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First paying customer! Not who we expected

5 weeks after launching Lowdown out of beta we finally managed to bring on board a paying customer!

It feels great to know someone saw enough value to pay even at this early stage. The interesting thing is that this customer isn't from our target audience of Slack communities. Instead, they are a tech team using Slack. We've thought for a while that tech teams might ultimately end up being our main users — reinforced by our Product Hunt newsletter feature where 2/3's of 100+ sign-ups were tech teams.

It's hard to be sure if this is skewed by the type of audience on Product Hunt, but the fact that so many signed up from a landing page that was very specific to a Slack community use case makes me feel like it's a direction worth pursuing. We need to talk to as many as possible to better understand their use case. Any tips on how to learn if we should focus on this customer type let me know!

Thanks everyone for your support so far 😊

  1. 1

    congrats... keep hustling!

  2. 1

    Congrats! It's hard to know sometimes why users have signed up! Like you said, try and get in touch directly with them.

    Maybe you could run some online ads focused at the different user groups to see if you get the same results?

    1. 1

      Cheers Jamie! Yeah great idea and something I've been thinking about doing. I've been keeping a log of all of the reasons people might use Lowdown which is a great starting point for this.

      1. 1

        Yeah nice - in my last company the product designer had a bunch of customer profiles too, based on our assumptions of the market. Then when we actually spoke to our users we could see what assumptions were wrong and over time get a more accurate image of who was interested in the product.

        Best of luck!

  3. 1

    Congrats, did they find out on the Slack App store?

    1. 1

      Thanks! No, we aren't actually in the Slack App Store yet. Plan to submit soon. All of our new users came from Product Hunt.

  4. 1

    That's interesting, but it makes sense, teams don't want to be constantly playing catch up with everything that happens on Slack, but selected highlights could be really useful.

    1. 1

      Yeah. I think the key bit for teams might be more around the selecting/curating rather than automatically pulling in top posts. That works for communities but often the posts with the most engagement in a team aren't that important.

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