alt Hacker NewsCold outreach is the only way I found to actually find users early on. No amount of blogs or social media stuff will get you users.
I had a product that got thousands of views from a Reddit post. Out of those, literally 0 clicked anywhere besides the page they landed on. I've been #2 on Product Hunt, 0 have actually used the product after clicking into it the first time.
Most products have a very tiny customer base, and they're not just casually browsing social media looking to find your exact product. You need to find these people and reach out to them directly.
Don't lie, but do little things that show them that you respect their time. Keep it short, tell them what the product is in plain English. Do some amount of research to qualify them as a potential customer. Try to tailor it to be relevant to them. Put your real name behind it. Ask them for feedback even if they wouldn't pay for your product. And don't follow up more than once or maybe twice.
It sucks. No one likes doing it. But if something is actually relevant for me, I would at least be curious enough to take a meeting. Unfortunately the only cold emails I get is from dev pod-shops or venture debt type people which are uninteresting.
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Right there with you. All the products I have built are not interesting to the HN or ProductHunt crowd. I don't even bother in those channels. Anyone reading this, find the places that are actually relevant to your customers.
I get a lot of office cleaning / janitorial spam (I don't have an office) alongside the dev shop spam. Just checked my junk SMS folder, I had 5 SMS messages for "fundraising" for a company gone 10 years ago. It is non-stop.
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You are on point with what you have just said, and I agree with that as well. Other than that, the most important part, if you have to get the right users, is the right targeting, which is not in most of our control. If you are doing it on Reddit, product, and/or even news hacker as well, right now hyper-targeting is really important so that people can relate to it. Everywhere, they are already seeing the marketing. That is why ads work the best, because you can target the exact audience you want.
Even with the AI thing, I think YouTube and Instagram models are improved so much that they are now taking your content to the right audience, unlike before. They used to serve it to random 10 people, then used to see the engagement, and then improve on that. Now they are on different paths where they are doing psychology- and interest-based targeting, and cold outreach does exactly the same. Even if it is the slowest, it is the most powerful as well, one of the most powerful.