How to Find Your Earliest Users
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How to Find Your Earliest Users
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Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#2The title is misleading. It should be “How to Get Your First Users”.
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#3Common sense theme here: focus on a small group of people and delight them. If they're having the same problem, chances are others are as well. Be authentic, work smart, and deliver value based on what people are telling you.
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#4Common sense theme here: focus on a small group of people and delight them. If they're having the same problem, chances are others are as well. Be authentic, work smart, and deliver value based on what people are telling you.
I liked this for contrast:
Additionally, when we started the company I didn't have much money, but I saw that the most commonly searched term for SoundCloud producers was "How do I get more Reposts on SoundCloud?" A repost on SoundCloud is like a retweet on Twitter, so artists want as many of them as possible so their music will get heard.
I thought if I named the company Repost and dominated the SEO on that specific search we could get some free inbound traffic. My assumption worked. I believe if you search "SoundCloud repost" in Google we're one of the top hits, and something like 25% of our inbound applicants come organically.
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#5For us (Dependabot) the best advice I ever got was that your initial customers should come from sales, not marketing, even for a really low-price SaaS product. I was literally giving Dependabot away for the first 6 months of its existence, but I was still doing concierge sales on it.
When you sell to customers directly you get to hear their reactions and get a much better sense of what's valuable to them. You also make yourself more approachable if/when they've got feedback down the line. Finally, you get a predictable return to your effort (even if it's low!), which prevents the kind of boom and bust that can burn you out in the early days.
I'd really, really highly recommend anyone else looking to start a B2B business take the same approach, even if your product is way too cheap for sales to be scalable.
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#6For a tech product, look no further than where you are right now. HN has been one of the best sources of users for EnvKey[1], a developer-focused configuration and secrets manager. While HN has a reputation for toughness, it's also full of early adopters who will give you great feedback and be understanding as you figure things out.
And don't be afraid to play small ball. Of course it's amazing to get on the front page of HN, PH, big subreddits, etc., but it's also hit-or-miss and subject to the whims of the hivemind. Posting comments in relevant threads is slower, but it can drive a surprising amount of traffic over time, and the conversion rates will often be much higher than a 'featured' placement.
Of course, you need to take care that you're adding something to the discussion and not just advertising. Basically, your comment should be able to stand on its own as something valuable without any mention of your product, but make people curious about what you're doing, so that by the time they get to your link, they actually want to click it and learn more.
Another tip: if you have a product that has sdks for various languages, integrations with other platforms, etc., treat each one as a mini-launch to that community. It's often much easier to get attention with "here's a cool new thing for Elixir" vs. "here's something for everyone".
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#7For us (Dependabot) the best advice I ever got was that your initial customers should come from sales, not marketing, even for a really low-price SaaS product. I was literally giving Dependabot away for the first 6 months of its existence, but I was still doing concierge sales on it. When you sell to customers directly you get to hear their reactions and get a much better sense of what's valuable to them. You also ma…
Hi @greysteil :)
Couldn't agree with this more. I also have a low-priced SAAS product [0] and spent a ton of time early on talking to new users who signed up. I wouldn't even call it "sales". I just wanted to hear from early users' own mouths why they had signed up, what they hoped to get out of the product, and how it was working for them so far. These conversations (which I still do today) provided invaluable insights into how to improve my product.
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#8For a tech product, look no further than where you are right now. HN has been one of the best sources of users for EnvKey[1], a developer-focused configuration and secrets manager. While HN has a reputation for toughness, it's also full of early adopters who will give you great feedback and be understanding as you figure things out. And don't be afraid to play small ball. Of course it's amazing to get on the front pa…
> Posting comments in relevant threads is slower, but it can drive a surprising amount of traffic over time, and the conversion rates will often be much higher than a 'featured' placement.
Could you elaborate on this? Do you see ongoing traffic coming in from comments on old HN threads (even old ones)?
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#9For us (Dependabot) the best advice I ever got was that your initial customers should come from sales, not marketing, even for a really low-price SaaS product. I was literally giving Dependabot away for the first 6 months of its existence, but I was still doing concierge sales on it. When you sell to customers directly you get to hear their reactions and get a much better sense of what's valuable to them. You also ma…
We did the same thing at Gingr. My co-founder and I were doing sales on our own for almost a the entire first year. We gave the product away for free and visited businesses in person after sign up to build a personal relationship.
One thing I’d add is that we approached these businesses like partners, not customers. Our pitch is that we wanted to create something great (that would save them lots of time) and wanted to hear directly from the horse’s mouth what would make the product great.
Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users
#10For a tech product, look no further than where you are right now. HN has been one of the best sources of users for EnvKey[1], a developer-focused configuration and secrets manager. While HN has a reputation for toughness, it's also full of early adopters who will give you great feedback and be understanding as you figure things out. And don't be afraid to play small ball. Of course it's amazing to get on the front pa…
> Posting comments in relevant threads is slower, but it can drive a surprising amount of traffic over time, and the conversion rates will often be much higher than a 'featured' placement. Could you elaborate on this? Do you see ongoing traffic coming in from comments on old HN threads (even old ones)?
Occasionally, yes, but by "over time" I meant that it's something you can do repeatedly that adds up, not that a single comment gets much long-tail traffic by itself.