💖 No audience, no list, no SEO. No problem…
So you have a new product or service, you’ve done the landing page and now you want to sell?
If you’ve already been around, built a mailing list (like mine), have a social presence, and get some keywords it’s easy but this is not the article for those people.
What do you do when you are totally new and have no audience anywhere, and you also don’t have $1000s to throw on ads?
No, don’t buy any shiny object that brings you ‘x clicks on autopilot all day’, or gets you ‘traffic while you are sleeping’. They won’t work and you will waste money, and gasp… time.
Here are the best friends of a new marketer.
⚡Peer groups (Facebook groups, forums, Reddit)
⚡Cold emails
⚡Outreach marketing
Don’t have an audience? It’s okay. The people you want to target are still out there. They are hanging out in places that are still reachable to you but you just need to work harder.
The first thing you need to do is build a network. The best place to find a network is through peer groups. Start by joining a handful of groups, and learn what they talk about. Then participate first by commenting on posts and then gradually as you are familiar, talking about your solution.
Be open to partnerships, giving away a part of your earnings to the moderator or the organizer. Ask for support.
Be nice and you will get what you want.
Cold Emails
I love cold emails. I rarely use them myself because I have multiple channels of acquisition at scale already, but running PursueApp (getpursueapp.in), I am seeing so many people build up their business using it.
Find people who could need the service you want. Get their emails using one of the many tools available online.
Write them a polite personal note (emphasis on personal) introducing yourself and how you can help them. Follow up at least 4-5 times if you don’t get a response. Beyond that, drop it. Not everyone converts.
Cold Emails are not spam. They are not sent en masse. They are one-on-one and talk to the prospect directly.
If you don’t have a customer list, they are often a pretty good way to build one, especially if you are not in a tech industry (where everyone gets too many cold emails).
Outreach Marketing
This is one step up from cold email. Direct outreach.
If you know who your prospects are and you know they are in the market. Politely stalk them.
It’s no worse than doing a cold sales call in the olden days.
The best place for outreach is LinkedIn because people actually expect some professional contact over there. It’s not the space for personal sharing.
The second best place is Twitter because it’s 100% public. Then there’s Instagram, and finally Facebook.
If you stick to LinkedIn most of the time you will be legit and ethical. On the other platforms be more careful and make sure you are not invading privacy.
It always pays to be relevant.
Build an audience… Already!
Protect your momentum like your life depends on It
How do I change my username on Indie Hackers?
Tiktok and Pinterest are important platforms to get traffic. It is necessary to share regular content here, too.
I haven't used TikTok yet... Need to get started
Have you acquired paying customers with those channels?
In my limited experience, software peoducts don't work well there
I opened these accounts for Notion templates. I haven't published a paid Notion template yet. It may be necessary to produce a lot of quality contents for software products.
Yeah, the problem is that software products are high commitment and have limited content ideas that can be made to short form...
For example.... imagine teaching SEO (what your product does) on tiktok. Your time is better spent doing something else
I feel like IH is the only site that treats pain points as business challenges. Google this subject and you'll find shinny marketing buttons that would make a cat crazy, but not much advice. Thanks for the article.
Thank you for this interesting post.
The most difficult is when you are at a very early stage.
There are two big challenges : to have reach and to be trust by your market.
You know your target and you have a product but the product-market fit have to be adjusted a little.
Even if you have a budget for ads, there is an important probability that you spend everything with no result (because your product market-fit is yet not well established)
In regard of outreach marketing. It's a mid/long term strategy. Does it worth the cost if for some reason your business is not viable ?
SEO, it's a long term strategy and it doesn't fit the need of an early stage business
The only way is cold prospecting (linkedin, email) but you have to face the challenges that you are not trusted and you have a small chance that you prospect have the need just when you send your email.
As someone just starting how, this resonates with me very much. Even with the numerous advice it's still incredibly hard to validate ideas. On top of that, if you're a maker, non of the sales and out reach strategies aligns with what you actually want to do, so it's very hard to be motivated and get better at it.
Absolutely! It's a challenge, but you gotta get started.
I still feel there is no one size fit all... The reality is you can't and should not be on all platforms. Just understand your audience and choose at least 4 to be consistent on and let others be extra. Your options are great thou
Good insight!
thank you very much for the tips, I will put them into practice
Good luck my mate!
Thank you man. I was worrying about trying to grow a twitter whilst building one of the many ideas I have and this really took the pressure off me. 😸
Great! Good luck
I'm sorry, but that's some bad advice about cold emails:
"Follow up at least 4-5 times if you don’t get a response."
Following up 5 times means sending 6(!) emails about your product to someone that obviously does not care. That's too much and spammy and hurts your brand and reputation.
the followups should have nothing to do with your product. it should be about the person you are emailing and all the research you did on them/their problems they're trying to solve.
That's a real good tip Nathan!
Ok, but I still think sending 6 emails to someone you don't know is too much.
It's actually funny that you replied here @RealNathanLatka, because I remember getting quite a lot of automated "personalized" emails from you back when I subscribed to the Latka Magazine. ;) At some point it was too much for me and I cancelled.
I'm with you @joejoe - I think 6 may be tipping the scale a bit too far.... and one's energy might be better spent elsewhere.
+1 for communities. Have to leverage other people's traffic when you're just starting out.
Literally no other way.
I agree... I do it even today.
We got our first 1k users for one of my projects from Twitter - just searched for relevant tweets and replied to those tweets adding value to the conversation and mentioning our product. Now building a tool to streamline this process: whisperwind.co.
Showed this to my team.
Cool, happy to run a test for your team if you guys are interested.
Also just signed up for the waitlist for this. Sounds great!
Awesome, I emailed you.
The idea of cold email bring me back to one on one sale that I did not like when I was running offline businesses. I guess I will have to embrace it once for all. Thanks for the article.
Question. So by cold email you mean targetting someone (unknown) on LinkedIn that might need your product and emailing the person?
Yes.
You're spot on with this post, Cyril. Slack groups got me my first few sales and newsletter subscribers. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks! I am glad you liked this post :)
@cyrilgupta - Great read, this article resonates with me as I needed the motivation to "just do it". I'm currently in the idea validation, but you've inspired me to make a goal.
Over the next 5 weeks, I'd like to send 20 cold emails or direct outreach to potential customers. Seeing as I'll need some ramp up, here's my plan starting August 7th:
I set a reminder in my calendar to start making a post on September 9th and submit it on September 11th with my experience, thought process, and what I learned along the way.
Let's go!
Matthew McConaughey voice Gotta pump those numbers up!
I support this! Make it 10x!
thanks
This is an amazing goal.. but how about you 10x it?
@cyrilgupta Challenge (partially) accepted! I'll meet you halfway , I'll try to 5x my goal:
With the more aggressive goal, I'm hoping I'll have some idea of the validation results before week 5 is complete (but will keep for thoroughness).
Doing it for the first time it seems impossible, but I don't know what's actually possible unless I try.
Seeing as you're pushing me into discomfort zone (more so than I'd already "signed up" for in my head), maybe I can solicit your thoughts on how/who to reach out to.
The idea I'm trying to validate relates to data retention / records retention.
# Problem (somewhat scratch my own itch idea):
# Competition (so far):
# Audience (types of users that experience the problem):
# Industries where retention rules may be more enforced:
# Questions:
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So how exactly should you get a mailing list?
I am doing it through free versions of my apps... It kind of works
Two ways: 1) You have a prominent newsletter subscription option on your website and drive traffic and optimize for newsletter sign up conversions through outreach /ads /PR. 2) For the U.S. there are several providers who sell B2B contacts for cold outreach online.
There was a talk given by Kathryn Minshew where she talk about step by step on what to do when you got literally nothing when starting.
She talked about cold emails/calling/dms and how to talk with media and try to get your blog out there. ( do watch the video if you want to learn more about it)
One thing that good to highlight is to make the product very simple that when you emails, dm or try to tell others about what you are doing they will get the entire idea of what you are doing in single word.
The reason it so important in Donald Miller book Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen he talked about people actually don't give a fuck about your product so trying to make them think what your product do is waste of time.
So the message should be clear, for example when I say I make burger business, you guys will have all the idea on how to pay, what it looks like what can you expect etc.
You can read more about clarity when doing business here Acquiring Your First Users Out of Thin Air: The Power of a Compelling Value Proposition
Great ideas, thanks for sharing!
Everything you said is what I'm going to start applying in my SANTO TREINO APP business. My audience is online trainers who sell online training and diets, my platform helps them with diet and training and how to manage their students/clients.
Great hopefully it work best for you I will recommend checking out the book . Its will help you a lot
Listening.. it's a pretty good video.
Yup, it can be like a checklist for people who just launch their product
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