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So, you’ve got a product that you’re ready to charge people money for. Awesome! But how do you actually get people to start paying you money? “Traction” “Hype” and “Buzz” are just some of the vague words thrown around for early stage startups. Getting people to sign up can feel a bit like witchcraft at first.
How do you generate a snowball when there’s no snow? The answer is one word: pain. You have to be solving a big enough pain point for that traction to naturally form.
Baremetrics took away the need for people to spend hours in Excel. We calculate all those metrics for people. We provided an immediate solution to that problem. And that got people talking.
do you use @Stripe? go get this, now: https://t.co/FQYR7PLlRj
— Kyle Bragger (@kylebragger) December 10, 2013
If you use Stripe to process payments and are exporting/crunching data in Excel, save your self loads of time and use http://t.co/gT1szEuLEr
— Steve Klein (@stevenklein) February 12, 2014
I’m very, very happy to be contributing to these numbers. @Baremetrics is one of the most useful tools I pay for. http://t.co/uF6Nwuhfmp
— Alex Hillman (@alexknowshtml) February 14, 2014
Signed @lamplighterapp up for @baremetrics. Wow. It would’ve taken hours to gather that data ourselves. Very cool. http://t.co/MYAIk6FtT7
— Ryan Masuga (@masuga) February 17, 2014
If you use Stripe, the only option is to also use @Baremetrics for understanding your payments and subscription data.
— Max Lynch (@maxlynch) March 17, 2014
Using Stripe? @Baremetrics is awesome. Instant insight. Knowing is half the battle https://t.co/6GnPtFkfOx
— Joel Hooks (@jhooks) April 15, 2014
Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a great way to deliver a ton of traffic in one fell swoop. The thing to keep in mind is that performing well on Product Hunt means that you’ve made people think, “Oh. That’s neat!”
Keeping people coming back, and more importantly, paying you again comes back to pain. Your product has to be more than just neat.
By all means, launch on Product Hunt, but ask yourself beforehand if you’re solving a big enough problem.
Retargeting
In case you’re not familiar with it, retargeting is a type of advertisement that resurfaces your brand/product after a user has visited your site.
The use case for this is snagging folks who visited your site, but got distracted and didn’t actually sign up.
Done well, retargetting can be a fantastic source of new customers. In our early days, it netted us $650 for $6. Not too shabby.
Get on the phone
Once you have your first handful of customers, get on the phone with them immediately and listen.
The most valuable feedback you will ever get are from your early customers. They will both guide you to your next customers and likely bring in customers for you.
When we launched Baremetrics, things were going pretty well. However, we got a ton of feedback from early customers, and wound up spending 2 months building an entirely new version of the product. Once we launched it, we doubled revenue in under a month.
Final Thoughts
It’s important to recognize that getting customers is not a passive experience. You have to fight for them. Talk to people, ask them to talk to people. Listen. Revise. Talk to more people. This hands on approach doesn’t scale, but do it until it hurts. Hopefully by then you’ll be on the right path.
