Old songs about the main thing, or How to attract more buyers

Original author: Justin Jackson
  • Transfer


You have created a product. It meets the needs of the consumer. But how are you going to launch it on the market?

Once Rob Walling, the creator of the Drip service, told me: "It’s not enough just to produce what people need." It's true. After launching the product, you need a steady stream of people interested in purchasing it.

I get hundreds of messages from the creators who developed the product, but could not find buyers. Why is it so hard?

The noise of large markets

The biggest problem with most markets is they are terribly noisy.

They already have reputable players who have flooded the existing channels with advertising, articles, keywords and posts on social networks. Your “novelty” is a drop in a stormy river: you will not even notice how you will be carried downstream, and no one will even pay attention to it.

Shouting all this noise and being noticed is not easy at all.

Your audience is not enough


You may already have gathered an audience. Maybe you have a beta list, Twitter followers, and people following your blog. Wow! This is an important first step.

However, if you want to take a truly advantageous position in the market, sending tweets to several hundred people is not enough.

“Having an audience is a good start. Well, then what? At a certain stage, you will have to learn other marketing skills, otherwise your business will stop developing. ” - Rob Walling, Drip.

Focusing your business on your small audience is like hooking it on a children's train.



If you are developing a high-quality product, you need the fastest locomotive that is possible, which can bring you to your market.

Find a locomotive that is bigger and faster than yours


This is what Baremetrics founder Josh Pigford did when he used the Buffer project as a high-speed train.



Josh developed a product that provided an automatic revenue dashboard for SaaS applications. Buffer has gathered a huge audience thanks to good content marketing (they have attracted more than a million users and 240 thousand followers on Twitter).

A big part of Buffer's marketing strategy is its transparency. They share information about everything: stocks, salaries, prices, fundraising, company valuation.

Josh offered the company something new: the ability to make its revenue metrics public through buffer.baremetrics.io. The latter superbly promoted both companies and contributed to their growth.

In just seven days of working with Buffer, Josh increased the number of buying customers by 27%.

“Fall on the tail” of another audience


For someone who is just learning to walk, it will be incredibly useful to enlist the support of seniors before setting off on a big hike. On the shoulders of your parents you will be able to overcome much greater distances than you would have walked on your own.

The same statement is true for applications.

Here is an example: Hipstamatic vs Instagram. Both offered a similar function for users: take a photo and set a filter. The difference is that Instagram posted on Twitter profiles. Users could register and immediately connect with the same people they followed on Twitter, and then capture the photos they took on Instagram. At that time, Twitter had not yet provided the opportunity to share photos, so Instagram actually became a service that implements these functions.

The author of the articles for the PSFK blog , Parneet Gosal, described it this way:
“On launch day, the creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, announced this event to his vast army of followers, who have already gathered more than a million. [But] it’s not enough to have powerful friends who know about your new service. So, the co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, told the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC that the open social network Instagram and integration with other social sites went a long way until the service became popular. [Users could] share their photos from Instagram on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. ”


Pay attention to the “hockey stick” on the chart.

Roughly speaking, Instagram managed to assign Twitter users. This is a strong argument that Twitter has closed the API access for Instagram:

"We understand the value of displaying the subscriber chain for Twitter users, but at the same time we confirm that this feature is no longer available on Instagram." - statement of the representative of Twitter, Carolyn Penner, July 2012.

This is the use of what has already been created to quickly and efficiently achieve your goals: you integrate into the platform, where users have already built social connections, and import these connections into your application.

Use the user base of other companies.

Catch the big waves



Back to the first example.

Another factor that played into the hands of the Baremetrics was that they caught a big wave - in this case, the growing popularity of the Stripe platform became such a beneficial “phenomenon”.

A big wave is a big trend or platform that rolls like a huge shaft. Stripe has grown into a developer community and turned into a real tsunami: it has become the first choice tool for embedded payments in popular web applications.

Focusing on Stripe allowed Josh to find his way to the thousands of developers who liked this ecosystem. Yes, PayPal has more users, but Stripe is gaining momentum. You have to find that perfect moment to catch the big wave. If you miss the “window”, the wave will be much smaller. Many people tried to launch Baremetrics analogues after Josh, but new projects did not receive such support.

How to recognize big waves? Be vigilant. What do people talk about on Twitter? What are they looking for on Google? What are they telling their friends about?

Many of us are familiar with Slack, a group chat application that has recently gained momentum. Take a look at the search queries in the Google Trends app for Slack and other other business-oriented group chat apps: Hipchat and Yammer:



Another good trend analysis tool is Topsy. Here is an example .

The main thing is to catch the wave while you have such an opportunity. In the end, the surge will subside and the channel will lose its value. My friend Kyle Fox described it this way:
It really is like a wave: you soar on its crest and know that, having done a certain path, it will fade away. Then you set about searching for a new wave.

The bottom line: three opportunities to promote a young business that are worth a try


  1. Find high-speed locomotive - influential market players . Search for individuals (or brands) who have already gathered an audience. Connect your wagons to their locomotive: offer cooperation that will benefit both parties.
  2. Go on the shoulders of existing communities: find platforms (especially those with social profiles) that you can integrate with. Such associations should allow users to import their existing contacts from the address book, or from the list of friends.
  3. Catch the big waves: constantly research your market. Stay tuned for new trends that can become your driving force. Pay attention to what people talk about at industry events, forums and social media. Be on the lookout and respond to trends in a timely manner! If you hesitate, you can skip the wave.

About the Author: Justin Jackson, blogger, writer, father of four children. Author of Marketing for Developers , a podcast host.

Also popular now: