Everything I did to find users for my waiting list

Finding customers is difficult. We've all been there (I definitely have) - you launch something... and no one starts using it. To make the process of finding my first customers easier (and getting inspired by similar tools) I decided to create a social listening tool to help with this.

I'm finally done building the MVP (started in October) and built up an imo "okay-ish" (considering the number of unique visitors, although I'm not sure how accurate) waiting list of around 70 people in the meantime, so I thought I'd share everything I did to get to this point.

Posting on Reddit

Posting on Reddit is a great way to get people to join your waiting list. By scheduling posts at the best time, and engaging with commenters who responded to your post, you can make sure that as many potential customers as possible are aware of your product.

I used Postpone (great app, has a free tier for 10 posts per month) to schedule posts at the optimal time for each subreddit that I picked and here are the results:

• /r/SideProject: 33 upvotes and 25 comments
• /r/SaaS: 1 upvotes and 0 comments
• /r/growmybusiness: 7 upvotes and 5 comments
• /r/indiehacckers: 1 upvote, 4 comments
• /r/LeadGeneration: 1 upvote, 0 comments
• /r/indiebiz: 5 upvotes, 2 comments
• /r/roastmystartup: 0 upvotes, 3 comments
• /r/design_critiques: 8 upvotes, 0 comments

The /r/SideProject subreddit is bigger than the rest, which explains the difference, although I used an image which always seems to help Reddit posts. Most comments were positive, but of course some were "why build this when you can just use <competitor>", which is expected. Other than that I got some positive feedback and a lot of people commenting they joined the waiting list

I could've definitely posted in more places than I did, so I'll take that as a lesson for next time 😄

Replying to people on Indie Hackers

I visit IH every day and was seeing a lot of other people struggling with finding new customers. I'm completely shameless so I just decided to reply to anyone who was commenting anything related to finding leads with a link to my waiting list.

My replies led to more signups, as people seemed interested in hearing about the project and learning more about it. From checking my analytics most users actually came from here, which is surprising. I still have a feeling Reddit lead to the most waiting list sign ups, but I can't be sure.

I actually also posted the same post as I did on Reddit on here, but no one upvoted or replied to it 😭

Building in public on Twitter

I signed up for Twitter more than 10 years ago and never used it apart from sending DMs to customer support 😅 As everyone and their mother are building in public these days I decided to hop on the bandwagon and start actually using Twitter.

I think I started with around 20 followers and am now up to 69 (nice), so I am making slow and steady progress. Basically what I've been doing is posting updates on Twitter whenever I had something that was remotely interesting and using the #buildinpublic hashtag. I also left some comments plugging my product whenever I felt it was relevant 😄

The results aren't the best, as I think I only got about 23 unique visitors from Twitter, but it's been super motivating connecting with and seeing other people building cool shit in public, so it's definitely worth it!

What's next

I literally just messaged the people who joined the waiting list 5 minutes before posting this, so I'm waiting to see how many people will actually end up joining. For now I'll be focussed on marketing and fixing bugs wherever they pop up. I guess I will set myself a goal of 100 users before I'm allowed to build features again as I already went overboard during the MVP 😂

If you want to help me with that goal you can sign up here (it's free!): https://mentionfunnel.com/ 🤩