Linkedin for a B2P product. I posted a few questions asking if anyone had similar issues, and got directly in touch with about 20 people who responded to involve them in customer research, then kept in touch with them as I was developing the product for feedback. Those 20 by word of mouth led to a bunch more people trying it out. It's difficult to put a specific number on whether that was 100 or a bit more or fewer, but a few cycles of word of mouth from happy users got me over the 100 users easily.
I just checked, and have about 9K connections on LinkedIn. I assume with the ability to pay for post promotion you could get a similar reach by paying linkedin a few bucks.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
>Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Personally I always found that just attending relevant events and using the audience question time to make (hopefully) interestimg remarks or addotional insights led to great conversations with interested attendees wich become potentiall customers.
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
That's one point of view, but it works. Of course sender should research the audience properly, and provide one-click unsubscribe option right at the top.
My dictionary describes spam as "irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.."
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
I really like the concept of gnod. I started creating notebookLM audios of hacker news posts and realised it would be nice to have a directory of notebookLM audios generally.
Will send you an email shortly about this. Would be nice to find someone to collaborate with on this.
Linkedin for a B2P product. I posted a few questions asking if anyone had similar issues, and got directly in touch with about 20 people who responded to involve them in customer research, then kept in touch with them as I was developing the product for feedback. Those 20 by word of mouth led to a bunch more people trying it out. It's difficult to put a specific number on whether that was 100 or a bit more or fewer, but a few cycles of word of mouth from happy users got me over the 100 users easily.
Inspiring, you must be having a good number of connections on LinkedIn. Target audience?
I just checked, and have about 9K connections on LinkedIn. I assume with the ability to pay for post promotion you could get a similar reach by paying linkedin a few bucks.
This was for a tool to speed up making educational videos, so I tried to reach out to people who were doing online courses and educational materials.
I see. LinkedIn promotions are not cheap, but the targeting can be extremely specific to maintain ROI.
Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.
Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Some harsh truths there.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
> especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
Largely true. Lack of money in some cases can be compensated by investing more time and efforts.
What is your customer acquisition cost? Monthly spend on ads? Where are the ads?
>Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads
You can start with a small budget and build from there. For the first year I only spent £100 per month on Adwords.
The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads. You have to pay a lot of attention to the detail and constantly fight against their defaults which are nearly always in their favour rather than yours.
> The bigger problem is Google et al make it very easy to waste money on their ads.
That's me in 2018. Spent a good amount of money in Google Ads and only attracted users that we did not want.
Just putting negative keywords wasn't sufficient, and even one miss was enough to waste all efforts.
That's why I eventually moved to LinkedIn and Capterra. It was a lot easier to get good results with their ad targeting.
Talks at meetups for the first 100.
Hacker News for the next 10,000.
Target audience was devs.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Personally I always found that just attending relevant events and using the audience question time to make (hopefully) interestimg remarks or addotional insights led to great conversations with interested attendees wich become potentiall customers.
Wow, what a combo of offline and online growth!
What made you prefer HN over dev platforms like StackOverflow or Github?
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
>Cold out reach via email.
In other words SPAM.
That's one point of view, but it works. Of course sender should research the audience properly, and provide one-click unsubscribe option right at the top.
My dictionary describes spam as "irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.."
Unsolicited messages sent over the internet is exactly what @twosdai is doing.
That would mean all database providers are basically spam enablers!
Have tried B2B for small businesses in USA using Apollo.io with limited success.
I guess businesses from outside USA would need bigger effort to generate trust.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
We mainly use it as a prospecting tool.
What were the other tools you used in your pipeline? And what kind of email sequence did you use? Would be awesome to know
How do you majorly engage them?
Where did you get the email addresses from?
Mainly apollo. We do some high level searches based on market factors and then purchase some emails from them.
First 5-10 clients was emails to friends of friends.
Next 50-100 was cold emails.
After that, mostly word-of-mouth.
Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
Did you have emails of target audience already, or you bought that? If bought, from where?
We are working on engaging the first 100 users. Focus more on organic users, https://powtain.com
We will do a formal introduction on HackerNews when we finish the POC.
Nice! Hacker news is a great starting point :)
Social listening on HN, Reddit, X... I used https://kwatch.io and jumped into the relevant conversations to mention my product.
Target audience? And in what duration you got those 100 users just by conversations?
Hacker News :)
It was this Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
I really like the concept of gnod. I started creating notebookLM audios of hacker news posts and realised it would be nice to have a directory of notebookLM audios generally. Will send you an email shortly about this. Would be nice to find someone to collaborate with on this.
Great!
Niche Facebook Groups: Entrepreneurs and Investors.
Targeted Linkedin outreach: A specific class of professionals
New for me to see fun platform like Facebook to target business people.
x (formerly twitter)
Who did you target?
Reddit
Target audience?
Hacker news and Reddit when someone encounters a problem my project tries to answer
Target audience? Did you use any tool to find relevant threads?
People who are searching for a place to move to. f5bot
reddit! consumer healthcare website
Which subs? How did you avoid getting banned?
The trick is you don’t.