How do you get your "first 20 customers"?
Hi IndieHackers,
I have been working recently on a SAAS product VadooTV and we have a trial version. Now I have been working on getting the first 20 free users who can use the product.
I am using Facebook groups and Reddit as avenues to reaching out to people. What have you done when you started out in beginning ? Reaching out to my contacts is not an options since they are not in the target sector . What other options have you tried and succeeded.
My niche is digital marketers, edutech platforms or video content creators who wish to host videos online away from youtube. This is my video hosting platform https://vadoo.tv/ . What options would work in this kind of a scenario.
What is your approach in acquiring first 20 users ?
The fact that this question gets asked so often is not a good sign.
No one should have to ask how they go about getting their first 20 customers because it's a sign you started ass backwards.
You have to know who your customers are and where you can find them in order to build. Doing the opposite is akin to making a key and venturing into the big unknown to find a lock, your key can open. Better to stand in front of a lock and create a key that opens it.
I hope it works out for you but the best advice I can give is to learn from this mistake and to not let it happen in the future.
Good luck!
RJ
Man, you're not wrong. None of what you said is wrong.
But it's also not helpful. There's no time machine available, and making mistakes early on is not the end of the world, it just means Anil might need to pivot if he doesn't get good feedback, or scrap the idea in the worst case.
This isn't a hard abort, it's just messing up the order of operations which might cause some wasted/inefficient effort. (Which is hardly wasted, you live and you learn. I don't really know of a way to learn how to do this kind of thing without screwing up a bunch of stuff.)
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I doubt we disagree on much here.
He's just already made the mistake, so the help he needs is on fixing it, not feeling bad about something he can't change anyways. It's gonna cost him. It always does when you mess up. That's ok.
But hey, he actually has a product. He's in a great spot..... as long as he takes the lesson, goes back, talks to people, and most critically adjusts based on their advice.
That last part is where the real danger lies. The odds are very good that he's going to need to reevaluate some assumptions, and folks resist getting notes even when they haven't invested heavily in implementing their ideas. With sunk costs, he's on shaky ground with respect to shifting his perception of how he can serve his market. A lot of folks just dig in, and that is the kind of mistake that should be on his mind. There's always a new landmine to trip over, and when mistakes compound, that's when you're in real trouble.
Yup, agree with that.
Hey @RjYoungling . What you mentioned is the right point but the product we are building is targeted for a different geographical region than where I live and hence the problem in not being able to reach through personal connections. To replace this I have been investing time on making virtual connections with the target group from various platforms. It's still early days but hope it works.
Rooting for you man! But the reason you wanna start with that is because you run the risk of finding out that no one wants what you've build. But you live, you learn.
I'm at 32 customers now. Got them through:
More info here:
https://cloak.ist/blog/how-we-got-to-400-mrr-in-5-months/
This is one of the most useful articles I've read this week. Thanks for sharing.
"We didn't write code until someone paid": This is the sentence that clearly caught my attention to read through.
Hey @louisbarclay . That's a beautifully written article. Learned so many things especially what not to do and what to do in early stage.
Really glad you liked it!
Airport has a community mostly for finding beta testers for apps, but they now have a "web" section of their site too.
https://airport.community/
They have a pretty active slack group.
Thanks @acantarero . The website looks good just sumbitted the app. The slack url seems to be outdated, can you share it across.
Try this one:
https://join.slack.com/t/airportcrew/shared_invite/zt-kdekqikx-~9b7LE9NDaioNAySbTis9Q
here's a suggested action plan for you:
happy to chat if you need :)
Hey @watus . Super awesome points especially the part where you mentioned finding the persona. I would work on pitching in the right places and getting the right set of users. Would get back to you in few days to discuss how it went forward and what else could be done
sounds good @Anil1729 godspeed!
I wrote four stories how people got either customers or mailing list signups from posting online:
https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/
https://syften.com/blog/post/saas_growth_case_studies/
https://syften.com/blog/post/140_dollar_comment/
https://syften.com/blog/post/personal-discount/
Perhaps that can help.
Thanks a lot for sharing @akfaew . Will check them out
I found that the best way was to reach out to people (target audience) to connect, get on a video call, and build relationships. At first, it was more about research, learning from them, later because I kept in touch with them, they started seeing our progress and value, and they would give it a try.
It is all about building trust so that people would give you a shot. "Do things don't scale". Don't think about automation, don't think about scale. Just treat everyone as human.
As in how to find them? You have to figure out who your target audience is, and think hard where they hang online. It could be LinkedIn outreach, could be email, could be anything, as long as you get to the right people.
Hey @kevon. That's some valuable feedback right there. The point about doing things which don't scale is great. I am trying to work on the same thing right now as well, trying to talk to first few individual customers directly. Glad to know it is the right direction.
Building trust is another major thing as you mentioned but I am not exactly sure how to make one look trustworthy.
About trust, you don't have to think too much about it, or pretend or anything. Just be genuine, be helpful, to really want to solve this pain your potential customers have. That's it. Don't try to sell or get money in the beginning. Helping is the best way to show trust.
But of course, that doesn't mean you're doing things for free. People understand that good work is a trade of value, so they should pay up. So don't be afraid to ask people for money once they find value from you. But never ask for money when you haven't proved anything to them.
:)
That makes a lot of sense @kevon . Thanks for sharing your experience here, it is really helpful to get a perspective of how to approach the problem.
Go get them!
Well, for our first product which was a credit monitoring service, I tried practically everything - you name it and nothing really worked.
Our second product, an Android app, the only thing I'm using is a Google app ad and that's working incredibly well for us. We hit 95.6k downloads, 3.4k registered users, and 21k active installs this morning. We're working on a version to help us convert users into paying customers.
LinkedIn and/or LinkedIn Sales Navigator might help you identify the users in the demographic you want. At least with LinkedIn, people disclose their occupations. You could also look for content providers on Fiverr and try to approach them.
I would recommend that you read "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.
Tech-savvy target audience?
Say no more. Twitter DMs. Tried that yet?
I wrote a whole post on how specifically to use Twitter to get your first 10-20 customers for SaaS apps: 4 Powerful Ways to Grow and Market Your SaaS Business Using Twitter (Examples Given).
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a Twitter growth tool and the author of a Twitter growth hacking blog.
I had a look at your blog - the screenshots show you offering your tool for free, but in the body of the article you said it got you 10 paying customers. Did you later change your outreach message?
Nope. It was a free trial all along.
They knew the moment they clicked the link.
The personalized links don't really do anything, they just make them feel a little special, and also allows me to track who clicked on my links in the DMs.
A few of them ended up upgrading and even thanking me for introducing my app to them. A couple wrote reviews, which got me my first few do-follow backlinks.
Oh, cool! Thank you for the explanation. I will try your approach. I'd like to share my results with you later, perhaps if I'm successful you can expand your blog post? How can I reach you? Are you jay@?
Yes, I'm Jay. You can reach me at jay@zlappo.com.
In fact, someone on IH recommended me this idea of using Twitter DMs to find my first customers.
I never expected it to work at all, but it did.
Good luck with your effort!
Thanks @simplisticallysimple for sharing the resources. They are pretty helpful
You should try cold email and use LinkedIn. We got all of our customers from cold emailing people and leveraging LinkedIn. LinkedIn was actually a huge source of meetings that led to new clients. If you play LinkedIn right for a B2B product, it can work really well. People are sleeping on LinkedIn.
Thanks @StartupSales for the suggestion about Linkedin to get users. We are still experimenting with linkedin to see if we can drive users from the platform.
The response rate seems to be good but we are not able to get exactly the right set of users who could use our product. Any suggestion on how to filter the right set of users who could use our product ? For example in facebook we are doing it currently using certain groups
I would search for them on linkedin and add them. Don't pitch them anything, just add. Post content regularly, eventually you can reach out.
I wrote a huge guide on it but don't want to do any shameless self promotion.
Sure, thanks for the tip. So as you mentioned it would be a long term game.
A lot of people have said you did things out of order, and that's.... haha, that's true.
You messed up. It won't be the first time, but you're far from sunk, and you're asking the right question. That's really encouraging and this is definitely fixable.
What I would recommend is identifying people, individual people who are your target market and doing cold outreach. I'd recommend hunting for them via forums, twitter and linkedin. Be wary of investing too much in cold email, I think it's kind of an iffy channel. Expect to send a hundred or so cold emails, maybe more, maybe less, to get a meaningful amount of user feedback.
A lot of people have focused on the order of user research, and that's really important, but you got it wrong. That's in the past. The thing you need to be very wary of in the future, like super super wary of, is that you already built this thing without feedback. So when you start getting feedback, it's going to be extremely tempting to ignore it, because it's invalidating your idea, that you love enough to go out and build it, and to refuse to backtrack on work you already did.
If you do that, you're just compounding your mistake. You might get great feedback and be off to the races, but it is very very likely people are going to tell you, not in so many words, to revise some assumptions and if you don't listen, it will sink you.
Hey @lzb . Thanks a lot for the valuable feedback. You mentioned it right in the sense that I shouldn't have built out the product without getting feedback.
But one thing I made sure is to build a very simple product with no complications and just the basic features so that I can add the feature requests based on user feedback.
I am currently working on getting feedback from the users and facebook groups seem to be a good channel so far.
One thing I haven't figured out is how to use twitter to drive user acquisition. I am not a power user of twitter and hence not much aware of the platform. If you can give some suggestions on how to use twitter to drive users for a SAAS product it would be really helpful
Not users. People. Find a company or a person who's in your target market and reach out the person you want to use your product. And talk with them.
This is more one on one sales than marketing. I get a lot lot lot of cold email, much more than I can possibly process, but hey, somebody tweets at me, that gets my attention. Just another way to get an individual person's feedback, which you absolutely need at this point.
One more piece of feedback. Don't try to make this process a form letter process. People can sense a form letter a mile away and they'll just delete it. Actually talk to the person as an individual. Early stage product feedback is a big ask, so respect the time of the person you're seeking out, don't just spam the same email to everybody you can think of. A lot of people won't reply and that's ok, but enough will if you keep at it.
Sure I wasn't aware twitter DMs could be a great source to get in touch with people. Thanks for the feedback about getting in touch one-on-one. I will start experimenting with this avenue and will report if I could see some good results.
I got my first 20 users mostly from personal connections and launching an early version of my web app on BetaList. I found BetaList users to be very responsive and helpful with their feedback.
Hey @svenfrese , BetaList seems a good source but the problem I observed there is the long queue of 2/3 months to wait before being featured
That's true, I knew well in advance that I wanted to launch on BetaList so I did my submission about a month before the beta was truly ready to be tested ;) Maybe something to consider for the next project then.
My first users always came from Twitter and Indiehackers. Sometimes from small and super targeted subreddit as well.
But, that's the easy part! The hard part starts after your first few hundreds/thousands users.
That's why i created spreadtheworld.net, to never have to wonder where to find a new acquisition channel again.
Hi @xavier. Thanks a lot for the great feedback and super awesome website too.
One question I haven't figured out is how to use twitter to get users. I am not an active user of twitter so not very good at it.
If you can give some suggestions on how to use twitter as a channel to get customers it would be helpful