For the last 4 months, I was working on my startup Float.
Now we have a hard time getting our first 10 customers who can use our product and give us some feedback to improve the product experience.
Would be great if you can share some tricks or tips you have to get an initial few customers.
For reference, you can check out Float here
https://addfloat.com/
First thing I'd do is start posting about your project on places such as Reddit. A couple of days ago someone posted a similar project here on Reddit and it did very well. I'd recommend making a similar post in the same subreddit and finding other ones you can also post it to (depends who your target customer is and which subreddits they hang out).
I'm also building a tool to help exactly with this. It will allow you to get notified whenever someone mentions your keyword (e.g. "product tours") in these subreddits so you can reply to them and find leads. It's not ready yet, but you can join the waiting list here.
This would be superhelpful. thanks man
One suggestion, you can start writing on medium for a related publication so that your product can reach to targeted audience.
Yeah, I have recently started writing on Medium.
First of all , the landing page looks great.
There are a couple of tips I can give based on your timeframe:
Short timeframe
Use paid ads on Google & Social media to target your customer and try to get them to sign up.
Find your target audience on Social Media and ask them to test your product. With the offer that if they like it and want to use it, they get the first year free. (make this extremely attractive so that they will leave valuable feedback)
Long timeframe:
thanks a lot, man. I will try to implement this.
Who are you ideal customers? Where do they hang out?
I would make product comparison pages.
Compare yourself to
Userpilot
Intercom
Appcues
Walkme
Helphero
WhatFix
Nickelled
Chamelion
Upscope
Then I would start doing direct out reach.
Go through product right here on Indiehackers that are making revenue. https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenue
See if they have an interactive demo. If they don't, find the founder and reach out explaining what you do and most importantly how you could help them.
Reach out to 100 tools. I bet you can close 10 customers.
After taking a look at your product, it seems like you could target a lot of businesses on Indie Hackers since many of us are building software products. I would look for people who are having issues explaining their product for their landing page or who want to provide quick tutorials for beta tests they are conducting with their users.
Since your product works to provide demos that can be used on landing pages, I would recommend posting a video created using your project on your landing page. My landing page for firetrack https://firetrack3-prod.web.app/home is lacking and I could see using addfloat to help make it showcase my product. Please reach out if you would like me to test and provide you with some feedback! :)
I think it could help conversions to include a Youtube video tutorial and screenshots from the interface. The stylized ones might look pretty, but people want to see what it's really like so they can envision themselves using it. I was just in another thread here about tally.so they do an amazing job at that if you want a reference point.
Thanks a lot for sharing. I will try to implement so of it into our product.
Lovely landing page - the only issue I see is it doesn't show any of Float, just cute illustrations. That would personally put me off signing up as a potential customer.
Sure let me add one float on the bottom of the homepage. By the way. You can still signup and use it :)
Hey Navdeep! Your landing page looks great :)
There aren't really any shortcuts but what I would personally suggest, especially for an early stage b2b product - focus on direct outreach rn for getting your first customers.
You will hear a lot of people talk about marketing, which is really important too, but more of a longer term game. And though you can always do this in parallel, directly reaching out to potential customers will help a lot more initially. Try stuff like cold emailing & direct outreach on social media - as long as you do your homework on the people that you reach out to and you think your product can be relevant to them, you will find users :)
yeah, that sounds like good advice. Recently I have discovered some chrome extensions to get email id as well.
Nice! You can actually get pretty creative with this - you can try their preferred contact email addresses, or find the relevant person in an organisation through linkedin / twitter, then contact them. Just as long as you sound like a human when approaching these people, you will get there :)
Yeah, will try to do some AB tests on that. But thanks, Daniela for getting some detailed feedback and advice. Couldn't believe people were so nice here on Indiehacker, unlike twitter.
haha yes twitter is a tough nut to crack, I think the fact that you only have a few characters to use & hard to give context on a situation doesn't help, but it does get better when you start cutting through the noise :) these might help on the twitter side : https://www.makingtwitterfriends.com/ https://www.findyourfollowing.com/
Good luck getting users though - looking forward to seeing a post after you found a channel that works for you!
Hello, we are happy to help via https://localazy.com/tags/interview,
our audience is full of SaaS makers ;)
Ping me anytime if you would like to get some coverage from fellow makers.
We can eventually make some co-marketing deal, upon discussion.
Jakub@localazy.com
Hey Jakub, I'm running a logo-maker website called [Instant Logo Design (https://instantlogodesign.com/), is it possible if we can reach out as well?
Hi Trey, noticed your site, wanted to send you a twitter dm but couldn't. Can you contact me back?
How about try to get into some routine job that would be benefited with your products, for a few months, and there you go -- free customer, direct feedback, and some cash. just an idea tho, but I don't have first hand experience. I think this is quite cost-effective.
Check out this free database of 100 strategies used by indie founders to start/grow their side projects and bootstrapped businesses.
There is more you can do, but there is also plenty of great advice here. Pick a few and focus.
Hi Navdeep, your landing it looks awesome, but you need to show the pricing and some kind of “checkout experience”.
If not, how are visitors going to buy the product? I don’t see a clear CTA
PS you can create also a LTD campaign to start
If you have not already, you need to narrow down your target audience. In other words, who is the user MOST likely to need product. Once you define that, your outreach will be focused and you'll have the feedback loop you need. If X type of user does not seem to resonate, jump to the next one, and so on.
I'm no expert, but I can offer some insights on how our startup got its first initial customers.
Read, read, read, about startup operations and vision. Such as the books: “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries or “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel. Those are the classics and my company had me read them. They will help you answer some of the more nuanced questions.
Identify the market you are trying to enter and the competition you are up against. What makes your project better than competitors?
Do you have a good grasp on the needs of your potential customers?
You may need to offer your services for free to test your infrastructure and then conduct user interviews to find out the flaws in your product and build from there. Ask them why they aren’t using your product’s competition. Look at the book “The Mom Test” by Ron Fitzpatrick to help you conduct great user interviews
Post about your project with a dedicated social media profile across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and, Instagram to easily show what potential customers can do with your services. After getting some reactions and engagements, respond promptly, to spread word of mouth. Plus people have to be able to find you to see what you can do!
Bite the bullet and purchase some paid targeted advertising through FB and google ad services once you think you can handle a few customers
After getting your first initial few customers ask for some good qualitative user testimonials from them to use as social proof to the next users
How have you built the website. It looks really cool. Do you use a template for it?
Also the video at the start page is quite cool.
Let me be very honest with my people. We used this template for the website
https://webflow.com/templates/html/saasbox-startup-website-template
and a Fiverr guy for Lottie's files
Hey Navdeep - I would focus on finding "design partners". Your initial set of potential customers who are willing to give you product feedback and could become your first set of customers.
Also important, think about finding potential customers with a "desperate need". Usually only people with an acute pain will buy from early stage start ups. Focus on the messaging that resonates for these people as they will be the persona that gets you to your first $1mm.
https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/picking-design-partners
Don't have much to add other than I'm on the same boat. So far through this forum my understanding is cold outreach in the beginning while making content for SEO. But none of that is relevant without first understanding your target audience. So first step is figuring that out. Then you know who to cold out reach and how to direct your messaging.
I tried doing cold outreach but I guess I need to focus one segment at a time.
I suggest you spend 20-30 minutes going through the following two resources. They seem to work for a lot of people:
47 great tactics to achieve growth >> https://www.knowledgehunt.co/item-detail?recordId=recHe965SySSwdH7d
Your first 10 customer >> https://www.knowledgehunt.co/item-detail?recordId=reccowiqBo61RwZT4
If you have more specific questions, let me know, and I will share a curated resources that will help you out. Good luck!
Thanks a lot, man for sharing such useful resources. I will surely implement these.
Your landing page design is really good!
For the copy, I'd put more emphasis on the benefit in the headline/subheadline tho. It allows to make product demo, but what does it means for your customer? How is that going to help?
Also, you only have one call-to-action, I'd suggest having a lots of them, ideally you should have one visible on the page at all part of the "scroll", that way if someone is convinced while reading, he doesn't have to scroll back up to click
Here is a great resource for going from $0-$1m. https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/chapters-enterprise/the-modern-go-to-market
thanks a lot man for sharing