How do you recruit early adopters for your product?
Michele Pomposo
93 replies
Hi PH ππ½ I would like to share experiences on how to get early feedback and validation when launching a new product π§π½βπ π
Let's start with mine...
1. In January I created a landing page about my new product with the goal of collecting early adopters e-mails
2. I searched on LinkedIn for professionals that can benefit from my new product. In my case I looked for "conversational designers" and I obtained a list of 6 hundreds people approx.
3. I created a sequence (thanks to an automation tool) to engage with those people on LinkedIn: view profile, follow, send an invite, endorse skills and a couple of follow-up messages to request if they were interested to get early access to the new product.
4. Once they land on the landing page, I started engaging with them directly on the landing page through a widget and a conversational application that I built with my brand new no-code design studio in a few minutes.
In this way I obtained the first 100 early adopters. This helped me a lot to gather feedback and improve the product before the launch scheduled on Thursday, Feb 9th.
What about your experience to look for early adopters? π‘
Replies
Benjamin Hoffman@benhoffman_
Honor Care Network
step 2... how did you turn your search into 600+ people? did you have a VA manually enter them into a sheet?
step 3... what tool did you use for automation?
Share
Tiledesk
@benhoffman_ step 2 ππΌ i was lucky! I searched for "conversational designer" on LinkedIn and excluded the Italian ones. After that, I shared the URL of the search with the automation tool
step 3 ππΌ Dripify
AARP Money Mapβ’
What was the widget/convo app you used?
Tiledesk
@drewfalkman for the widget I use the one of Tiledesk. If you join our Community you can get the convo app I used for free and add to your website
Jobs Console
We work with a lot of early-stage companies at @consoledotdev ( https://console.dev ), which is a free weekly devtools, cloud & infra newsletter for experienced engineers. There's a section for early-access and beta releases which gets very high engagement - we can easily send several thousand developers to try each tool we feature.
So if you're launching something, get in touch with the details: hello@console.dev !
Tiledesk
@consoledotdev @davidmytton sure! Check our PH post and feel free to propose me some cooperations opportunities: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
My product hasn't launched yet. But I found groups that have millions of members where at least one exec has told me that when my site launches, they will want to get their members to sign up.
Plus I'm building a kind of marketplace where about a thousand people will prefer their customers to use my site rather than to contact them directly. Why? Because on my site,
they'll be able to interact much better with customers
they'll be able to earn widely seen reviews
they'll learn much more about what their customers want
Sounds amazing! What tool did you use to automate engagement with people on LinkedIn, if you don't mind me asking?
Tiledesk
@yulia_mamonova dripify. There is a 7 days free trial. I also asked for an extension and, in my case, it worked
@michelepomposo I will definitely check it out. Thanks!
Tiledesk
@yulia_mamonova awesome! keep me posted about your progress with dripify
What a strategy, Michele! Impressive.
I was about to ask you what tool you have used to automate your LinkedIn interactions, but I got it already from one of your answers in this thread! It was Dripify, right? π€
Then, I would like to ask you what your retention/conversion rate was when using such a strategy. Have all the 100 early adopters used your product or upgraded their accounts?
Tiledesk
@rogeriotaques I confirm Dripify! You can use Waalaxy as an alternative. About retention, it's more than 40% after 2 weeks. We are now working to improve activation :-)
Awesome very smart
Tiledesk
@haley_ranae_currie thank you! ππΌ
what is the part you liked the most?
Tiledesk
@haley_ranae_currie Hey Haley, I'm Michele's co-maker - do you mind checking out what we've launched today and let us know your thoughts? cheers https://www.producthunt.com/post...
I recently discovered a trick on Instagram that allows me to capture the email addresses of profiles that might be interested in my product, such as yoga teachers. As a developer, I created an extension to make it easier to send emails to these profiles and include them in my newsletter if they open the first email. By spending approximately 1 hour per day on Instagram, using my extension to search for good leads, I was able to accumulate 1000 engaged subscribers to my newsletter and 100 paying customers in just two months. I have now launched a side project using my extension, which I have named Instalead.
because a lot of people ask me in DM where they could access to Instalead, I give you the link to join our private beta https://instalead-on.web.app/
Tiledesk
@sebastien_letelie thank you for sharing! @saeid_kajkolah I think this could be interesting for you ;-)
I like it! what about the follow up?
Tiledesk
@matteoaliotta1 with the first message I briefly introduce myself and my startup.
Second message I offered them a sneak peek of the design studio.
Only when they showed interest after the second message, I shared with them the landing page URL
@matteoaliotta1 @michelepomposo How did you measure "showed interest"? Was it those who opened or clicked some link or were you asking them to reply back?
Booomerang
Hi Michele, great share! I have follow up questions
1. Did you find 600 people manually yourself? Without paying for emails or anything?
2. What automation tool did you use to create a sequence? That would be really useful.
We have launched a marketplace for people to rent and lend items from each other. We leverage platforms like Facebook Marketplace.
I was reading the book TRACTION and started taking notes from there. 6 months after launching, we got our first paying customer.
Tiledesk
Booomerang
@michelepomposo Thanks for the reply! Much appreciated.
@michelepomposo thank you so much for sharing and starting this conversation. Are you able to share the name of the Linked In automation tool/ process that you used here?
nice and impressive π
Tiledesk
@naveed_rehman thank you Naveed ππΌ what's the part you liked the most?
Tiledesk
@naveed_rehman absolutely! I also personally like the Building in Public section of Indie Hackers π BTW would you like to try the Chatbot Design Studio?
@michelepomposo using PH discussion as another channel to grab early adapters βοΈ
@michelepomposo Sure, why not! (and finally, you grabbed me too)
Thanks @michelepomposo for sharing. We took a bit more networking approach to it by inviting 10 friends/colleagues to review and critique an early wire frame for the design of www.Levelfields.ai, an investment research application that uses AI to break down the barriers to investment research.
I asked every person initially interested to name and invite 5 other people and did one on one interviews with all of them to gather feedback.
I asked each of them to also name 3 people who might be interested and I carried out individual discussions with each.
When we were done with the interviews, we had a decent list to keep informed of our product.
When we launched the beta product, we asked them to signup and buy a subscription. Those who didn't we just gave free access to.
In this way we gathered a lot of feedback prior to building the actual product which saved time on UX studies.
Tiledesk
@andrew_lvlf this is a great approach! I'll try it next time
My early adopter method is an upcoming page for my next app https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
Tiledesk
@nitin_p cool! I also though to this, but it was too late in my case since Ship was not available anymore. II just did a teaser page here on PH and it is working pretty well. I just passed 100+ followers a few minutes ago. You can check it here: https://www.producthunt.com/prod...
ps: are you also using whatsapp for your newsletter? i just subscribed to your upcoming page
@michelepomposo Thanks for subscribing. No I am not using WhatsApp in newsletters. I am building a marketplace that basically brings newsletter creators and advertisers together.
Tiledesk
Tiledesk
@michelepomposo Would love to! Or at the very least provide you with some resources to get your strategy going! I'll connect with you on Linkedin if you'd like to find some time to meet?
Tiledesk
We also have created a landing page for early adopters and promoted it via tons of resources: from Betalist to ProductHunt. https://senseapp.ai
But one thing we took at risk to add was an after-submit survey. But it worked well! Using Typeform we achieved almost 75% of completion, which we couldn't expect! Of course we received tons of valuable information for our future customer development.
Tiledesk
TransferChain
For me its my personal network who are either working on startups or founded one. I also reach out to my tech-savy collegues.
Tiledesk
@kaya_lordoglu fully agree with you!
We have our own database of emails that we use. But, in general, your steps are correct. We are also looking for potential customers at Linkedin and ask them to give feedback about our beta version.
Tiledesk
@andrii_osce any tip to share on how to build a good db of mails?
@michelepomposo There are too many tips, too long to describe :) The simplest thing is to use third-party CRMs.
Tiledesk
ok, got it
Interesting workflow. Constant engagement is key. There is a fine line between contacting potential early adopters introducing an opportunity and spamming.
Thus your process seems to take care most of these.
The numbers you quoted are solid as well- 100 early adopters was a great start.
If I may suggest an improvement; You can use tools to augment/enhance your search on media (I am referring to step 2 on your list), such as Audiosense for twitter, to easily identify and curate potential adopters (thus expanding your search group on twitter as well).
The more aligned to your interests the target group is, the better chances of converting those who land on your page to early adopters.
Naturally the engagement stage (step 4 on your list) is equally important and judging by the numbers, it seems that you have done a good job there.
Tiledesk
@apollon440 thank you so much for your tips! i was actually looking for an automation tool on twitter π€©
good strategy,worth following.