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How to Find Your Earliest Users

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Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#21

Post by danenania »

graystevens wrote: post #19
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 d…

> So if you do take this route, don’t forget to be human and post normally sometimes.

Great point. As an inveterate HN addict, this isn't an issue for me, but it's important to strike a balance.

It's like asking friends for favors. It's totally fine, but if it's the only reason you ever get in touch, it will start to get old.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#22

Post by tortilla »

tnolet wrote: post #17
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

That's awesome congrats!

It's a nice looking site too.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#23

Post by soperj »

I'm going through this right now with my real estate related site OpenHouseTour[1]. It's definitely different (and eye opening) when you're dealing with clients that aren't as savvy with computers and you're having to explain how to do things like copy and paste. I try to take the XKCD one of the lucky 10,000 approach and just think about how much time learning this will save them in other parts of their life, but sometimes it's hard.

1 - https://www.openhousetour.ca

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#24

Post by paulie_a »

wpietri wrote: post #13
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 a…

Every developer should be forced to tech support at some point. And additionally sales calls. While I really hated doing the latter it gave me some appreciation to what they have to do. Customer support gives you insight into how your actual customer used your service and their pain points. It's incredibly valuable as developer to see that point of view directly.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#25

Post by hluska »

soperj wrote: post #23

I'm going through this right now with my real estate related site OpenHouseTour[1]. It's definitely different (and eye opening) when you're dealing with clients that aren't as savvy with computers and you're having to explain how to do things like copy and paste. I try to take the XKCD one of the lucky 10,000 approach and just think about how much time learning this will save them in other parts of their life, but so…

If you're struggling with that kind of support, I recommend that you start playing a game. It's called "learn something new every contact".

The rules are simple. Whenever you talk to a client you haven't spoken to before, your goal is to learn something new. It might be something new about your product/problem, but it could be completely unrelated. Hell, through the years I've learned how to make an insanely good brine for turkeys, piss off Mormons in Utah and make a killer whiskey sour.

I recommend this because at this point, that level of support you're providing is business development, so the impression you leave is very important. Clients tend to feel very awkward when they have simple problems with someone they deem an expert. And, if you can provide that level of support while seeming genuinely interested in your clients, you'll win more than you lose. Try it!! Worst case scenario, you might learn to make a turkey so good you'll get emotional thinking about it...:)

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#26

Post by adventured »

tnolet wrote: post #17
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

Just checked out your site. Two things I ran into, the first was that the site seemingly wouldn't load. So I quickly typed in https://www.checklyhq.com and it doesn't resolve. Then I went back to the original url and gave it a bit of time, took maybe eight seconds to load the content, and it's doing that every time (HN flood?). It seems like something is fully loading, blocking the page load, before it finally displays the whole page.

Anyway, I'd definitely suggest redirecting the www to the naked domain.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#27

Post by daveguy »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4
himynameisdom wrote: post #3

Common 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…

I found this one very interesting too. I wanted to ask the founder how he knew "the most commonly searched term for SoundCloud producers was..." Is this somethig someone just threw out as a bit of anecdotal evidence? A running joke in the community or common knowledge among fellow producers? Or was there a specific analysis of say Google trends he did to come up with this nugget of insight? I think if you can identify a common search terms for a niche group then you can find common problems to solve... But how did he do that or know that?

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#28

Post by soperj »

hluska wrote: post #25
soperj wrote: post #23

I'm going through this right now with my real estate related site OpenHouseTour[1]. It's definitely different (and eye opening) when you're dealing with clients that aren't as savvy with computers and you're having to explain how to do things like copy and paste. I try to take the XKCD one of the lucky 10,000 approach and just think about how much time learning this will save them in other parts of their life, but so…

If you're struggling with that kind of support, I recommend that you start playing a game. It's called "learn something new every contact". The rules are simple. Whenever you talk to a client you haven't spoken to before, your goal is to learn something new. It might be something new about your product/problem, but it could be completely unrelated. Hell, through the years I've learned how to make an insanely good bri…

hahaha. Thanks, that's good advice. I'm not the most personable (luckily my wife is) and honestly when you put it this way it sounds so simple, but for the life of me I wonder how on earth people manage to do this without feeling scripted like "what are your interests?". How do you get to the point where you actually know enough about someone to say hey, that's something they know that I would like to learn?

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#29

Post by arosier »

tnolet wrote: post #17
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

Sight looks great. I would suggest selling benefits rather than features in the top fold of your homepage.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#30

Post by wpietri »

paulie_a wrote: post #24
wpietri wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Every developer should be forced to tech support at some point. And additionally sales calls. While I really hated doing the latter it gave me some appreciation to what they have to do. Customer support gives you insight into how your actual customer used your service and their pain points. It's incredibly valuable as developer to see that point of view directly.

Absolutely agreed! A while back I gave a talk on why everybody should do support: https://vimeo.com/136270620
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