Polite, personable cold calling, visiting industry conferences/exhibitions, paying for advertising or at least look at the numbers of searches for your key words.
Follow industry experts on twitter, linkedIn.
If applicable, small batch direct mail, advertising in popular niche publications
I've always found if you make it clear you're not selling anything (yet!) and are genuinely interested in solving their issues you can get people to provide feedback quite easily.
Do: Build your visibility and credibility. Fish where the fish are. Where are your target buyers spending their time and getting their information? Find a way to publish there.
Figure out who are the best connected people in your network or vicinity and talk to them, let them know you're taking on projects and be clear in what kind of projects you can help with. Make it easy for them to refer you.
I got my current start (granted not super successful, just started about a month ago) with my product paying all my bills by looking for an audience and just selling manual services that emulated the product itself. Once I saw secured actual contracts and demand, I built it.
In my case, I used a few different marketplaces, but I might also recommend competitor's forums.
Just go to where your audience frequents and sell them something, and if they pay for it, build it.
Some of this might be considered spam, but I would imagine if you did a bit of research or attempted to explain how you add value in some way: I'm sure people don't mind direct emails or direct messages (if something exists)
With that, I'd recommend stuff like linkedin/twitter etc to find relevant people in the industry you want to sell to and work from there.
Go on LinkedIn, find contacts, email/call them to explain why your product would help them and their business, set up a demo over video chat. Pitch them your product, why it would benefit them and try to secure a deal.
After you've got some sales under your belt, sponsor a booth at a tradeshow relevant to your market. Demo your product in-person, collect leads and follow up for more sales. Rinse and repeat.
Get involved with your local community. Word of mouth is the best referral system when you're getting started.
Try using your personal network to find a local business / organization that is struggling with some piece of software / website. Or donate some work to a non-profit and ask them to spread your name around. Every successful project should bring you at least two more to work on.
My biggest hurdle was getting bigger projects and not just "fix my webpage" type tasks.
I tried cold emailing companies under my business name in order to get some better projects but i didnt receive much attention. Do you suggest other ways of reaching to possible customers?
The suggestion to hire someone to do the initial outreach is a good idea, i will try it out.
One way is to start showing business results, before getting hired. Go get sales for the product, figure out a way to reach potential customers and talk to them about the product.
For the past couple of years our average engagement was full-time and 8+ months long, so we only needed to look for new customers once or maybe twice a year.
We took some time to create our consultancy website and make sure we're communicating our value and principles at least somewhat effectively.
It also helps having satisfied past clients who will speak well of you when someone calls them up.
We don't really do any speaking, blogging, traveling to conferences to network, or anything like that. I just advertise on a couple of websites like HN who wants to be hired, for hire subreddit, angel list, startupers.com, etc to let people know we're on the market looking for a new project. We usually find someone who is a good fit within a couple of weeks.
We are also involved in the local tech community and in the past we would get some projects through word-of-mouth, but those were at lower rates near the beginning of our careers.
You could also try platforms like codementorX and moonlightwork until you manage to connect with someone yourself.
Aha ok. Without knowing the product it’s hard to advise, perhaps you can start a youtube channel around it, become the go to expert in the field? Sell consulting? Sell follow on products or services?
Hundred, hell, I got four. (Not four hundred, four, trust me it's plenty - we sell Big Solutions Contracts.)
Start with your current connections.
Attend the conferences of the industry you're in. Ideally, present/speak at them.
Blog about solutions for your industry if you can do it without coming across as spammy.
Keep an eye out for articles/blogs/etc on problems that your offering solves. Follow up with people directly about that and/or post to the blogs saying "we do this and here's why we're great". (If you do this, absolutely do disclose that you're self promoting.)
Find someone with industry experience and/or a rolodex. Pay them a decent commission.
Find the right search terms to drive people to your site and make sure you have a clear description of the problem the customer is facing, with simple glossy answers for how you can help them fix it.
Forums and meetups. Find places where your target market congregates and show up there. Participate in the conversation without being spammy (ideally, you started doing this already). Ask for feedback on your product and maybe toss in a special coupon code for members of that forum/group.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I'd suggest partnering with someone who already has distribution in an area that's genuinely interesting to you. Distribution could be in the form of an existing social media following, blog, or email list. At a minimum, you will learn a lot, really fast, by building for an existing audience with real problems and iterating with their feedback.
Blog about topics that would be useful to managers or owners of these kinds of companies.
Once a month, do an in-depth training webinar on a topic they could use.
Then offer your new prospects an easy to understand consulting package - i.e. $1500 month gets them unlimited support plus X many hours of your time. Offer low, medium and high-end (custom) packages.
good luck!!
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