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I think it depends a lot on your product how effective this will be. I did a lot of this while EnvKey[1] was in beta, setting up in person interviews/meetings v
by danenania 9y ago
I think it depends a lot on your product how effective this will be. I did a lot of this while EnvKey[1] was in beta, setting up in person interviews/meetings via my network, and while I did learn a lot from it, it didn't lead to getting many users. This was primarily an issue of timing: EnvKey is a tool for managing configuration and secrets, so the most natural time to adopt it is when you're starting a new project. It has an import feature, but convincing someone to import an existing project is just a much higher bar than convincing them to try it on something new.
The problem is: what percentage of companies happen to be starting a new project now or even in the next few weeks? There are plenty of them out there, but the odds of getting someone at the right moment when reaching out one by one in meatspace are too low to make it work. In this situation, I've found that a hybrid approach works better: use organic marketing, meetups, and conferences to cast a net that is sufficiently wide that at least some of the people that see it and like the concept are in a position to adopt it right away, then keep in touch to find out how it's going and what the blockers are. This has been effective for getting our first batch of happy production users.
1 - https://www.envkey.com https://www.envkey.com
- freehunter 9y agoYeah, just walking into a supermarket and expecting to find a B2B connection is unlikely, but like you said, walking into a convention where your likely customers are is a great opportunity. Even coupling that with the other guys suggestion of just taping fliers everywhere outside the convention or dropping business cards on tables in the entryway lets you skip buying tickets to the convention but still get some boost from it. $300 will get you pretty damn far that way, enough to get a customer or two that you will hopefully be able to provide good enough first-class service that they'll help you from there.
- manigandham 9y agoInteresting service, you're right that timing matters since we probably would've used this when we started. Also OpsZero is my cousin, small world.
- danenania 9y agoAwesome! They have been a great ally :) Can I ask what you're using currently to deal with this issue?
- manigandham 9y agoWe made our own small library to glue together Google Cloud's KMS and GCS while using the built-in service accounts. Fast, easy and cheap. Option #2 here: https://cloud.google.com/kms/docs/secret-management#choosing_a_secret_management_solution https://cloud.google.com/kms/docs/secret-management#choosing...