Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.
Ads for me, too. Google, Capterra, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were my main ad channels.
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
Some harsh truths there.
Unfortunately not everyone has resources to start with ads (especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs), and in some way growing organically and slowly gives you more time to develop product better.
Having said that, I am in agreement with the essence of this reply.
> especially bootstrapped firms or solopreneurs
My company is bootstrapped, and I'm a solo founder. If you don't have any money to grow your business, then you aren't going to be able to do much until you have some money. Hard truth, but it takes money to earn money -- either your money, or somebody else's. You have to get buyer's eyes on you, somehow.
Largely true. Lack of money in some cases can be compensated by investing more time and efforts.
What is your customer acquisition cost? Monthly spend on ads? Where are the ads?
Talks at meetups for the first 100.
Hacker News for the next 10,000.
Target audience was devs.
When doing talks at meetups, do you present a version (mvp?) of your product or are you doing a talk on a topic that aligns with the meetup subject and at the end, oh by the way, I have this product you might like to try.
Wow, what a combo of offline and online growth!
What made you prefer HN over dev platforms like StackOverflow or Github?
Cold out reach via email. It was so useful we pivoted and now have a product to help with it.
Your channels are dependent on your product and market you're trying to serve. For us it's b2b enterprise customers in the United States. So email works well. If you are trying to sell to developers, or union carpenters in venezuela its going to be different per case.
Have tried B2B for small businesses in USA using Apollo.io with limited success.
I guess businesses from outside USA would need bigger effort to generate trust.
Yeah we built a whole email pipeline using Apollo and some other tools. Maintaining high deliverability is really hard but it really makes a difference. If you're just using Apollo I can tell you that it's going to be really hard to make any outbound campaign work.
We mainly use it as a prospecting tool.
What were the other tools you used in your pipeline? And what kind of email sequence did you use? Would be awesome to know
How do you majorly engage them?
Where did you get the email addresses from?
Mainly apollo. We do some high level searches based on market factors and then purchase some emails from them.
First 5-10 clients was emails to friends of friends.
Next 50-100 was cold emails.
After that, mostly word-of-mouth.
Target audience was publishers (audience development/growth)
Did you have emails of target audience already, or you bought that? If bought, from where?
Hacker News :)
It was this Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
That was before showing something on HN was called "Show HN" though.
Great!
Hacker news and Reddit when someone encounters a problem my project tries to answer
Niche Facebook Groups: Entrepreneurs and Investors.
Targeted Linkedin outreach: A specific class of professionals
New for me to see fun platform like Facebook to target business people.
reddit! consumer healthcare website
Which subs? How did you avoid getting banned?
The trick is you don’t.