Ask HN: I'm having trouble finding the target audience for my product | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm having trouble finding the target audience for my product

6 pointsstemonteduro4 comments

I started working on it in March, immediately putting a beta online.

At the moment there are 200 registered users, 90 active (who receive the daily emails), and since I enabled the paid plans (first week of August) I have 2 customers (one on the basic plan and one on unlimited) for a total of $55 MRR.

Over these months the landing page has received about 2k visitors: - most of them come from X (45%) - then direct (40%) - then Google and so on

It’s clear that I need to work on finding my target audience (or audiences) to understand whether or not I have PMF.

It’s dailygram.me (in short, it lets you add IG/X profiles and receive a daily summary of what they post, with links to every single post, all by email).

At the moment the premium customer uses it to track real estate profiles.

In my opinion, it could have different audiences: - People who want to track profiles for work - People who want to track creator accounts for inspiration, and so on

The problem is that I don’t really know how to reach these people, where to find them, since it’s probably not an issue people are actively discussing in groups anywhere.

I’d like your opinion on what the target for the tool could be, and eventually where to find them when they’re not well defined (like indie hackers, devs, sysadmins, and so on)

I think you need to understand your potential user base more. Focus on a specific audience, one at a time. Your focus is too broad.

For the real estate use case, what is the specific problem they are solving with your tool? I can speculate that they want to track open houses in their area, and they don't want to open the social media app since it is designed to be a distracting time suck.

So where can you find people who work in real estate? Where do they discuss that specific problem? What other tools do people use instead? Are you competing with MLS sites, perhaps?

The 90 active but non-paying users likely have different use cases. You can try to learn those, although their willingness to pay hasn't been established yet.

Thanks, then I think I’ll try to focus only on one niche, and since I already have a customer I’ll immediately try sending them an email to understand how they use it (and if I can improve the service from their perspective at no extra cost).

And then I think it makes sense to contact those who no longer use the service to ask why and get some feedback (they definitely signed up but didn’t find what they were expecting).

1) You build a solution and now you're looking for the people who have the problem.

2) Read this book "The Lean Startup"

Yeah, I know that first you find a problem with people who suffer from it and then you build the product, but as I said this was my first attempt and I started right away because I already had an MVP requested by a friend who needed to track IG profiles for work (he’s a journalist).

I already have the book (it’s called “Partire Leggeri” in italian), I’ll move it up on my reading list right away. Thanks!

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