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How do you recruit early adopters for your product?
Hi PH ππ½ I would like to share experiences on how to get early feedback and validation when launching a new product π§π½βπ π
Let's start with mine...
1. In January I created a landing page about my new product with the goal of collecting early adopters e-mails
2. I searched on LinkedIn for professionals that can benefit from my new product. In my case I looked for "conversational designers" and I obtained a list of 6 hundreds people approx.
3. I created a sequence (thanks to an automation tool) to engage with those people on LinkedIn: view profile, follow, send an invite, endorse skills and a couple of follow-up messages to request if they were interested to get early access to the new product.
4. Once they land on the landing page, I started engaging with them directly on the landing page through a widget and a conversational application that I built with my brand new no-code design studio in a few minutes.
In this way I obtained the first 100 early adopters. This helped me a lot to gather feedback and improve the product before the launch scheduled on Thursday, Feb 9th.
What about your experience to look for early adopters? π‘
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Rogerio Taques
What a strategy, Michele! Impressive.
I was about to ask you what tool you have used to automate your LinkedIn interactions, but I got it already from one of your answers in this thread! It was Dripify, right? π€
Then, I would like to ask you what your retention/conversion rate was when using such a strategy. Have all the 100 early adopters used your product or upgraded their accounts?
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@rogeriotaques I confirm Dripify! You can use Waalaxy as an alternative. About retention, it's more than 40% after 2 weeks. We are now working to improve activation :-)
step 2... how did you turn your search into 600+ people? did you have a VA manually enter them into a sheet?
step 3... what tool did you use for automation?
@benhoffman_ step 2 ππΌ i was lucky! I searched for "conversational designer" on LinkedIn and excluded the Italian ones. After that, I shared the URL of the search with the automation tool
step 3 ππΌ Dripify
@michelepomposo Great post! Everything was laid out so clearly. Curious, how'd you find the responses to be when endorsing the skills of people you didn't know personally?
Great content! I just finished the development of EmbedQuiz.com and trying to get my first users.
This sounds like great solution, I'm going to try something similar!
@michelepomposo Of course! Unfortunately ProductHunt doesn't let me share links in the comments so I DM you on Twitter!
My early adopter method is an upcoming page for my next app https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
@nitin_p cool! I also though to this, but it was too late in my case since Ship was not available anymore. II just did a teaser page here on PH and it is working pretty well. I just passed 100+ followers a few minutes ago. You can check it here: https://www.producthunt.com/prod...
ps: are you also using whatsapp for your newsletter? i just subscribed to your upcoming page
@michelepomposo Thanks for subscribing. No I am not using WhatsApp in newsletters. I am building a marketplace that basically brings newsletter creators and advertisers together.
@nitin_p ok, got it! it sounds really interesting. I will get in touch with you when I will have some marketing budget available
Hi Michele, great share! I have follow up questions
1. Did you find 600 people manually yourself? Without paying for emails or anything?
2. What automation tool did you use to create a sequence? That would be really useful.
We have launched a marketplace for people to rent and lend items from each other. We leverage platforms like Facebook Marketplace.
I was reading the book TRACTION and started taking notes from there. 6 months after launching, we got our first paying customer.
@elifares these are my answers:
1. i find them trough a standard search on LinkedIn
2. dripify
marketplaces are always tough, since you have to keep demand and supply always equilibrated
best of luck with Boomerang!
For me its my personal network who are either working on startups or founded one. I also reach out to my tech-savy collegues.
Sounds amazing! What tool did you use to automate engagement with people on LinkedIn, if you don't mind me asking?
@yulia_mamonova dripify. There is a 7 days free trial. I also asked for an extension and, in my case, it worked
We also have created a landing page for early adopters and promoted it via tons of resources: from Betalist to ProductHunt. https://senseapp.ai
But one thing we took at risk to add was an after-submit survey. But it worked well! Using Typeform we achieved almost 75% of completion, which we couldn't expect! Of course we received tons of valuable information for our future customer development.
Awesome! Over what period did you send your initial outreach over LinkedIn? I've been experimenting with it a lil lately, but don't want to get my profile flagged for spam! I read that it's one risk of this method (but it could also just be tales from low-quality untargeted mass outreach campaigns).
Thanks for sharing!!
@barneelloyd in a couple of weeks!
i was already quite active on the platform in terms of engagement and direct messages
if you start from scratch it's better to go slower ;-)
@barneelloyd hey Barnee, Jovana here. I'm Michele's co-maker. Do you mind checking out what we've launched today - open-source no-code Chatbot Building platform - and letting us know your thoughts? cheers
We work with a lot of early-stage companies at @consoledotdev ( https://console.dev ), which is a free weekly devtools, cloud & infra newsletter for experienced engineers. There's a section for early-access and beta releases which gets very high engagement - we can easily send several thousand developers to try each tool we feature.
So if you're launching something, get in touch with the details: hello@console.dev !
@consoledotdev @davidmytton sure! Check our PH post and feel free to propose me some cooperations opportunities: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Thanks @michelepomposo for sharing. We took a bit more networking approach to it by inviting 10 friends/colleagues to review and critique an early wire frame for the design of www.Levelfields.ai, an investment research application that uses AI to break down the barriers to investment research.
I asked every person initially interested to name and invite 5 other people and did one on one interviews with all of them to gather feedback.
I asked each of them to also name 3 people who might be interested and I carried out individual discussions with each.
When we were done with the interviews, we had a decent list to keep informed of our product.
When we launched the beta product, we asked them to signup and buy a subscription. Those who didn't we just gave free access to.
In this way we gathered a lot of feedback prior to building the actual product which saved time on UX studies.
@tehrynn we try but not always it's possible... next step is to improve our onboarding experience. would you like to help us with appcues?
@michelepomposo Would love to! Or at the very least provide you with some resources to get your strategy going! I'll connect with you on Linkedin if you'd like to find some time to meet?
Interesting workflow. Constant engagement is key. There is a fine line between contacting potential early adopters introducing an opportunity and spamming.
Thus your process seems to take care most of these.
The numbers you quoted are solid as well- 100 early adopters was a great start.
If I may suggest an improvement; You can use tools to augment/enhance your search on media (I am referring to step 2 on your list), such as Audiosense for twitter, to easily identify and curate potential adopters (thus expanding your search group on twitter as well).
The more aligned to your interests the target group is, the better chances of converting those who land on your page to early adopters.
Naturally the engagement stage (step 4 on your list) is equally important and judging by the numbers, it seems that you have done a good job there.
@apollon440 thank you so much for your tips! i was actually looking for an automation tool on twitter π€©
Hi Michele, great content! Thanks. Could you share the messages you sent to the prospects?
I am trying cold email atm to reach CEO's but maybe your linkedin approach would be better.
Let me know.
@matteoaliotta1 with the first message I briefly introduce myself and my startup.
Second message I offered them a sneak peek of the design studio.
Only when they showed interest after the second message, I shared with them the landing page URL
@matteoaliotta1 @michelepomposo How did you measure "showed interest"? Was it those who opened or clicked some link or were you asking them to reply back?
Your launching it's going to help Creator s and marketeers to gather feed back and improve the product
@mosh_malcom for sure! have you already had the opportunity to try out the new chatbot design studio?
It's hards to predict π―how a landing site helps in engaging them directly to the page though a widget and a conversational application which brings as to 100 early adopters. Which helps to garther feed back and improves products..
@mosh_malcom it always a matter to experiment and perform some A/B testing. Ping me if you need some help with the setup π
@michelepomposo thank you so much for sharing and starting this conversation. Are you able to share the name of the Linked In automation tool/ process that you used here?
I recently discovered a trick on Instagram that allows me to capture the email addresses of profiles that might be interested in my product, such as yoga teachers. As a developer, I created an extension to make it easier to send emails to these profiles and include them in my newsletter if they open the first email. By spending approximately 1 hour per day on Instagram, using my extension to search for good leads, I was able to accumulate 1000 engaged subscribers to my newsletter and 100 paying customers in just two months. I have now launched a side project using my extension, which I have named Instalead.
because a lot of people ask me in DM where they could access to Instalead, I give you the link to join our private beta https://instalead-on.web.app/
@sebastien_letelie thank you for sharing! @saeid_kajkolah I think this could be interesting for you ;-)