20 Acquisition Channels
Acquiring your early stage customers
Howdy!
Back again and let’s kick-off!
Today, we’re going to be talking about one topic for a change.
🔥20 Strategies to acquire customers for $0
3….2…1:
Cold Email
Okay, but you knew that. How can you actually stand out and get that cut through?
Simply get to the point…very fast. Talk ONLY about their outcome and don’t bother much about yourself.
Here are 56 killer subject lines
eg. RemoteWorkly + <Cold Outreach Company>
Hey xyz,
Is there a reason why you’re wasting 67% of your day in meetings ? I’ve built a new way to save you money and time if you’re interested.
PS its free
Facebook groups
Do NOT spam on these groups. There is virtually all types of FB groups since Zuckerberg’s push for groups in 2017.
Your initial focus needs to be around building authority in all steps of the way. Do not link spam.
Build content, assertive blogs or strategies about the problem you’re solving and acquire customers through that.
Educate. Don’t dictate
Build-in Public
This is a new term, but it’s been around for a while. My bias, but DO NOT be in stealth mode, there is 0 reason for you to be so unless you’re a corporate
Twitter is a great place to build and so is LinkedIn. Some great examples are Domm Holland and Kunal Shah. The beauty of this is that you get to take your audience on a journey and also get immediate feedback on what you’re working on.
Shortens the feedback cycle as your potential customers are building it for you
Hacker News
Hit or miss. You need to be persistent, and keep sharing it. Make sure you get atleast 12 likes and 8 comments in the first 15 minutes to have a decent chance
In addition, maybe don’t spam link to your product, use ShowHN or AskHN and lace it with your product blog
Another great way is to reference your product in the comments section
Early PR + Distribution
PR can be your best friend to boost up your organic traffic and domain authority.
You need to have a PR spin, you don’t need to hit CNN, some high performing blogs will help too
There’s plenty of tools out there that will shoot your product out to 300 journo’s for a fee
Product Hunt
Get your launch done right and you’ve got a great chance of some really communicative early customers. Your goal is to end in the top 4. Make sure you push really hard in the first hour from launch. Launch at 12AM PST, if you’re in Sydney - 6:30PM
Launching on integration directories
See if you can leverage existing directories to acquire customers for your product. Maybe add a Slack integration or a Chrome extension. Its a great way to acquire customers and also an SEO juicer
Engineering product for growth
Product led growth is the best way to grow. Products like Intercom, Drift, Getbeamer, Calendly or Loom are great products that are inherently positioned for growth.
Their value comes from their distribution
Friends and Family
If they’re the right customer and they were in the audience breakdown of your customers then absolutely a good choice of people
SEO (inbound)
Even in 2020, especially in 2020 SEO is probably an incredible strategy to acquire inbound customers and leads. People are getting more and more numb to manual outreach.
People are reverting to community, trust signals and high intent triggers to chose a product
BetaList / BetaPage
Its like Producthunt for when your app is in beta, you need to pay to skip ahead of the list but if you wait for a month you’ll get auto listed. They’ve got good domain rating as well and drive decent traffic
Podcasts
You get to tell your story, your why all whilst being associated with a trust factor for the audience, i.e the host.
This is a great way to attract customers, build authority as well as build a network
Free Tools (Calculators)
Blogs are great but interactive engineering is much better. Why? The barrier to writing a blog is not much, but when you add some layer of code, however accessible it is in 2020 - its still a step above just a blog.
It also is a great excuse to “launch” this on all your groups and pages vs another blog
Google Ads
Technically not free, but an amazing way for driving early growth. Target the keywords for what people are already searching for and send them to a targeted landing page.
This is important, don’t just send them to your normal page, if they’ve clicked on a GAd that is “Best ways to brush my teeth” - build a dedicated page that talks about this WITH a signup CTA too
Competitor bad reviews
Billion-dollar businesses exist in the reviews section of a competitor. G2, as well as Capterra, let you filter and find the low star reviews and their complaints.
Review Sites / Directories
List your product on the above directories like G2 and Capterra, or even Trustpilot. An amazing and simple way to attract customers. There’s plenty of these out there
Partnership networks (Appsumo, Stacksocial)
These networks already have the audience, you just need to be sexy enough for them to enlist you. DM the founders on Twitter. Its frowned upon as they take 75% of the revenue at times. But sometimes its the boost you need for early users and feedback
Upcoming newsletters plugins
Offer your product for free to upcoming newsletter creators. You can often find them sharing their content on Hackernews, Growthhackers, Reddit groups, Indiehackers as well as twitter
TikTok
Even as I write this, TikTok’s organic growth is COOKED. People starting accounts 7 days ago hit 1M followers. You can easily leverage this viral growth to plug your product, whilst also building a decent social media following yourself.
Viral Referral
Use tools like vyper.ai or viralloops to build a gamified referral system like Robinhood to acquire users
Quora
The worlds largest QnA sitting right there fresh for you. Your customers are looking for answers, go there - answer the questions they’re facing and mention your product.
Twitter loves early-stage products, a lot of indie users are on it. Build on twitter, share your growth and you will be rewarded in multiples
Reddit Subreddits
Close-knit groups of people sharing problems about a topic. Build authority, don’t spam, leave constructive feedback and engage with the community before posting your link
Meetups
I just spoke at a very small meetup yesterday and acquired 8 users from big logo brands that I’m going to leverage on my home page. They work
That’s all for now.
See you, next week friend!
Great list thanks!
Brilliant list! Will be trying some of these on SurejobzApp.com.