How to get your first 5 users Free: a new idea 🔥📈
I spend a lot of my time sharing how to get your first 100 users, but how do you get your first five?
The first few users of your product are absolutely critical. They help refine your product, identify bugs and process issues, learn about messaging, and - if you're lucky - drive early revenue.
It's an important stage because preceding it most of your work has been in a bubble, free of feedback both quantitive and qualitative.
A NEW STRATEGY: COMMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
A new strategy I've been sharing is to monitor communities for opportunities to add value and gracefully mention your product.
If you're in tech / SAAS your potential buyer is likely on communities like Reddit, Growth Hackers, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, and yes, even Indie Hackers.
What to do
Identify meaningful conversations to participate in. The best tool for this is Syften as it sends you instant alerts with relevant threads, and indexes all the web's larges communities. You can compliment this with Google Alerts although that focuses more on websites
Keywords to track
I recommend tracking three types of keywords:
Your own business / product name - to identify people discussing your product and jump in
Your competitors - to identify what people think of them, their strengths and weaknesses. And gracefully and objectively offer your own solution.
Your problem - similar to what you might bid on when marketing with search engines, think of phrases your potential customers may search. Then connect with them and offer value into your content marketing or directly to your site.
Remember: these are (broadly) meritocratic spaces so good content should travel further. Do not, ever, spam.
Replying
You are replying to both the person who wrote the post and everyone else reading it. This isn't just giving one-on-one advice, so make your answer both specific and broadly insightful.
Reporting
Review the performance of this work. Yes, it's free but there is a cost related to time spent. Does it drive traffic? Does that traffic drive sign ups? What is the ROI of the time spent. All your marketing work, whatever the channel, should consider this.
Good tip! To add to this - for Slack groups, set alerts to get notified when specific keywords are mentioned in a channel
Oh interesting, where do you do this?
Hey Olly, thanks for the mention. Yes, I can say from what I've seen that mindless spam, especially on Reddit, will indeed lead to a ban. Always add value, and skip threads where you're unable to - no matter the temptation.
So for example, if you're working on a nocode tool, monitor Hacker News topics with the keyword "nocode" or "no code". Add value to those, and after a while you'll become an authority.