How to get your first customer and some places to launch & list your app

jessehaywood
Thu, 11 Nov 2021 15:25:45 +0000
Resources & Tutorials

Only launching on your personal social media account won’t cut it. Getting your first customer is hard. It’s important to launch on multiple platforms, and in certain cases, relaunch later down the road.

Before I list the places to launch, here are a few tips:

Pre-launch

Define your goals and metrics for success

Pick a launch date and stick to it

Create a launch checklist, or find one on the web (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and ProductHunt have some great resources for product launches)

Create a pre-launch landing page (we are big fans of Webflow around here. Also, check out this blog post about creating a great landing page)

Create an explainer video (it doesn’t have to be fancy, you can use Loom for free up to 5 minutes)

Start building an email list (maybe offer some freebies or host a contest through KingSumo)

Start creating as much content as you can (SEO is a long-term game. Get started now even if nobody reads it)

Engage with communities like this forum or other no-code communities and become an active member, not a spammy promoter (connections make a difference)

Create all your social accounts, have them linked to your landing page, and start posting consistently

Build in public on your social feeds (Kill your ego. Nobody is going to steal your idea. Ideas don’t make money. Execution does.)

Be sure your friends and family are ready to hype your product on launch day

Outreach (create an outreach list of influencer, journalists, etc and start reaching out to them)

Run pre-sales for a discount leading up to launch

Post-launch

Keep capturing emails and be consistent with sending them

Reach out to users for feedback

Make an FAQ on your landing page based around that feedback

Set new goals and start chasing them

Go hard into marketing (shipping new features is important, but if you don’t have customers, then nobody will be using your new features)

Relaunch after you’ve made significant updates

Places to launch and list

Product Hunt (here is a guide on how to do it)

Show HN

Launched

StartupBase

BetaPage

TechPluto

Emoji Launch

Communities to launch in

Indie Hackers (they have a no-code group with 18,000+ people in it)

Reddit: r/Entrepreneur, r/startups, r/smallbusiness, r/EntrepreneurRideAlong, r/sideproject, r/indiebiz, r/imadethis, r/design_critiques, r/growmybusiness, r/shamelessplug, r/AlphaandBetausers, r/RoastMyStartup, r/nocode

Betalist

AppSumo (I’ve actually met Noah Kagan and am in a private Slack group he made. He’s legit. I recommend his YouTube channel for some good content)

Broadwise

Crazy About Startups

Side Projects

I hope this was helpful for you. I am not the originator of this content. This is based on an Indie Hackers post by James Fleischmann. It has a lot more links and content, but I narrowed it down and added some context around what I thought was helpful for you.

Be on the lookout next Thursday for a post listing a ton of No-Code communities you need to be a part of.

Do you have any other helpful resources around launching? What are some great places to launch that I didn’t mention? I’d love to hear from you!

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