Blogfactory, and avoiding the pit of no customers
Hey all 👋🏼
I'm writing this post to first talk about the new product I've been working on called blogfactory.dev, but second, to also talk about avoiding the pit of despair that 90% of indie hackers encounter.... building a product for weeks only to have no one use it! 😱
Important clarification: I am no expert in avoiding this pit, and have actually found myself in this pit many times. This is more about how I'm hoping to avoid this pit with blogfactory.dev, and maybe also getting some advice from others who have successfully avoided the pit.
Anyway, on to blogfactory! With blogfactory.dev, I've tried to minimise time to MVP as much possible. It's a simple AI blog content tool, but with two USPs. 1. An SDK to make integrating the blog content into your product super simple. 2. Tools to make generating blog content in bulk super simple. E.G. if you want 10 blog posts just from 10 titles, we can do that for you with all of the generation happening in parallel in the background.
In terms of avoiding the pit, anything not core to the product has been cut, and I've been trying to follow the advice that everyone tells you: Listen to your customers, listen to feedback, and grow around the customer pain. Basically, don't make loads of assumptions... The only problem is that no one tells you have to get those first few customers who's feedback you should listen to! How are others doing this?😅
At the moment, the current plan for blogfactory is:
- keep on engaging with people on Twitter, and then if they reciprocate, eventually sharing my product
- try out PPC ads on Google and Twitter
- maybe try out a TikTok account
- try building free public tools as lead gen magnets
- programmatic seo and longtail keyword targeting with blog posts (dogfooding our own product to do this 😊)
- posts like this one!
Does anyone have good advice on how to avoid the pit of no customers? How have you done it for your product?
