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🥶 I’ve Built it but No customers
Today, I want to talk about what you should do when you’ve built your product but you don’t have much customers yet. I am also sharing a clever little trick I've been using with Fiverr to help grow my side project before.
Getting first 10+ customers is one of the toughest problem for a new product and often require cold out reach. Trying to do mass marketing when you start out is often a wrong approach because
Your product messaging isn’t optimized yet
You don’t know your target customer as well
You haven’t positioned your product the best way yet
If you want to quickly test it, try running 100$ paid ads as an experiment and see how many convert and what the total LTV is. If your ROI is higher than 100$, awesome! You don’t need to deal with cold start problem and just use paid ads as your distribution channel.
Unfortunately, this is not the case most of the times. The truth is you are not even sure what tag line you should use on your hero and paid marketing to really ‘click’ with your audience yet. You might have made sales beyond 10, but what you need is 10+ MEANINGFUL customers, who are fans of your product and will help you to refine above.
This is why mass marketing shouldn’t be your first concern when you just started. You need to manually cold out reach and engage with individual users because
You have a better chance of converting them with your ‘human touch’
You get to understand their problem and their language
Use who they are as your target customer persona
Use their language to come up with your product messaging
You get to learn why or why not they are buying your solution
🤔 Okay, How?
Often you want to find a community on Reddit, Facebook or Twitter and there are two ways
Make a post about your solution (broadcasting)
Cold DM the target users
There are plenty of resources on how this is done, so I won’t go too much deep into it. You should definitely utilize these communities as your first go to.
But what happens if you’ve already done it and still struggling?
The post you made on Reddit generated some traffic but you can only do this once in a while otherwise you will get banned.
Cold DM people in these community is slightly targeted, but they are still a shot in the dark.
🚀 Hacking Fiver
I've used Fiverr to jump-start several projects. The idea is simple: reach potential customers directly. It's especially handy for B2C products, eBooks, or templates. It can be done at any service marketplace such as Fiverr, Upwork or any place where your target audience might be.
Here's how it works
“Jobs to be Done”
The first step is to translate your product or service into a 'job'. What is it that your product does? If it was a person, what kind of expert would it be?
The famous “Jobs to be Done”.
Once you've got that figured out, you're ready to get started.
Push-Method: Cold Outreaching
Head over to Fiverr (or any other service marketplace) and look for experts who provide the service your product performs. It could be anything from translation to design to video editing.
Find an expert with a lot of reviews, and open up their profile. Then, you want to copy the IDs of the people who left reviews, and paste them into a Google Sheet. Easy enough, right?
Next, take that list of IDs and run them through Google. Many folks use the same ID on multiple platforms, so you can often find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on. Keep the IDs you can find, and delete any that you can't.
Now you're all set to reach out to your potential customers with a cold dm.
Remember you don’t want to be spamming them or be too salesy. The whole point of cold DM is to add ‘human touch’. So be human and connect as a human first before you pitch your solution.
This is a lot more targeted list of potential customers simply because these people actively looked for such service or expert, AND PAID for such service
Here is a short post I found from our fellow #buildinpublic #indiehackera about his experience of cold DM
Pull-Method: A Bit of a Long Shot
Here's another method, although it might be a bit slower. First, create a profile on Fiverr as an expert in the 'job' your product does. You want your profile to look professional, so take a look at what other experts are saying and make something similar. (Have fun creating a fake profile as the best expert you can imagine 😛 You don’t even need to use your real photo)
Once your profile is all set, offer a promotional discount with an explanation. You need to give people a reason to try out your service, even though you don't have any ratings yet. Just make sure you don't set your price too low, or people might think your service is low quality. Aim for about 60-80% of what other experts are charging.
You can include in the profile to attract them more such as e.g. "I am just starting here so my rates are discounted at xxx for the first 10 customers"
When someone shows interest in your service, tell them that you're already booked up, but suggest your product as a solution. Something like, "Sorry, I'm already working with X clients and I'm at capacity. But I've used this (template, SaaS, etc) before and it might be able to help you with [service]: your URL."
This approach takes a bit more time, but it does bring in some inquiries. And it's another free funnel for potential customers. The best part is you can create once and forget about it until your get the notification from Fiverr 🙂
🔑 Takeaway
Remember, the trick is to think creatively about how you can reach your target customers. Whether you're taking the push-method or the pull-method, make sure your pitch resonates with their needs. And always keep an eye out for new ways to get your product in front of people.
In the beginning, it feels slow and naturally inclined to ‘marketing’.
Unless you already have a distribution channel built, there is no other way around.
You got to start sending messages people one by one, and I mean hundreds if not thousands.
This is how all new projects by new founders have started.
This is the first step and how you get to the next level where you have some MRR coming in, refined your product, messaging and landing page for better conversion.
Once you have better figured out the conversion and churn, then you can look for paid-ads with MRR you earned to scale it to next steps.
Do not make the same mistakes I made over years. Fast track your growth by stealing from my learnings
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