Founders with no audience: how did you get your first 10 paying customers?
Getting your first 10 paying customers is hard.
Doing that without an audience is even harder.
So I'm curious to know for founders who had no audience, how did you get your first 10 paying customers?
And how long did it take to go from 0 to 10?
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I don't agree with the "doing that without an audience is even harder". I've analyzed how 450+ founders got paying customers (see Zero to Users for more details) and the majority got them WITHOUT having an existing audience.
Here are the top channels they mentioned for getting the first X users:
Marketplaces & app stores (worked for 78 founders). Recently wrote a post on Indie Hackers on this.
Product Hunt (worked for 78 founders)
Reddit communities (worked for 45 founders)
Cold email outreach (worked for 42 founders)
"Powered by" marketing (worked for 42 founders, see this Indie Hackers post for explanation)
Hacker news (worked for 39 founders)
Having an existing audience (worked for 39 founders)
Yup, having an existing "media brand" came up on the 7th place. Most channels tapped into an existing audience someone ELSE owned. For eg, reaching out to people who follow an influencer in your niche. Finding a "directory" and cold-emailing people there, etc.
Don't let "I need to have an existing audience before getting started" limit you. You can get paying users without that.
Interesting to see and a good reminder. I often think way more founders have a huge audience because naturally these are the people you hear about the most on Twitter.
Thanks for sharing.
Isn’t success on Product Hunt, Reddit, or Hacker News partially due to your audience/network? It seems like you need some supporters to get any traction in those places.
I'm getting your PDF, but can you talk more about how these folks succeed on places like Product Hunt without an audience? I've had a couple launches there and it seems like if you don't have a 15 or 20 people to upvote you early on launch day, getting you above the fold, it's a complete wash for the day.
Woah, I didn't expect to see having an audience be so far down the list.
When doing your research did you come across any Reddit communities that were particularly effective? Aside from the niche ones related specifically to the industry each business was in.
Appreciate the breakdown and great idea to put together that report! Just signed up.
Most were communities where your audience hangs out :) So yeah, niche communities. Btw I remember one guy also mentioning that most SaaS founders he worked with have <200 Twitter followers, so that was another point against the 'you must have an audience before a product'.
These interviews could have a bias (maybe founders without an audience are more likely to want to do an interview) but overall it seems there are many ways you can get paying users without a pre-existing audience.
Yeah that makes sense!
Just to be clear my original post wasn't to say that you absolutely must have an audience - we got pretty much all of our customers without one :)
Interestingly, I was going through our signups and it was interesting to found that the largest source of signups for us was Reddit.
Twitter, on the other hand, has brought in quite a bit of traffic but few actually converted.
I don't think there are 'universally effective' Reddit communities. Maybe if you post on a community like 'technology', you may find that 0.5% of users are in your target market.
Good point! I suppose there are some like r/SideProject and r/EntrepreneurRideAlong but you have to be careful how you engage with those.
Having an audience is far down the list doesn't mean that it is not useful. It is the difference between correlation and causation. One very likely explanation is that it is hard to get an audience in general, so not many founders have the right audience or enough audience. So unless the analysis takes the audience size and the relevance of the audience into consideration, that lowest "ranking" is not very useful. If those 39 founders all had a big enough relevant audience, then the success rate or the usefulness would be 100%:-)
True. I also wonder if many founders ignore the impact that their audience has.
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Completely agree! It seems to translate to "become popular" and then people will buy your product otherwise you are speaking into the ether.
I've seen "Twitter celebs" compare the approach to building trust as one would as a market trader in days past. However, when at a market, I don't really care about how interesting the trader is or how much noise they make as long as they have good products, and I know this through actually buying a product that solves my problem.
The reason it is popular is because everybody wants to be famous, and this advice gives people an excuse to try to be famous that isn't purely egotistical.
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Cold emails, but all personalized and tailored. It's tempting to send 1,000 batch emails and pray for one or two responses. We found this to be inefficient and not a strong start to a long-term relationship. Instead, we tried to understand why someone would find value in talking to a stranger (us) and prove in a sentence or two that we did the research before reaching out.
Is this for WhaleSync?
I can see how personalisation helps improve the likelihood of someone responding.
How did you select the types of people you were emailing?
As I'm thinking it can feel like a waste of time to personalise an email if someone is just not the right fit.
Yup for Whalesync.
And totally agree. We defined a few "target personas" who we thought might find Whalesync valuable. We then scoured the internet for people who fit these profiles and only reached out to them.
For Zlappo, my first 10 paying customers came from -- of all places -- DM on Twitter.
I even covered this in my blog article, with screenshots of my DMs that worked: https://zlappo.com/blog/4-powerful-ways-grow-and-market-your-saas-business-using-twitter-examples-given/.
We've recently broken the 1,000 paying customers mark.
Thanks Jay and congrats on getting past 1,000!
This is helpful as I'm starting to use Twitter to market our SaaS. I've been using TweetDeck to monitor discussions related to Nocodelytics and try to be helpful where I can.
I've been trying DMs but only for people who've expressed some kind of interest in our product on Twitter. Will take a look at your approach!
Also, did you market under your own personal Twitter or Zlappo's?
At the end of the day, if you have an interesting enough idea, it won't matter if you have an audience or not. However, I would recommend starting locally. Posting on communities like ProductHunt or Hackernews will get you a spike in the start, but probably not many long-lasting users.
Instead, go to your local business in your town or area that you think might find your product useful, talk to them in person, build relations. This is hard, but it most likely will help you build a small group of really dedicated users that will even help you improve your product.
This sounds like great advice for companies operating in the hospitality or retail sectors, although probably harder given the current climate.
I'm not sure how that would work for many indie hackers on here working on say...a B2B SaaS?
I've been trying to launch a marketing automation tool for D2C brands and I'm still struggling to find the audience for it.
What have you tried so far?
haven't reached the 10 paying customers yet, still bootstrapping my side projects
I've reached $186 after 2 months, didn't have time to promote the products, but I did 3 things that worked:
What didn't work for me at all:
here are my numbers
How do you handle upsells? Simply send free users an email once in a while outlining the benefits of the paid plan?
yes, I send out 2 emails to all those that have downloaded the free version ... I wanted to use Gumroad's email workflow, but after their redesign, their email layout is really awful, so I had to find a hackish way of nurturing those "leads"
now I'm working on switching to an all-in-one solution, way better than Gumroad, Systeme.io
What I'm planning next:
SOLN : If you're looking for a LT saas onboarding tool. There is one I recently picked for my future saas project on appsumo. You might want to check that out.
Thanks for listing those out! I like how you've curated valuable content and have found people who will pay for access to it. It reminds me of how Pieter Levels got started with Nomad List.
Have you considered adding a page to your site which shows how X bootstrapped business/indie hacker got started with their first customers?
Then you could share that in communities like r/entrepreneur and over time generate a bit of organic traffic for you.
Yes, you're completely right ... my website is right now on Carrd + Gumroad, which is not SEO friendly + a nightmare for analytics
I'm working to switch to Systeme.io soon, to have funnels + blog + form + email all in one place ... then I'm going to have one page per story or at least those really interesting ones
Sounds great! Looking forward to seeing your progress :)
In my case I joined a facebook group where I put posts regarding the subject of my tool (https://pagemtr.com). I've to say this works pretty well and in my opinion is a good way when you start a business because you are able to get really valuable feedback.
You don't get that feedback serving ads across the web, simply - if something won't work on a website/app people aren't supposed to tell you about that. Getting feedback almost face to face is really helping.
Facebook groups never worked for me :(
Most of the time I was kicked out or the post was deleted even if I was offering it for free and not selling it.
Have you tried pitching your product idea without the link (saying something like: Hey guys, I'm working on [describe your product], wanted to see if the members of this group find it useful, feel free to comment if you want me to get in touch when the product is released). Then DM the people who responded.
Yes, I never posted the link in the group. Just the text and the youtube link sometimes.
I know I am doing something wrong but not sure how to fix that.
That's great! Looks like you've built a useful tool there to monitor and improve website performance.
So I take it you found the group on Facebook and posted your product asking for feedback, is that right? Or did you post to promote it and ask people to simply sign up?
Mainly I write a post on the group when I have something new released, for example, recently I've released a crawler to check internal linking on a website. It gives an overview how pages are linked between, how many links are outcoming etc. The group is SEO related so I just wrote: Hey guys, I released a crawler, it can do blablabla... if you want to give it try for free ping me. In that way I get a lot of leads (some of them changes into paying customers), and more lots feedback on what I did wrong :)))
I don't write agressivly selling posts.
That actually sounds quite simple hah. I think a lot of us have this idea that you have to be a marketing expert to be able to post on Facebook and other communities without being seen as spammy.
But judging from a lot of the replies on here you can do it by simply being nice, showing up and sharing what you're working on without being spammy (ie no links, ask for feedback).
Thanks for sharing!
Exactly that's the way! :-)
Cheers!
This is a good one. What kind of facebook group did you join? Are there even fb groups discussing page metrics? I'm so out!
Cheers
Thanks! Mostly SEO groups. I've a group I like the most - keeps some level, and that group works the best to get leads. Recently I posted new feature announcement, got ~30 leads.
I recently wrote an article on how I got 66 paying users for my MVP. Check here: https://ritikamehta.substack.com/p/66-paying-users-on-beta-product-mvp
That's really useful! Thanks for sharing that Ritika.
Sharing to friends , family and all connections of social networks
Started doing unscalable things for my audience to get some traction.
Checked what's funny and what's not by iteration.
Found what I was good at and what I was not.
Realized what I do not want to do.
Then:
Grab the first 200+ peeps on my newsletter (still by doing unscalable things like consultations, helping others on FB groups etc)
Pre-sale a course to 10 of them.
That's it 🏆
I started hyping my product on a subreddit two months before it launched. This resulted in roughly 150 newsletter subscribers. The day after I launched Legendsverse, I had my first customer.
And all I did was keep revealing new features and marketing them. In December of 2020, Legendsverse made its debut. I currently have 228 one-payment customers.
Now I'm focusing on creating up distribution channels because I'm afraid that the sub I use to market my product will eventually label them as spam.
You've done pretty well to hype up your product without getting banned and get to 228 customers so far!
What kind of messages/comments did you leave to stay on the good side of mods?
At the beginning and every now and then I share pics of my Marvel Legends figures, but most of my posts are new features for LV.
I have no idea why they have allowed it this much.
Legendsverse has a lot of free features that are useful for the average collector. So probably that's why.
-Friends, family, network
-cold calling
SEO & Blogging
Incredible results if you put in the time and work. Also the cheapest option in the long run.
I agree! It's also the top channel according to the report by @zerotousers but obviously takes time.
What other channels worked for you, if any?
Building in public on Twitter was very helpful to me in that aspect. I could directly interact with indie makers & ask for feedback.
Interesting! I suppose it makes sense given the niche and problem your product is trying to solve. Have you noticed many of those on Twitter actually signing up?
Yeah actually they did!
-cold outreach
-worked my network (let them know what I'm doing)
-posted on twitter (reply guy here)
-posted on reddit
In my experience, unless you're a marketing or some other category thought leader that is going to sell an ebook or course, an audience is a nice to have. It takes a really time to build a highly engaged audience and you'll eventually tap it out.
If you can't get 10 paying customers, you're probably not solving a real problem and/or trying hard enough.
For MyCheckins, the ideal customers I started with were founders and managers of teams with less than 10 members.
The first 10 customers came from these channels:
It sounds simple, but I experimented with 5+ channels and it took me ~6 weeks to hit the mark.
To make your marketing work and bring results, make sure you develop your product messaging first. You need to clearly understand the bleeding neck problem your product solves, identify the bad alternatives, articulate your value props, and tie them together in a document. You can use this as the foundation for all marketing work.
Pick your channels, experiment fast, and you're good to go.
Thanks for breaking that down and good point about product messaging.
How did you go about understanding the bleeding neck problem?
Sent a bunch of emails to potential customers (chrome extension developers that were about to be impacted by Google shutting down Chrome Store payments).
Posted here in IH extension developers group and in a few reddit comment threads (that I monitored with f5bot).
Now organic search (from content articles I wrote targeting specific keywords) seems to be the most common way that users come in.
These are the ones that worked for me. I tried others but they weren't effective.
Personally I hate building an audience so these methods suit me more.
I like the hustle of directly emailing potential customers!
How effective was that? I've found emailing potential customers results in maybe 10-20% of them responding, so it can be gruelling work.
Yeah, it is a little grueling, but I was targeting people with a very high likelihood of needing my product. I got similar 10-20% response rates and probably sent around 150-200 emails total.
I got my very first customer through cold emails which was my first validation that this really was a product that developers would use. So in that sense it was invaluable! It was also exciting.
That first customer also gave me a bunch of feedback about things the product needed so that was also really valuable and gave me leverage for future customers.
In the future I wish I had a better way of keeping track of all that stuff. I manually updated a Notion database which was tedious, but I couldn't find a really simple CRM. Today I would probably use FollowUpThen for reminders to myself to send follow-up emails 2 weeks later.
Glad it worked out for you! How long did it take to get that first customer?
I feel like it's crucial getting to that first response and customer as soon as possible as it gives a bit of a morale boost to keep going.
Definitely agree tracking this stuff could be easier. I've used Streak in the past but didn't know about FollowUpThen - it looks quite useful!
Through a Twitter reply.
I shared the specifics here: https://chromeextensionideas.medium.com/how-i-got-99-subscribers-in-a-day-and-how-can-you-do-it-too-1204565b6845
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“Be the last click” is how SEO people describe this phenomenon. Glad to hear it’s working for you!
Congrats - that's great to hear!
Do you know which of your pages are getting the most traffic from Google?
That could indicate what people are searching for, where they're landing on your site and why they like what they saw to sign up.