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How to Find Your Earliest Users

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Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#11

Post by [deleted] »

danenania wrote: post #10
geekjock wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#12

Post by geekjock »

danenania wrote: post #10
geekjock wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Makes sense. Nice product by the way!

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#13

Post by wpietri »

greysteil wrote: post #5

For 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…

Yes! 100% agreed. I got into computers because kinda didn't like talking to people. But learning to do good user interviews (which has a lot in common to a consultative sales process) has been amazingly helpful.

I coached for a long time at a weekend workshop called Lean Startup Machine and it was amazing how much teams would benefit from just talking with 5-10 potential users. They'd often come back in a few hours and say, "Ok, our previously brilliant idea turned out to be entirely dumb, because we didn't understand X, Y, and Z about our users. Let's try this again."

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#14

Post by mrskitch »

When I started browserless.io, I was having a heck of a time getting Chrome running properly in Docker. After about 1 month of hit-n-miss `docker build`'s (which was taking ~15 minutes each time due to the amount of deps and lack of layer caching therein), I decided to sort popular open-source libs by comments and reactions. To my surprise I wasn't the only one experiencing this issue!

This actually turned out to help in two ways: I knew _exactly_ what to build, and where to find first users. After that I point I really haven't had to market or even cold-call anyone since (thanks to SEO and GitHub) most folks find the solution when there in the midst of the problem.

If you're looking to build something, and are tech-savy, I think it's an interesting thing to go to popular OS projects and do some research. It'll open your eyes as to what others are needing and (sometimes willing) to pay for.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#15

Post by elvirs »

leesalminen wrote: post #9
greysteil wrote: post #5

For 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 t…

unrelated by on the bottom of every page of your website it says "GINGR, BOULDER, CO, 80302, UNITED STATES" no street address is not a good impression. Have you looked into renting a mailbox at a UPS Store? addresses on those things look like real street addresses with suite numbers and all.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#16

Post by leesalminen »

elvirs wrote: post #15
leesalminen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

unrelated by on the bottom of every page of your website it says "GINGR, BOULDER, CO, 80302, UNITED STATES" no street address is not a good impression. Have you looked into renting a mailbox at a UPS Store? addresses on those things look like real street addresses with suite numbers and all.

Ah, good catch! We actually have a real office (and thus street address) these days. Will update. Thanks!

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#17

Post by tnolet »

greysteil wrote: post #5

For 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…

This hits home. Literraly signed up the first paying customer for my monitoring SaaS [0] two days ago. It was done through discussing issues over mail, a tiny bit of “hand holding” and treating the customer as a launching partner (which they totally are). That first Stripe notification is pretty awesome [0] https://checklyhq.com

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#18

Post by jefftime »

danenania wrote: post #6

For 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…

What does PH stand for?

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#19

Post by graystevens »

danenania wrote: post #6

For 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…

This has definitely been the case for me over at breachinsider.com too – the ShowHN brought our first handful of customers, which have been a real delight to work with and completely fit the description outlined above... they understand the position we are in, and are happy to report issues or bugs they find (and are happy when we fix them in hours rather than weeks).

Generally speaking (and not in anyway a comment directed at the lovely people behind EnvKey), it can be a double edged sword, as if you are seen to only plug your business, even if you do add to the conversation, it can come across as a little disingenuous or pushy. So if you do take this route, don’t forget to be human and post normally sometimes.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#20

Post by NipunSingh »

jefftime wrote: post #18
danenania wrote: post #6

For 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…

What does PH stand for?

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