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Reid Kimball

Seeking advice for customer acquisition

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Edit: thank you everyone who took the time to comment! Hello! I have a health and wellness app that helps people track their compliance on therapeutic diets with the help of AI. I’ve gotten very strong encouragement from friends in the tech industry but am finding acquiring customers difficult. I don’t spam my app in communities on Facebook or Reddit, but I’ll briefly mention it here and there when someone else posts or comments about using apps to help with therapeutic diets. My user growth is about 2-3 per week. If I try to ask communities to talk w people for user research, I’m finding most communities will delete the post, even if I am not selling the app but want to talk with others about their pain points. I’m curious, what customer acquisition strategies and techniques have worked for you?

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Lee Pri
Thanks for sharing this, Reid! One approach that’s worked well for early-stage health apps is partnering with niche influencers or micro-communities in the wellness or chronic illness space, people who already have trust and engagement with your ideal users. You might also explore creating helpful content around therapeutic diets (e.g., blogs, YouTube shorts, or TikToks) that subtly feature your app as a tool. Value-first outreach tends to resonate better than direct promotion.
Sarah Jade

Build relationships not just a customer list. People buy from those they trust. Focus on genuine value first.

Rajiv Ayyangar

No easy answers here. But here's some questions to ask:

The users who come in and love your app: ask them 1) how they found you, and 2) how they would describe your app to a friend.

1 gives you the channels to focus on.

2 gives you positioning

Reid Kimball
@rajiv_ayyangar Those are good thanks! Not sure I have users who love the app yet. Could be the app is t good or not the right fit for them. Lots of work still to do.
Johnson Fung
Yea - I’d say that the first thing you want to focus on is building a community of really committed users, and leverage them to post on your behalf (genuinely, not as a promo). That involves commenting with insight on posts people have, and when the conversation seems to go well, potentially reaching out in an DM explaining your project and asking if they want to join. Giving away free licenses, free months, to these folks also helps build this up in the beginning. It’s worth the cost to you. Once you have a core base of supporters, it’s a lot easier to then start building more. I’d recommend looping all your supporters into Slack or Discord to keep in conversation with them.
MubashirullahD
Launching soon!

I feel like b2c would be easier than b2b but thats probably because I'm doing b2b. I would start an instagram channel, post content about diet. It takes time, that's the only hurdle.

Posting on reddit is very difficult. Even in r/sideproject where people are posting, the post can get removed by filters. It's not us, it's the platform. There are subreddits with people that exactly need what we build and lo, my comment is invisible. Letting people find us is definitely where I want to spend my energy. Linkedin, Youtube. Our own blogs. I once wrote a blog and I found chatgpt was referring my work in its search with a link! I was so surprised because I wrote it a few weeks ago.

What's true for both of us is that when customers are happy, they talk about us and that word of mouth is something else.


Currently, how we got our first B2B customer was through freelance proposals. It worked for us because our product is like that. We're figuring out the rest.

Reid Kimball
@mubashirullahd which blogging software do you like to use?
MubashirullahD
Launching soon!

@reid_kimball So far, we've built it ourselves since it's not too hard with Gen AI. Essentially, the blogs will be in Markdown, and we'll use a React library to render them. And since we're using Next.js, the blogs are built using Static Site Generation (SSG). This means they load as fast as possible, improving SEO.


One notable tool we have used for our docs is Docusaurus. This tool can be used for blogs too. You'll just be deploying on a sub domain. I tried figuring out if I could use the tool to deploy to the same domain with the rest of the site and while possible it looked complex. The tool is great because you just worry about writing the blog again in markdown. The rest is setting up folders and doing configurations

Reid Kimball

@mubashirullahd Thank you! I considered making my own blogging system with markdown too. I also use React. Did you see the new React experimental transitions? They look really fun to use and experience for users. I'm leaning towards implementing a blogging system like Docusaurus, Contentful, or Sanity.io. Appreciate you sharing your approach. 🙏

MubashirullahD
Launching soon!

@reid_kimball we have our marketing site on next js and have the main app in react. I should say I rewrote the marketing part in next js to gain easy SSG and SSR.


No I've not heard of transitions. I'm sure it'll surface on my youtube feed eventually 🙂

Luis Roberts

I slapped a simple “built in public” progress bar on my landing page showing total meals logged. Social proof nudged curious visitors to sign up.

Ed Navarro
Is your app public? Website? On the App Store (Apple or Android)? It sounds like a very niche audience which is great in terms of developing overall marketing strategies but can be difficult when looking for the right places to engage them. TRADITIONAL MARKETING: Since it’s tracking therapeutic diets I imagine these users have been prescribed by a medical professional? Perhaps there’s an opportunity for more traditional marketing such as printed materials. Example: short pamphlet or flyer in a doctor’s office. Clear, straightforward messaging with a screenshot and QR code that lets prospects download from the App Store. CONTENT: If you’ve got a website, creating content related to therapeutic diets and general healthy eating might help SEO as well as trust. EMAIL: Start a newsletter offering tips and articles to existing app users. Promote it on your website and social channels to gain new subscribers that could turn into app users. Just a few ideas, hope it helps!
Scott Spanier

Figure out where your customers hang out.


Lots of the advice here seems to focus on building a community & relationships but first you have to figure out who you're targetting and where they find entertainment, advice, and conduct their research and focus your energy there. Then you can focus on encouraging user generated content for word of mouth growth.

steve beyatte

What about:

  • Talking to the people who are putting people on the therapeutic diets

  • Go to the communities where people are on the diets and asking how they're currently tracking

  • Talk to the top 10 most popular articles about each therapeutic diet and offering them an affiliate deal

Akshay

Using AI SDR can help massively.


Here are some of the tools you may use:

  1. Marblism .

  2. Artisans .

  3. AiSDR .