Ask HN: I have a list of 20 potential customers. How to reach out to them? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I have a list of 20 potential customers. How to reach out to them?

7 pointscodegeek9 comments

My idea is very niche focussed and related to my current field. I know quite a few people in the field already. So I have this list of about 20 people that I want to start a discussion with. How would you go about it ? Should I just use something like survey monkey ? personalized email ? custom form ? phone call and ask questions ?

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Call them, introduce what you are doing and ask them if you can meet.

If you can solve a problem they have, they will make time for you.

Most buyers care about three things: Cost, Productivity, Revenue. Think "CPR". If you can reduce costs, increase productivity, or drive additional revenue, they should want to meet.

Skip email or surveys. You want to talk to them and ask open ended questions about their needs to see if you can help.

from selling two productivity related products I often run into customers telling me "Revenue, Cost, Productivity" is the priority and productivity is a long way behind cost, so I fingers crossed you have a cost or revenue idea :-)

Start with a personal email. Keep is short. Your ask, in the initial email, is for a phone call. That's it. Your objective is to set a time for a call. One sentence on what you're building, and one sentence on why it is applicable to them. Indicate that you respect their opinion and that you would like them to help shape your product roadmap.

On the call. Don't sell them anything. Ask them questions about what they are currently doing, and what solutions they would like to see for the "problem." Even if you just talk to 1 out of 20, listen to what they want and tweak your product to make them happy. If that customer is happy, then there is a good chance that other users will want what you've built. "Do things that don't scale" - PG.

Your goal on the call is to get that person using your product. Offer to do it for them. Write code for them. Help them implement your solution. Treat it like a consulting gig. Whatever they are looking for, you can do it.

A LinkedIn add compliments a direct email. But, a LinkedIn message is often ignored.

If you don't have the customer's email use Rapportive -- http://rapportive.com/

Rapportive is amazing! You add Rapportive to gmail. It is a free add-on for Firefox, Safari, Mailplane, and Chrome. You can guess at the email you are looking for...firstname@companyname.com, firstname.lastname@companyname.com, firstinitiallastname@companyname.com, etc. When you get a hit the right hand side of gmail lights up with the person's picture and links to their publicly available social networks, all of which gets displayed alongside the message. The sidebar replaces Google’s contextual ads, so that’s a double win.

Even if you don't like my advice you should checkout Rapportive, it helps.

What worked for us in the beginning was asking people for their advice. Something like "I'm really interested in your work and would really appreciate a chance to ask you some questions and get your advice." Then you can have a phone call, or even better, an in person meeting over coffee. This gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about them and what they need, and potentially tell them about your product in a very customized way.

PS: Try doing this at scale rather than relying on those 20. For example, twitter follow a few hundred people in the target market and then DM the ones that follow you back, asking for their advice.

Phone call. You always miss exceptions in surveys, even if you allow open answers for each question, you sometimes want more elaboration to an answer. 20 people is also very doable to call. Sending a survey will also result in people forgetting/less willing to answer your questions. Calling is also more personal.

Unless you're used to doing cold phone calls, and fairly adept at reversing a prospects objections - I would first start with Linkedin.

Emails and phone calls are easy to ignore. I would first use LinkedIn to approach them asking for advice (keep the intro short, sweet, but intriguing). Then email a few times via LinkedIn - and THEN ask for a phone call.

If you do decide on phone calls, I would first find another group of 20 people you don't care as much about their answers- and use them first to "refine your approach" and reduce nerves.

If you only have 20 people to reach out to, you don't need much structure in how you go about doing it. Your goal should be to make those meetings happen at all.

Ask them for advice around the thing you are working on. Your goal at this stage should be to find 10 users who love your product.

Personalized email or phone call.

A survey, in particular, seems awful for this.

certainly. I guess by survey I meant putting some structure around the questions I will be asking them. The initial contact has to be personal (email/phone/in person).

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