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How did you land your first customers?
What has worked for you in landing your first few customers? We've just launched a public beta with a couple of initial customers and looking to onboard more. I'm curious what worked for others, especially in b2b saas space.
P.S. Apologies if this topic has already been explored but I haven't found anything relevant.
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hey @kureikain! I checked out your product - I love the clean design and rich documentation. one extra thought for you to consider, I love your pricing (very affordable!), but the colorful design almost looks like it could be "100, 600, 1500" at first glance if you don't see the periods. Maybe consider just staying "$1, $6, $15"? I actually think that'll look and feel cheaper to the users. Just a thought! :)
@justintbuchanan thanks so much for such a valueable feedback. That's totally right now that you said it. Thanks so much again. Gonna make a quick change :-)
Hi! We already had a strong product LiveChat (https://www.producthunt.com/post... ) when we started working on our product suite. Our second product was @chatbotcom . The first paying customers came from LiveChat's customers database (the tools work smoothly together). Also, we bought a strong domain (chatbot.com) that gave us organic, well-converting traffic. A similar story happened with our third product - HelpDesk. First customers came from LiveChat's database (with HelpDesk we covered some customer cases that LiveChat doesn't cover). Also, we bought a strong domain (HelpDesk.com) and got organic traffic. As far as I remember, the first paying customer came from Product Hunt, actually. :) (https://www.producthunt.com/post...)
We went through our personal network to reach prospects for interview during beta. On boarded them on free plan as they could give us way to build better product.
We recently pivoted and invited them for 15 min meeting and gave lifetime access to most features otherwise they had to pay for.
@pooran_prasad_rajanna I often hear about the networking funnel, but is it easy to switch to other paid methods of acquiring clients after?
I asked a couple of my friends running their own startups for feedback of our product ( https://roiculture.com ). Eventually, they liked it and subscribed!
@shyam_prasad_reddy We answered related quora questions and engaged in reddit communities
romantic link
We are building in public, every new status update we have, such as the figma prototype being completed. We consultant with the founders who helped us validate our idea initially to walk them through the user journey. It increases buy in, relationship building and more.
@ethan_halfhide I like the idea about buy in. How did u get customers to follow you initially though? Did you already have the right following or email list?
You raised a good question, we started testing our service with our friends and acquaintances, then moved on to social networks and today we opened the hunt https://www.producthunt.com/post... In six months, we have increased our community to 1,500 users. Social networks give us more growth than just advertising. I hope you will also succeed
I have spent lot of money at Facebook ad to get my first paying client but no luck.
Then I started using Twitter & IndieHackers & I got my first client without spending a penny.
At https://growcify.com, we received several requests from customers before even launching the product. And at https://localites.co, it was all about community spread.
If you don't have a big influence on social media, it would be a little bit difficult to get customers without using paid advertisements. my team and I often pay some people who have good enough at the field that our business running on.
Let's say your sass is helping people to build their website and selling goods, find someone who has expertise in that kind of thing and also has big followers and influences on social media.
I hired my first employee ! he was in a way my first client because I had to convince him that this project was the best one.
We're a tutoring platform, Think Tutor, so we came in with some existing clients and began to transition them over. It's difficult to develop your first new customers through your platform though!
Hey @dmitry_kalinchenko! What worked great for us at Panther (https://www.withpanther.com/) initially is cold outreach.
Prospecting the right people and companies, iterating a ton on messaging, digging deep in the open rates and reply rates, etc. When a company was (or wasn't) interested, we asked them, "what in our initial email led you to make that decision?"
Outside of this, we took time to design a short presentation/demo that covers the problem, our solution, and what our product looks like.
@dewayne_johnson did you use automation and email databases? At our launch, I tried out mass cold outreach - that yielded 0 result. Since then I've switched to doing more manual prospecting and custom message writing, which seems to be a bit more fruitful
@dewayne_johnson @dmitry_kalinchenko High bounce rates, > 100 emails with essentially the same message in the email body will get flagged as spam. Do watch for that.
@dmitry_kalinchenko We don't use email databases but automation wise, we use tools like LinkedIn SalesNav, Hunter.io, Outreach, etc that speed up the prospecting and emailing process.
@dmitry_kalinchenko @nyootron Definitely. That's where a tool like Mailwarm (https://www.mailwarm.com/) comes handy!
We launched ProdPad more than 10 years ago, before Product Hunt even existed (though watch this space, we're launching new AI tools for ProdPad next Monday 😎 https://www.producthunt.com/prod...), so we had to find other routes to find our first customers.
It was just me and @simoncast back then, and we were both product managers by day, so we didn't really know what we were doing with marketing, but we figured it out... And our first ever paying customer from a decade ago is still with us today 🌟
I'd give the same advice today though: Build a 'good enough' homepage that's easy to change so ou can test different taglines and value propositions (ours was literally something simple like 'Better product management with ProdPad's roadmap software' or some variation on that), and TAKE HOLD of your first customers.
DON'T have automated onboarding emails. Instead, literally look up each customer who comes through on LinkedIn, look at the logs to see what they did when they encountered your webpage or trial sign up, and send a custom message for each.
We were getting something like 5-10 trials a day back in the super early days, and so this flow was perfectly manageable, if I was willing to keep a constant check on the logs and my inbox. And then every time someone replies, REPLY BACK IMMEDIATELY. Give proactive help. Ask questions. Clue them in about the new stuff you're testing or about to release, and ask them if they want to be beta testers. Make them feel really special. You'll also invariably help them with bugs, as the first version of your product will suck. That's okay! As long as you show them that you acknowledge and can fix bugs, and take on board their suggestions for ways to improve your app (there will be lots—you don't have to build all of these suggestions, but your first trialists will point out some pretty obvious wins), you'll get on their good side.
Then ask them to buy. Even if you don't have a payment system fully sorted yet. Talk to them about pricing and how they'd pay for this thing. If they give you positive signs, get a payment system in place (even if rough and ready and a bit manual at first), and start taking in some money! Voila, your first customers.
It took us a month or so to get our first customer, from the time we launched ProdPad in it's customer-ready state (we had an internal only version previously), and most of my time that month was spent talking to our very first trialists through the door, learning and adapting our product and processes so we could continue gaining speed.
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