!

      My plan is to improve the landing page with some product screenshots (designs I have made) and give it a bit more polish. Then doing more outreach in places like reddit, twitter (and now discord!) to see if folks are interested in something like that.

      As far as trying it, I'll be sure to post here on IH when it's ready (it's not... trying to get the marketing engine rolling first... I'm historically guilty of building too soon). Appreciate the response and thoughts about market targeting!

  3. 2

    I would go on Twitter and talk to some? You can literally message anyone on Twitter! And you'll find tons of people that do trading on there. A good place to start might be to search for keywords related to trading. Get into the community and start listening to their conversations.

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      Yep, Twitter seems like a great place to start.

      I have a dedicated account specifically for following crypto traders. I log on a couple of times a week and see how the community feels about the markets. For Bitcoin you have popular hashtags like #BTC (and also the respective "cash tag" $BTC, lol). It looks like there are similar hashtags for traditional stock and index funds such as $AAPL and $SPX. I'd start interacting with the community by searching for these tags!

      I'm doing something similar by finding relevant e-commerce people on Twitter. I search for folks talking about #Shopify or #Wordpress and then like and comment on their posts. Sometimes I drop a link, but I try not to. Usually, it's better to provide value upfront. If they are interested in what you have to say they will check out your profile where you should have a link to your product.

      Hope that helps @austencam!

    2. 2

      This is a great idea too. I like the idea of sending out some DMs once the landing page is improved a bit. This could really help gauge interest from experienced traders without much friction or investment upfront.

      Thank you for the suggestion! :)

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