It's time to go spear-fishing! Our target customers are founders of early-stage B2B software companies. We just need to figure out where they hang out.
Fortunately, I'm one of those founders. Where do I hang out? A few places come to mind:
- Hacker News
- YouTube on channels like My First Million and All-in Podcast
- Reddit on places like r/Entrepreneur and r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
My immediate goal is to acquire a small group of founders that can help me refine the pitch and position the product in a way that resonates. We'll save Hacker News for when our pitch is good.
YouTube makes it difficult to target founders because videos are typically around a narrow topic, and it's difficult to build meaningful relationships over their comment system. It seems like the right way to do YouTube is to start your own channel or to be a guest in someone else's video. The plan is to do both at some point.
I don't have enough clout on Twitter to broadcast what I'm looking for. And reaching out 1-to-1 is hard because almost all the founders I follow are not early-stage. The low-clout founders are hard to find!
So that leaves Reddit. I created an account under my real name and joined all the communities I could find related to entrepreneurship.
The specialization of each subreddit lets
So that leaves Reddit. I created an account under my real name and joined all the communities I could find related to entrepreneurship.
Reddit is good because you can connect with people that are relatively unknown i.e. early-stage founders. The conversations are organized by topic, and I can just be as helpful as possible on any topic that I think B2B SaaS founders would find interesting. I'm not aiming specifically to convert them to customers, but to foster relationships that might be mutually beneficial in the future. I want to understand what they're building and what problems they're struggling with, so I typically try to get them on a call. And if there's ever any value I can provide, I do so without prompting, with no expectation of anything in return.
The annoying thing about Reddit is that some of the communities are heavily modded. They prevent you from posting links or even posting at all in some cases. To overcome this, I tried to think of communities that I can start so that I am unrestricted in what I can post. I started r/TorontoStartups but it's a chicken-and-egg problem: I don't have enough clout to seed the community, and I can't get the clout from the community without first seeding it. So this approach will have to wait unless I think of a clever way to bootstrap it.
There was one community that turned out to be especially good. I found r/PrelaunchSaaS, which is run by John Wheeler. He's working on a cool product that allows you to make fancy product demos, and he's facing the same problem as we are (no clout, few/no customers), and approaching it with a very similar solution - by documenting his process. He's experimenting with both written and video format. He created a discord channel for early-stage founders to help each other, you can request an invite at codingbutclueless.com. John has been very helpful with his feedback so far, and I expect I will be able to find another few founders in that group that are willing to give detailed feedback. I try to help every founder that asks anything in the group, if my experience is applicable. This community seems like it's one worth building upon!
Now that we're starting to get feedback, we're going to iterate on our pitch in the next chapter.
Stats
Monthly revenue: $125
Monthly spend: $50,000 (roughly)
Monthly profit: -$49,875
Paying customers: 5
Total signups: 3243