The Ah-Ha

It was while I was out engaging survey tools, digging in forums, asking questions on Reddit. That an Indie Hacker popped into my dm's.

That guy was Fed, at Gummy Search. He said something about my last post, and how it looked like I was trying to do some research and did I want to take his tool for a free spin and see if it helped.

"I built an audience research tool for Reddit which makes it really easy to dive into those communties and figure out pain points, solution requests, and opinions on various topics. If you're interested in checking it out, it's free to try, and would be happy to help you accelerate this process of yours. do you want to give it a shot?"

At first, I assumed it was yet another spammy whatever....

But I pulled up his search tool and instantly realized that this could get me to the answers I was looking for, in much less time.

I set up an audience targeted around the contractors - including some massive-sized subreddits that had 10's of thousands (and I think 1 had a few hundred thousand members).

Now I was getting somewhere! 🤪

My hope was that I would find a different line of phrasing, or some word choice I had not considered, or some gathering place where all my buyers were hanging out. Once I implemented that across my marketing, I'd be off to the races!

This is NOT what happened.

I realized that, across so many of the ideal people I was looking to market to, none of them seemed to be looking for help in generating leads. Or getting customers really, at all.

In fact, it seemed to be much the opposite. I came across one particular thread from an electrician...the title of his post was "I HAVE SO MUCH F&^%ING BUSINESS RIGHT NOW, IT'S BECOME A F&^%ING PROBLEM"

• The commenters seemed to agree with him. They went on. The supply chain issues had slowed their ability to get what they needed, to be able to complete jobs in a timely manner. And the labor shortage in play meant they couldn't find good people...they were doing nearly everything themselves and turning away new and old clients.
• Now I was starting to understand why the power washing company was ghosting me after being previously so excited about receiving free leads. Business was falling in people's laps.

For our new home back in the midwest..I had contracted quite a few people already, a painter, an electrician, a water filtration company -- all were performing well below the bar of standard acceptable work. Some were also charging a premium for sub-standard work. And us customers were paying it. We had no choice. Few options. One landscaping company told me, "I used to do the lawn for the home you just bought - I just cannot keep up - I wish I could take yours on, but I can't"

In that situation we hired a new landscaper. The cost was higher than we'd ever paid before. The output was poorer than we'd ever gotten before. It was clear that you could open a business in any number of home service areas, and succeed with little experience and little effort. Who was going to buy a 38 lesson lead generation course?

In my conversation with Fed - from Gummy Search - I recounted this realization, much of which came from using his Reddit Search tool.

At one point he says,

"I don't want to push an audience on you, but had you thought about working with startup founders/IH'ers/bootstrapped founders? They're always looking for ways to get themselves to work on their marketing - we all love coding new features, but marketing...we have to find ways to make ourselves work on it.."

That for me - was like a thunderbolt. 🌩⚡️

But I had my reservations about this new audience. I was not going to make the same mistake twice. I didn't feel that a course they'd self-pace through would be the right thing.This needed to be something different. Something tailored to them.