How to get 100 early adopters in less than two weeks
I've been experimenting with an outbound tactic for the past few weeks. The goal was to build a beta program from scratch. This tactic worked very well and I would like to share it with all IH 🤗
These are the steps:
- create a landing page about your new product to collect emails of early adopters. This was mine: https://tiledesk.com/chatbot-design-studio/
- search on LinkedIn for professionals that can benefit from your product. In my case I looked for "conversational designers" and I obtained a list of 6 hundreds people approx.
- create a sequence 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.
I did it with an automation tool called Dripify, but you can also do it manually
The most important thing is to customize your messages, looking for some touch points and always elegantly ask for permission to share with them more info.
In this way I obtained the first 100 early adopters. This helped me a lot to gather feedback and improve the no-code design studio before the launch on Product Hunt scheduled for the next Feb, 9th: https://www.producthunt.com/products/chatbot-design-studio-by-tiledesk
Trending on Indie Hackers
Thank you, now I try to get early adopter for new mobile app. In my situation reddit works much better than other places
Do you recommend any automation tools for reddit?
We run Surfkey.io as reddit growth worked for us wonders. You can set keyword alerts and get notifications whenever the KW is mentioned.
We use it to jump into relevant convos, provide value and plug our product if it makes sense.
Nice, I will sign up for that now!
Thank you guys. I am not so a Reddit power user...
Maybe it's worth a shoot using some automation
I've built MentionFunnel which can help you easily find potential leads on Reddit by getting notified whenever e.g. a competitor is mentioned. I also wrote all about how to find customers on Reddit, so check that out if you have time 😁
I joined your waitlist months ago! I started using it but I didn't exploit it too much due to other priorities. I will try to retake it after the PH launch
So, this was my first experience and I just published posts manually to subreddits about apps, entrepreneurs and similar. But I think it will be useful to find automation tool for it.
I am building one @MichelePomposo. The working version is done. It has a few bugs here and there.
I came across this post of your's when I was searching the internet for Landing pages. I liked your tiledesk landing page.
Could you tell me how you built your landing page( design to code roadmap) ?
The landing page was made with WordPress. I first designed our value proposition with the hero and the other 2 blocks. Later a friend of mine helped me with the visual design. After that I fine tuned the message directly from WP.
ps: I would love to beta test your tool. Do you have a waitlist?
Thanks for sharing the steps you followed to build the landing page.
I am getting started with building the waitlist landing page. I will definitely share it here once it's done. Thanks for showing interest to try out my product.
ps: I joined your waitlist!
great! can't wait to try your product 🚀
Hey Jura, how d oyou do it on REddit? Posting on subreddits or directly writing to people?
Both ways are very valid options. I actually wrote all about how to find your first customers on Reddit where I go over this question (and more) 😁
cool, thank you. I'll read that one, super relevant :)
Posting on subreddits, if you want to write directly to people, it would be hard to find right people in my opinion. But if you have method, please share with us :)
Thanks Jura!
You can use a tool like MentionFunnel to find people mentioning certain keywords in certain subreddits and then send them bulk DMs 😁
Nice tactic, Michele! Thanks for sharing. Which tool did you use to build your page to collect emails?
Thx! I did it with WordPress. I used their plugin to manage Contacts
Thank you man for sharing the points that worked for you. We also used LinkedIn for our tool and no doubt Linkedin is a good source of people who will get your service easily as compared to any other platform. Just tell and show the result how your tool can help them in their business and boom you will see how they will appreciate and get your service.
I have done this for Churnfree a customer retention tool that can reduce your product's high customer churn and you can increase your revenue.
If your facing high customer churn in your product membership business you must try Churnfree for free to show how it can boost your revenue and save your customer from churning.
No card is required to sign up to enjoy a 14-day free trail of best customer retention tool Churnfree in the market.
Interesting! How do you reduce churn? What is your "killer" feature?
100 in 2 weeks? I am not sure hehe, my app Beezle Social isn't hitting it yet!
keep going! the important thing is to grow week after week
You are very luck to get 100 adopters within 2 weeks.
I am lucky to have a great product development team :-)
You can check our product here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chatbot-design-studio-by-tiledesk
Any plans to monetize / when would you consider monetizing this?
Saw in producthunt that this is free.
Good question! Actually we want to leverage on our community. You can build unlimited bots for free and share with everybody.
We have a Pro plan that instead is dedicated to larger teams that are working also with live agents. There are some features that mainly help them in optimising the conversation queues management
great tactic thanks for sharing, wanted to start with cold emailing, but this will be better as i can start directly, no need for creating new email, warm it up and other issues
it sounds good! what about the deliverability rates of your emails?
didn't start on it yet, but i was going through this framework
https://unimaio.notion.site/The-cold-email-framework-that-helped-us-land-our-first-15k-client-82bc6e1f66a047f694f53486ebf2f48d
this was shared before on IH here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-weve-got-our-first-15k-web-design-client-using-cold-email-framework-included-40c93d5d95
thx for sharing!
Thank you for sharing! Hope you the best with your PH launch!! (I'm preparing PH launch too 😎)
Best of luck for you launch! Feel free to follow mine today to get some inspiration: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chatbot-design-studio-by-tiledesk
Super helpful share. Love the landing page.
thx! do you also like our PH post? https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chatbot-design-studio-by-tiledesk
Did you do any paid marketing ?
nope, any recommendation according to your experience?
:) Not yet. I am also looking for suggestions.
2 . Network and build relationships: Reach out to potential early adopters through your existing network, attend events and conferences, and engage with potential users on social media.
Awesome! Is there any product you're building these days?
Yes! Maool
Maool is an easy-to-use email editor that helps marketers & business owners in creating emails for their marketing campaigns. It has all features to create stunning emails. Customize email to match with your brand and export to your favorite ESP with a click.
Awesome! What are the main differences vs. tools like Customer.io?
Customer.io is a customer communication platform that helps businesses send personalized messages to their customers through various channels, including email, SMS, and web push notifications. It provides features such as audience segmentation, automation, and A/B testing, enabling businesses to effectively communicate with their customers in real-time and improve customer engagement.
VS
Maool is an email marketing platform that provides tools to create and manage email campaigns. It offers features such as a drag-and-drop email editor, email template builder. The platform aims to make email marketing more accessible and efficient for businesses of all sizes. It provides an intuitive interface that makes it easy to create professional-looking emails, even for users with limited design experience.
ok, got it! thx
I should have thought about it before launching my data generator web app ipsumdb in mid January
How your launch went? this tactic should work not only for early adopters but also for first customers or to find people that will help you in pivoting your idea / product.
Actually Chatbot Design Studio is a pivot of our existing product: https://tiledesk.com/
actually i get 2 new users, i will try your method and hope get more customers. I also communicate on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn everyday. I really think about boost some posts on facebook and twitter.
oook, keep me updated about the boost results
The D-Day is approaching! Good luck Michele.
Interesting approach with LinkedIn, might try later ;)
🤞🏽fingers crossed! please keep me posted about your progress with LinkedIn
Great post! Do you think it would be a bad idea to create a new LinkedIn profile for every niche I go after? Not sure if I want my timeline to be filled with everyone I connect with l.
uhm...
how many niches would you like to target?
I suggest to keep an unique profile and maybe publish different contents according to your niches
Awesome strategy! Congrats on collecting those 100 early adopters. Can you please share a bit of information about the conversion rate of your sequence? For example, how many messages did you send and how many responses did you receive?
Of course, good luck on Feb 9th!
Sure! I sent approx. 600 connection requests, with more than 50% acceptance rate and more than 30% reply rate.
After that, about 1 out of 2 people (among those who replied) wanted to try Chatbot Design Studio
This is so inspiring. I do not use Linkedin since I see it as a time waster. But I won't hesitate to hire somebody bombard people on Linkedin with my cold emails :D
LOL I forgot to mention that my product is open source...
would you like to contribute? i can help you with some outbound activity
Incredible post! The tips on how to acquire early adopters quickly are extremely helpful and actionable. I especially appreciate the emphasis on building relationships and leveraging personal networks. Thanks for sharing your experience and success with getting 100 early adopters in such a short amount of time!
🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 Thx for the support!
IMHO to build relationships is the best part of building in public :-)
Im happy for your success but I personal hate someone's first cold opening being a solicitation on LinkedIn. I literally just block them.
i completely understand your point of view :-)
this is the reason why I'm always sending "elegant" messages without solicitation and avoiding to sell people something already from the first interaction.
first of all i want to build a relationship through touch points (i.e. founders helping other founders, etc.) like we do here on Indie Hackers, Product Hunt and/or other communities
Currently working on a little side project and now reading this, i see how LinkedIn can play a great role in kick starting my user base.
Did you have to manually search for those 100 customers or you used a script or tool for it?
What's your ideal Customer Profile? Any keyword that is common for all of them?
You can search for that keyword or job title on LinkedIn and after you can use some automation tool (i.e. Dripify, Waalaxy, etc.) to start engaging with those profiles
Awesome awesome read, thanks so much.
Never thought Linkedin was so good lol
LOOOL
What are the channels that are you using for prospecting early adopters and new customers?
Thank you for sharing! I ignored LinkedIn for years i wish i did not!
You're welcome!
What are the channels that you are using the most to promote your work/product?
For now a little bit of LinkedIn and Twitter
Any particular growth tactic are you using for Twitter? I would like to start also with this channel soon
At the moment i have no tactics and i am not seeing very much of a growth yet, but i try to niche down in my tweets and not being all over the place
yes, it's better to focus on just one channel
I meant niching down in twitter itself instead of tweeting about everything
ok, got it! thx
Hi Michele, thank you for sharing your insights. Creating a waitlist accessible through the website has worked wonders for us as well - we often engaged with those contacts on LinkedIn and have built quite a network there. Adding to your list:
Excited for your PH launch!
Hi Irina, thank you for the tip and the support! 🙏🏼
I actually prefer Discord :-)
Would you like to join our server to follow the launch and our future updates?
Interesting approach!
I'll definitely support your PH launch! Good luck :)
Thank you Daniel for the support! 🤞🏽
Thank you for sharing
You're welcome! Hope it helps ☺️
Great idea, will check out Dripify. At a previous startup I founded we managed to get a few hundred pretty quickly simply by creating a mailing list prior to launch and targeting niche areas on reddit that would find it useful. I know it can be a pain though as so many subreddits don't allow any self promotion whatsoever.
interesting! how did you get around this problem?
We started off making all the mistakes and just getting banned in a bunch of subreddits by accident, I find it way too strict tbh but eventually we started to post about how we'd solved problems in areas that people had and when they wanted to learn more we would link them to the product.
ok, thx for sharing
i will keep you updated about my progress with reddit
100% works! I would also recommend setting Reddit keyword monitor around your problem space and jumping into relevant conversations and providing value, offering help, and plugging your product if it makes sense.
Comments get a lot of eyeballs, even on seemingly low-profile posts.
We got our first 100 users in two weeks this way.
is there a free trial for this tool? how long does the learning curve take?
It's free, and there is almost 0 learning curve :) It's dead simple
awesome! i will try it
Nice tactic man! How long are you doing this for?
I started experimenting with LinkedIn automation sequences last November...
At the beginning I was more "aggressive" with connection request without an intro message and follow-up message more oriented to sales rather than establishing a connection. Reply rates of the first campaigns were about 12/13%.
The last one instead, with the improvement I shared in this post, had more than 30% reply rate 💪🏼
Thank you for this insight, Michele!
You're welcome! 😉
Hi Michele, this is great :)
Thank you San 🙏🏼
Last but not the least, I forgot to mention that I used Tiledesk to start engaging with the visitors of the landing page after 5 seconds. This helped me to increase the conversion rate and obtain more leads
It's Great, sending a welcome email to the newly onboarded users means a lot, you can even include the product feature update in the welcome email. Which will make them try your product :)
Yes, sure. I started with the engagement directly on the landing page through a widget and a conversational application that I built with Tiledesk in a few minutes. I'm actually trying to exploit the same technology also for in-product onboarding. What are the tools that you use for onboarding and product tour?
We use Superokay for customer onboarding
thank you! i will check it
This is a really valuable insight for all new founders!
Thank you for sharing and good luck with the Product Hunt launch :D
Thx! Always glad to share experiences with other Founders 🤗
Thank you for sharing your strategy Michele! All the best for the PH launch!
Thank you Maya 🙏🏼
If interested, you can follow the launch by clicking "Notify Me" on the coming soon page: https://www.producthunt.com/products/chatbot-design-studio-by-tiledesk
There will be also a special promo on launch day
Nice strategy, Michele!
Thank you Ben 🙏🏼
What is the part you liked the most?
I like the Dripify automation - hadn't heard of that tool but will likely be trying it in the future!
Cool! You can also try Waalaxy as an alternative. They have a plugin for Chrome that it's quite useful when you want to add some LinkedIn profiles to your lead list
Fantastic, I'll check it out! thanks again for the recs :)
You're welcome. Please keep me posted about the results ;-)
Wow, interesting!
What about the follow up? did you use any mail automation?
I did the follow up on LinkedIn. 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
Great idea, Michele. I have found LI to be pretty good for establishing contacts. One thing I try to working on is personal branding - here’s what I do. Phil… https://abitgamey.substack.com/p/branding-ourselves
Thank you Phil! 🙏🏼
What do you think about my LinkedIn profile? https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelepomposo/
that is pretty cool. Did you need a premium linkedin profile for this?
nope, you can use the standard search feature of LinkedIn ;-)
be just careful with the number of messages you send every day
Any similar tool for Twitter? Im looking for my first 100 subs
Any tip?
Building rippedrich.com
Good question! I don't know any tool to automate direct messages on Twitter :-(
Anyway you can try to replicate the same tactic using Followerwonk that allows you to filter twitter accounts based on their bios...
You can search for some keywords that can be relevant for you ICP (like "conversational designer" in my case) and after you can manually engage with those people
same -- looking for a twitter tool. So far I've been doing it manually
This comment was deleted a year ago.