For us (Dependabot) the best advice I ever got was that your initial customers should come from sales, not marketing, even for a really low-price SaaS product. I was literally giving Dependabot away for the first 6 months of its existence, but I was still doing concierge sales on it.<p>When you sell to customers directly you get to hear their reactions and get a much better sense of what's valuable to them. You also make yourself more approachable if/when they've got feedback down the line. Finally, you get a predictable return to your effort (even if it's low!), which prevents the kind of boom and bust that can burn you out in the early days.<p>I'd really, really highly recommend anyone else looking to start a B2B business take the same approach, even if your product is way too cheap for sales to be scalable.
For a tech product, look no further than where you are right now. HN has been one of the best sources of users for EnvKey[1], a developer-focused configuration and secrets manager. While HN has a reputation for toughness, it's also full of early adopters who will give you great feedback and be understanding as you figure things out.<p>And don't be afraid to play small ball. Of course it's amazing to get on the front page of HN, PH, big subreddits, etc., but it's also hit-or-miss and subject to the whims of the hivemind. Posting comments in relevant threads is slower, but it can drive a surprising amount of traffic over time, and the conversion rates will often be <i>much</i> higher than a 'featured' placement.<p>Of course, you need to take care that you're adding something to the discussion and not just advertising. Basically, your comment should be able to stand on its own as something valuable <i>without</i> any mention of your product, but make people curious about what you're doing, so that by the time they get to your link, they actually want to click it and learn more.<p>Another tip: if you have a product that has sdks for various languages, integrations with other platforms, etc., treat each one as a mini-launch to that community. It's often <i>much</i> easier to get attention with "here's a cool new thing for Elixir" vs. "here's something for everyone".<p>1 - <a href="https://www.envkey.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.envkey.com</a>
When I started browserless.io, I was having a heck of a time getting Chrome running properly in Docker. After about 1 month of hit-n-miss `docker build`'s (which was taking ~15 minutes each time due to the amount of deps and lack of layer caching therein), I decided to sort popular open-source libs by comments and reactions. To my surprise I wasn't the only one experiencing this issue!<p>This actually turned out to help in two ways: I knew _exactly_ what to build, and where to find first users. After that I point I really haven't had to market or even cold-call anyone since (thanks to SEO and GitHub) most folks find the solution when there in the midst of the problem.<p>If you're looking to build something, and are tech-savy, I think it's an interesting thing to go to popular OS projects and do some research. It'll open your eyes as to what others are needing and (sometimes willing) to pay for.
Common sense theme here: focus on a small group of people and delight them. If they're having the same problem, chances are others are as well. Be authentic, work smart, and deliver value based on what people are telling you.
I'm going through this right now with my real estate related site OpenHouseTour[1]. It's definitely different (and eye opening) when you're dealing with clients that aren't as savvy with computers and you're having to explain how to do things like copy and paste. I try to take the XKCD one of the lucky 10,000 approach and just think about how much time learning this will save them in other parts of their life, but sometimes it's hard.<p>1 - <a href="https://www.openhousetour.ca" rel="nofollow">https://www.openhousetour.ca</a>