I am worried about your social media marketing 🥵
I entered the Product Hunt community some time back, and while I enjoyed launching products and engaging with fellow creators, I couldn't help but feel a sense of disappointment.
This community seemed to have shifted its focus – it was no longer about conversing with the audience; instead, it seemed to be talking to itself.
Products were being upvoted as a strategic move to encourage reciprocity – an unspoken agreement that if you voted for someone else's product, they'd return the favor.
There are Whatsapp groups that collect people together with the single aim of voting up products.
There are people who "manage votes" for you for a little bit of cash.
This looks like sickness. It's bad for the audience, it's bad for the founders. We get nothing but vanity validation.
As I spent time on Twitter, I got caught up in the conversations revolving around #buildinpublic. But it struck me – who is really reading these 'build in public' discussions?
It's predominantly those who are already engaged in the same process of building in public.
This is a problem.
Your fellow creators and peers are not your target audience. Who are you actually creating your content for?
When utilizing social media marketing, there are three primary objectives you should be aiming for:
🧷 Generating leads
🧷 Nurturing those leads
🧷 Converting those leads into customers
If these three goals aren't at the core of your efforts, you are merely posting. It's not marketing.
Metrics such as comments and replies might inflate your ego, but what truly matters are the tangible results like sales and conversions.
In cases where your social media traction is still gaining momentum, it's likely that you have more friends and colleagues connected to your profile than actual potential customers.
While this is natural, it's essential to acknowledge that they aren't your target market.
In order to effectively connect with your intended audience, it's crucial to craft content that resonates with them. Shift away from seeking validation from peers and instead, stay focused on your mission – acquiring more customers.
Here are a few actionable ideas to guide you:
🧷 Compile a list of your prospective buyers' pain points – don't worry if your product doesn't address all of them.
🧷 Create a catalog of topics you plan to cover – stick to these themes for consistency.
🧷 Stay updated on relevant news and trends that might interest your target audience and incorporate them into your content plan.
🧷 Steer clear of seeking validation solely from peers. Remember, their opinions might divert you from your core mission of acquiring and serving customers.
Can you relate to this situation? What kind of content do you currently produce? Feel free to hit "reply" and share your thoughts.
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Woah, this post hit me right in the feels! 😅 I've definitely been guilty of getting caught up in the social media vanity metrics game before. Gotta keep reminding myself that my fellow creators aren't my target audience.
As an aspiring indie hacker, I'm trying to stay laser focused on acquiring actual customers for my new SaaS project (link in bio). But it's so tempting to get distracted chasing clout and validation from other founders!
Really needed this reality check today. Time to get back to brass tacks and start creating content that truly resonates with my ideal customers.
Anyone else struggling with this? Would love to hear your thoughts! And if you want to check out my little SaaS side hustle, I'd hugely appreciate any feedback from this amazing community.
I am glad this clarity came to you. You'll do great with the renewed focus!
Somitting I'm learning as we speak. It seems like social media is being taken over by just those who are doing it professionally. Not actually buyers. One strategy I'm using now is: I judge who I follow, based on the activity on their posts, then I go to the comments and interact with those ppl. Lots of followers and likes mean nothing.
It's like you said, my product is not aimed at indie Hackers, ghostwriters, social media marketers, it's hard to find where the ppl are...
No, the people are all there. Your audience... They just don't post as often. They are the consumers. They are reading, watching. Sometimes liking and commenting.
Thats a good point, consumers aren't posting as much.... So If I'm not getting good results then, I must need to do better 😅
We'll figure it out :)
Guys, I write often on business tech and marketing. If you like this article, you might like more of my content. You can follow me on Twitter. I am @cyrilgupta
helpful
Thanks!
I mean isn't it normal that everything is manipulated? That's pretty normal for marketing as a whole.
I am okay with that. I am only concerned about the target audience for all that effort.
I agree with your point.
Thanks!
Post is really useful and will help in our social media account privacy
Glad it was helpful... but privacy? I never even talk about that
I mean when we are working on marketing people never consider about their social account privacy. But Helpful information from your blog.
Product Hunt is a well-known platform that lets users share and discover new products varying from the latest mobile apps, websites, to tech products or services in the market. It has become a launching pad where tech company founders generate buzz about their products or services.
Right... Thanks for confirming that.
I created an account to upvote this article. This post hit me as well. At the beginning, we're focused on the users. And then comes a lot of app lovers. It's shockingly how much we try to keep in contact with those people and found out taking with them more than with the users. This is a shocking alert. I'm going to focus on your guide starting from today. Wish me luck~ and wish whoever reading this to also focus on the users.
Wow! I am glad it's had such an impact. Good luck!
For me, I think finding a way of actually reaching a target demographic seems only achievable through paid advertising so far. Given prospective customers don't seem to be the target audience in places like product hunt.
I do feel like comments & likes don't really correlate to traffic on your app through organic social media. However, they may slightly increase visibility of your business.
I use paid advertising too, but I am also working to build an audience. I think I was able to do this reasonably successfully with my YouTube channel.
Oh funny, you are describing a point which I was thinking about a lot at the moment...
Like isn't #buildinpublic a bit of a zero-sum game among solo founders?
On the other hand, it can be exciting for future customers to get a behind-the-scenes look and follow the story of the product. It's emotional, and we all love emotions... I feel the whole "document your work" is definitely a legit idea.
But also realized it feels better to not focus content on peers but create it in a way that it's interesting to people outside the indie niche.
What's your approach? Do you make regular content and if so, how do you position it?
P.S.:
Will print this out and hang it to the wall, well on point ;)
"On the other hand, it can be exciting for future customers to get a behind-the-scenes look and follow the story of the product. It's emotional, and we all love emotions... I feel the whole "document your work" is definitely a legit idea."
Unless your product is developer focused - most customers don't give a sh*t about how you built it. In fact, unless your customers are developers, they are probably too busy with their own workflows to ever care about your "building journey."
Your competitors though will thank you for documenting your work to see if there are any gems worth taking.
Yes as you put it I mostly agree.
But there is also the angle of do you just talk about yourself and that's it, or do you do it to provide valuable information that people can apply to their own lives.
I was thinking about how to approach making content in this regard, like the "How I did xy..." vs "How you should do xy...".
So to speak from one's own truth instead of "commanding" people. To share your personal experiences and the strategies that have worked for you, rather than telling your audience what they should do.
Which, I was wondering, isn't in the end similar to "documenting your journey"?
I totally agree that it might be exciting for customers to get behind the scenes look, but that's a very small % of customers unless the problem is unique and so pressing that it is urgent for your customers.
In many situations you might find yourself interacting and talking to more buildinpublic people instead of customers.
It's great for accountability though.
I'd also start a series of content oriented campaign (not just building, but talking about the topic you're building for)
Yes I agree that just interacting within buildinpublic groups might not be the most fruitful with respect to getting customers..
But I also feel there's a fine line between just building in public within those groups vs sharing experiences/insights/strategies from your journey in a more "designed" format that provides takeaways to a general audience (see the comment above)
This is an interesting take and confirms my suspicions about the buildinpublic movement. I really like it and I joined it, but I agree that these people who follow your journey might not necessarily be your target audience.
Do you have any advice as to how to find where my target audience hangs out/where to follow them?
I've reviewed your website and saw four target audiences: small business owners, bloggers, freelancers, and nonprofit organizations. Among these, which specific group benefits the most from your product and receives unique value?
This is one thing I am kinda struggling with. I hear/read all the time that you should narrow down to a niche not too big but not too small, so I should perhaps direct my messaging to a single category, but I am afraid of losing opportunities because all the 4 I mention now would be a good fit for this kind of product. Any suggestions?
Just a few thoughts first.
All of these target audiences are huge. I think NPO is the narrowest. The narrowest segment has 10 million potential customers around the world (Google it).
We are all living in our own information bubble. If all hackers know what AI is, only a few percent of the people in your audience really understand what AI is. Others do not have the slightest idea. Your value proposition for them means nothing.
First, focus on one segment.
Focus on only one target segment and niche down. For example, a small business owners transforms into a bakeries owners in Espoo. It's called the Initial Customer Profile. Should not be confused with Ideal Customer Profile. In this example, Ideal Customer are all small business owners.
When ICP is described, you can understand where they hang out and how to follow them. Most importantly, you can understand whether they have a problem with your solution or not. If not, then go to the next segment.
The second way is to focus on the problem.
You offer a solution without describing the problem for which this solution is intended. Example: Making a website isn't a business problem. A small number of customers is a business problem.
If your solution helps resolve this problem, define which segments really may have this problem.
When ICP described...
When you understand your ICP, their problems, and what they want, you can find them, create content and educate them on how your solution may help them.
Hi, thanks a lot for your input. How do you find the size of a niche? Are there any tools or resources you can share?
I am still confused as to who would be the best audience for me.
It's a typical emotional reaction about selecting an initial audience. You aren't alone. I only have one solution in my toolbox. Stop thinking, pick one, and concentrate on audience problems.
There are two approaches to estimating niche or market size: top-down and bottom-up. In the case of non-profit organizations, I simply google 'how many npo in the world':)
In the meantime I had long conversations with ChatGPT and Bard. I know these are not people, but I got a lot of useful advice. I described the product, what it already does, what it will do at launch, what's on the roadmap from there, and what I think are the strongest characteristics (ease of use and AI assistance), and both ChatGPT and Bard gave the same conclusion that with this product the ideal customer profile would be small businesses. What do you think?
At this stage, I would be thinking about the target audience as a hypothesis. So we need to test a hypothesis.
Small businesses are a good segment to start with. Small businesses are different; that's why niche down. When a niche has been chosen, it is necessary to describe what business problems it might have.
Answer this type of questions, as an example: 'What business processes have my ICP?', 'What are the problems they solve every day?', 'How do they solve these problems now?', etc.
Then you have a problem list. Now you can answer the question, 'Does my product solve problems for my customers?'.
If not, how do you change the product so that it solves real problems for small business owners?
If yes, where and how do you talk about your product in their language?
Love the problem, not the solution. After the process above, you will better understand customers and their needs. If your product doesn't solve any problems, just pivot. It's also normal
I am replying here to your last message since IH seems to limit nesting.
I would assume that if they don't have problems with skills nor money they probably don't care about having a website or haven't considered it yet. I guess there are some businesses like very small ones like a bakery or something who might not care about having one.
I've seen that you're working for an event management platform. I've got an idea about ICP — small event agencies.
Every event needs a website. Events are short-term stories that do not require the best quality website, but agencies or private managers have a lot of events.
And I would be thinking about more contexts where 'quality' could be low but 'frequency' is high.
A few potential competitors eventcreate.com rsvpify.com
We have an audience that doesn't care about having websites. It means there is an audience that cares about having websites.
If this audience really cares about their online identity, why do they still not have a website?
I'm clarifying. If I really care about something and understand its importance, a lack of tech skills or a small amount of money won't stop me from solving it.
I agree that it's a hypothesis for now and I am starting to follow some communities of small biz owners on Reddit etc to try and learn more about them.
For now, the problem I believe my product solve is that small business owners have a lot on their plate, might not have technical skills so creating a website for them would normally require hiring experts who can do it for them. But with DynaSite they can do it themselves easily and quickly with the help of AI and without writing any code, so they can then focus on their business instead of stressing about building a site. So they can save time and money.
I have updated the copy on the landing page to reflect this. Do you think it addresses the problem the product solves clearly?
Yes, it's much better, if problem exists.
Just one more tip, how I'm thinking in the same cases for deep diving into the customer's world and checking my assumptions about the problem.
If tech skills, money, and time weren't a problem, why do my customers not have a website yet?
It could give you some new perspective on customers problems.
Yes, I do have a strategy for this. I am going to write more about it later.
Looking forward to it :)
For some products they are. When I was building in public Automatio, I was posting weekly updates and got significant amount of sales from it, since the tool itself was solving theirs problem.
If that's the scenario for you then all power to you. It's not the same for majority of the people
I totally agree with this! It's so easy to get lost on social media. It's so easy to think that the majority of businesses are targeting indie hackers, marketers and who else is in your bubble. But in reality there are tons of people and opportunities out there that you simple don't see on your social media. Tons of boring businesses focusing on a niche that might be less online. SEO and social media might be still useful to target them. But they will not show up in your feed. You are not the target audience so you will never know.
This reminds me of the mobile game industry. All the mobile games seems to stay alive by showing you ads for other mobile games. It feels absurd.
Well said.
This is the best post I've read on indie hackers this month for sure.
To vote for this article, I made an account. This article struck me as well. We start out by putting the users first. Many app enthusiasts then follow. It's shocking how much we attempt to stay in touch with them and how much more time we actually spend with them than with the users. This alert is shocking. I'm going to concentrate on your guide as of right now. I wish you well and ask that you keep the users in mind as you read.
I can completely agree!
Good to see you here, Cyril! I know you from your WSOs…TubeJeet was one of them, right?
Btw, great write up! Keep up the good work.
This seems just as true for SEO in general as it is for ProductHunt/IndieHackers. I feel like 90% of SEO is gaming the bots that increase your rank. Unfortunately, these bots are the gatekeepers to human attention, so it's a catch-22.
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Product Hunt has become very 'gamed'.
Still a strong place to launch, but most are heavily planned.
I think social media is very important that who is your customer
I totally agree to the part you spoke about focusing on the mission. It’s important that founders don’t lose track of this.
"
🧷 Generating leads
🧷 Nurturing those leads
🧷 Converting those leads into customers"
I totally agree with these point
interesting literally
Why! Thank you
I agree but what is a realistic solution? I treat producthunt as a strong back link and that's about it.
Targeting audience is really important else your effort will be waste of time. Targeting audience is easy for og entrepreneurs but new guys will find it not very hard to achieve.
My recommendation is before posting in social media scroll around the target market and understand what they are talking about now and what they like to talk. To know it is easy just see the like dislike and comments. From that you will have a bit understanding on what your potential customer talking about and how you can be in the middle of it.
In twitter you can also try comment things out and if it get likes and interest from you audience than make it as a posts.
There is other tricks that you can try but essentially it comes down to you approach to it. Here if you interested to understand how to approach this Getting more engagement in social media: finding the right audience
Thanks, good advice.
Well. This is so true and I didn't think about it earlier. and yes our customers don't even post often. From here I agree, I need to post about the pain points I am solving and the solution I am offering. Thank you so much for this article.
You are most welcome.
Great post and share. I've seen people using Linkedin post to game the system before until Linkedin changed their algorithms to reward meaningful engagements instead of likes and "drive-by" comments. However, I know solo-founders who have acquired more and more customers becuase of their "Build-in-Public" tweets. In these kind of strategies, size matters. Even if 90% posts are for peers, if 10% reach your target customers, you still get 10% organically. Your peer may also refers people to you.
However, I'm also working with founders who are growing their SaaS startup without being on social. That works the best for B2B SaaS. In fact, I've interviewed one SaaS founder with multiple exits without ever being on any social meida. He has attracted investors and PE firms wanting to invest or buy his startups. It's like when you're make cash, people will find you. The episode will be released this Thursday. Here's the podcast link: https://www.virtualfinpilot.com/podcast
Cool! Do link it. Which podcast is this?
Just linked the podcast. Episode 1 for this solo-founder is to be released on Aug 24. Stay tuned. Thank you for asking!
Thanks
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I am not sure what we are talking about here.
Sorry, all this time I was writing a reply on the wrong page. My bad
No problems.. it happens