
Ask HN: How did you find an audience for your startup or project? - tmaly
How did you find the audience of initial users for your startup or side project?
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shubhamjain
In my experience, your expectations shouldn't be as optimistic as success
stories like that of Slack, which had 8000 companies signed up before they
launched their product. It's wise to assume that your customer acquisition
would be wearyingly slower. You don't have to start with 20-30 customers but
just 1-5, who get the value out of your product.

For the last product, which I shut down due to lack of traction, the most
valuable leads I received was when my product got featured in a newsletter
without being asked. I had posted a comment on a Blog post which described a
complicated GA setup to achieve something that my product could do without
effort and the author forwarded it to his subscribers.

I think that sums it up quite well: look for people who have the same problem
as you're solving and pitch them your product. Any other marketing effort:
paid ads, blogging, events require too much investment and I don't think they
should be recommended if you're bootstrapping a small product.

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segmondy
Wow, I didn't know that slack did that, any idea how they did that?

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jwilliams
My advice is B2B-type centric, but the principles likely apply in other
contexts.

I've used and seen this approach used to both validate, grow and shut down
projects.

Build a list of people. Should be your target audience, but if you can't do
that, find people that are adjacent or gatekeepers. Ideally this would be ~10
people, but if it's 3, start there anyway.

Go with a specific question/ask. Interview them. Then get them to ask you
questions back. Answer as honestly as you can ("I don't know" is fine, but
follow up with your suggested process).

At the end, ask who else you should speak with. If you're on the right track,
your network and opportunities will grow. If you're not, it'll shrink to
nothing. Repeat.

Good luck!

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muzani
From your competitors! I'm not kidding.

If there's a market for your product, there will be an alternative product for
it. Like for me, I had a recipe app. My competitors were recipe blogs,
Facebook pages, and groups. If you're building something SaaS, there might be
a WordPress plugin doing the same thing.

Your product should be 10x better than the solution they hacked together. If
no solution was hacked together, it's possible there's no market for it or
that you haven't done enough research before building the product.

There might be some exceptions though, like a note taking app, where the
competitor is a piece of paper with no community.

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jermaustin1
In a former life, I was a product developer, I now consult other pre-rev/pre-
money/broke product developers on features, ux, and marketing.

I wrote up a nice narrative a while back [1] on my two "first" products I
built. The first "first" was on accident, and the second "first" was... kind
of still on accident.

[1] [http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-
launches/](http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-launches/)

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texteller
Before building any project or startup find where your focused audience are at
and try to get closer to them through social networks. So when you build the
product, you could ping them back to be your early users.

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tmaly
where would you start to look for the focused audience?

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b10t
Check Amy Hoy's sales safari. Jonathan Stark has mentioned looking for
conferences and publications/newsletters that cater to your target market.

~~~
tmaly
This reminds me a lot of the Market Map from Pat Flynn's book. Its the same
idea. Maybe he picked it up from her.

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pryelluw
By networking with people who could potentially benefit from using it. This
takes time.

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dillweed
Or how did you find the people your product would innately appeal to.

