3 ms·

These sound like fine ideas. Are they how you got your first customer? How did that happen? I'm interested in hearing the story from start to end.

• breck 18y ago
  Yes, for a project I'm currently working on. It's targeted toward consumers in a small niche medical community. I Google'd until I found a handful of active forums for this niche. Then I posted to the most active one. I offered a free year's trial to the first beta users. I got 12 from that site. Then after a few days I repeated that process on another forum and got 8 more. I'm working out a lot of bugs but having real users is great. So far they've been active and enthusiastic with feedback. I'm not sure whether this is the right niche for my product, but am improving it a lot with their help. I haven't charged anyone yet(in fact, haven't even setup the payment system yet), and may run into difficulty when I do launch the public product since it seems consumers are very reluctant to pay for things online. But that's why it's great to have beta users from my target market who can help me get the product to a point where it's good enough to charge.
  • bkovitz 18y ago
    Wow, so you got your initial users by posting on-line! That's interesting. So far, I had been assuming that we would have to work through our networks of friends and/or make cold calls. Cold-calling is probably the hacker's worst nightmare, but I've been revving up: "I can learn to do ANYTHING!!"