Live data from Hacker News

How to Find Your Earliest Users

indiehackers.com

31–40 of 46 posts

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#31

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 hel…

I agree, you can find a lot of peoples pain points from just going to forums.

Looking back now, it amazes me at how often you see people crying out for a solution that they want to pay someone for. Mainly CMS plugins, but there's still a lot of opportunity out there.

Also, nice product!

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#32
post #17

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

Very happy for you. I'm on the same exact boat, first customer signed up on the 6th of this month which I'm ecstatic about. Wondering if you are German since it says Berlin as the HQ at the bottom of your page?

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#33
post #28
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unfortunately, the shortest possible answer is really hand wavy and vague. That kind of knowledge tends to come fairly organically if you really listen to what people say and aren't afraid to share a little bit about yourself.

When you're in the early stages of a venture, ideally, you know a little bit about the person you're talking to, know a bit about the problem they're having and are genuinely interested in how they found you and if your solution is working for them. That gives you a ton of fertile ground. In this stage, I love to thank people for using my product, tell them that because my product is so new it's very important to me that all of my users are very happy, and then ask them for any feedback or advice they have. It sounds very corny and scripted (and honestly, it is), but most of the time, if my product is any good and if it solves a real problem, everyone I talk to will have something.

At that point, it's about always validating what the person says to you. It doesn't matter if you agree, if you plan to implement the feature, or if you think it is the most incredibly stupid thing you've ever heard. Someone cares enough about your product to give you some feedback! Hearing feedback is an honour and I think it should be treated as such.

If you get those two things down, you'll learn from almost everyone you talk to. Particularly those people who need a little extra help. And, when you're working with people who need a little extra help, it's good to validate them too. Maybe you have a user who has trouble with copying and pasting. That sucks, but it's also an unbelievable opportunity. As builders, we need people like that to help us escape our own little, highly technical echo chambers!

Aside from those things, it really just comes down to active listening. If you listen closely, you'll start to notice that lots of people leave little threads in their statements. They'll often leave these little threads when they're about to pause and let you talk. For example, if you ask "how are you?" someone who is really open to talking will reply, "I'm good, it's a beautiful day today." That little thread about a beautiful day opens up lots of questions. If you don't already know where they're from, you can ask. If you do know, you can confirm, "Ah, you're from Timbuktu, right?"

Also, it's important to note that this only really works if you're genuinely interested in what people are saying. A big part of the game is knowing when to stop playing. We live in a world where it's expected to be prosocial and interested in everyone around you. But honestly, there's nothing wrong with being selective in who interests you. I would caution you that if you aren't genuinely interested in what people are telling you, you need to either get genuinely interested, or you need to replace yourself with someone who is. But, there's no value judgement in that. We're all programmed differently and it's all good.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#34
post #17

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

Please put your site behind CloudFlare (if have not already). They have a free plan and it's totally worth it

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#35
post #33
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unfortunately, the shortest possible answer is really hand wavy and vague. That kind of knowledge tends to come fairly organically if you really listen to what people say and aren't afraid to share a little bit about yourself. When you're in the early stages of a venture, ideally, you know a little bit about the person you're talking to, know a bit about the problem they're having and are genuinely interested in how…

Not OP but thanks, this was helpful to me too!

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#36
post #17

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

Hi tnolet I am co-founder of SenseGrow (http://sensegrow.com) would try out checklyhq. Was looking for something like this.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#37

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 is absolutely valuable advice. Initial sales interaction gives you a lot of market insight. It has a lotof value in initial days.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 identif…

As part of its marketing products Google used to have a keyword analysis tool that enabled the look up of search statistics for keywords. It also recommend keywords based on a target URL. They’ve changed their tools since I used it last, but I assume something similar still exists.

The approach of discovering a keyword niche and targeting it is harder now that more people know about the technique.

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#39

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…

I think your second tip is precisely what I've been trying with http://2FB.me because Shareable Tweets is kind of ambiguous. But for YouTubers who want to experience watching video as a simulcast, there is YouTube Share Enhancer which is the 2FB tool plus.

YouTube Share Enhancer: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-share-enha...

SoundCloud Share Enhancer: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/share-enhancer-for...

Re: How to Find Your Earliest Users

#40
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 displa…

Thanks for the tips. Crazy how things like this can slip. The site is static and on AWS Cloudfront, but it's a quick port from the actual Vue.js app which makes it rather big. Will make it server rendered (and faster) in the future. For now just reshuffled some v-cloak tags which should result in a quicker experience.
Post reply on HN