HACKER Q&A
📣 k00b

How should I find customers for my product?


I’m having trouble determining whether I’m selling my product wrong or I’m selling my product right enough and I just need to remain persistent.

What I’m trying to sell is https://choremate.co. I explain how it works in depth here: https://keyankousha.com/the-best-chore-chart-in-the-world.html

So far I’ve tried a few things: 1. talking to local student housing coops 2. sitting on the UC Davis campus with a sign “free candy for advice” and asking for their opinions on the product/pitching it (I’d get ~5-8 people/hr coming up) 3. reaching out to people looking for roommates on craigslist (but I was understandably banned for doing that)

I was able to iterate quite a bit from the “free candy” approach as that had the most signal but it isn’t viable anymore given the pandemic, and it still didn’t result in any sales. Similarly the student coops are empty now.

Basically, am I doing this right? Am I supposed to feel this uncertain? Any advice? I’m a programmer by trade and temperament, doing this without co-founders or mentors, so it’s hard to know what to do or expect.

  👤 helph67 Accepted Answer ✓
How about providing demo versions to a few purposefully chosen sites (widely distributed geographically)? These would automatically require being updated to the PAID version after X months. If the money starts rolling in, you're on a winner otherwise you should have many users with plenty of feedback.
👤 Jack000
This seems like a difficult niche because you're selling to a demographic that doesn't have a lot of disposable income. There are monetized chore apps, so it's certainly not impossible though.

I would make the app free, try to climb the ranks of the SERP page for "chore chart" or similar. When you have more users there are a lot more options for monetization, including freemium/affiliate products or even just ads.

I'd also change the messaging a bit. Everyone says their widget is the number one widget, it's just kind of meaningless. It would be good if you can provide social proof - real users of the app and the benefits they received after using it.

👤 anthony_franco
Well, did you improve the product based on what the "free candy" people said? Were you able to determine the reasons they didn't buy and then improve your product accordingly?

Seems you should be improving your product/product positioning more. That would make marketing a lot easier.