I am 36M solo founder with about 6 products under my belt but I am super-scared to promote them!
I've spent exactly all of last year building a total of 6 products, 4 of which are paid.
But I haven't gotten a single paying customer yet.
Channels I've tried.
Posting on Hacker News and Product Hunt
Paid ads (Google, Instagram, Reddit)
Listing on tool directories ("ThereIsAnAIForThat.com" etc)
Creating Free tools and sending some related traffic back
Asking a couple of people I know to try my products
Each have given me various degrees of success. Rest assured, I have lots of users using the free parts.
Recently I'm trying push marketing; for example recently my girlfriend and I went to a pet-friendly cafe in Bangalore and we got talking with the proprietors. One of them was interested in what I was building and I found myself pitching my product them.
I felt icky and weird since all my life I've been a software engineer and hardly ever someone who sold anything.
What's your experience getting customers, especially the first ones for your product?
Replies
Not sure if this will help but... In the past I also had several projects and none got used. The problem was not the product, the problem is that instead of pushing 1 project 100% of the time, I was pushing 16.66% of the time each one of them.
And if making 1 product successful is hard... making 6 is impossible.
I would focus on one of them, try to understand the pain it solves, market it, get your first users, and then go for the next one
Mudrex
@david_conelly Hey thanks. So I guess the answer is to not stop and keep building
@divyanthj If I can be a little bit more specific, I would say focus on marketing one of them, but both things work 🥳
I suggest if you have users using your free tools then you need to start with marketing emails and I highly suggest hiring an employee with online marketing experience because you can have the best app in the world but it's no good if people don't get to see it.
Mudrex
@gerome24 Yeah, thanks. That's part of the broader strategy I'm having. I'm not VC funded or anything so I have to be frugal too.