If you made your first sale in the last year, how did you get that first customer?

Tiny side project so not really a company.
I posted on Kern.al comments that I'd solved someone's idea/problem.
Got a clickthrough and sale via Kern.al.
Just 1 sale for the year haha. Here's the product if curious: https://petershi.gumroad.com/l/excel-to-market-map

Lessons:

1. First sale shouldn't be hard if you actually have a product that solves a problem
2. To grow further, I follow advice of people who've achieved more success e.g. Mike Slaats Upvoty's founder summarized how they got to 20k mrr here: https://youtu.be/Ncu-hkZEW4Q

1. Small side project: Dev Resource List
2. I curated a database of beginner friendly resources to help people learn JavaScript.
3. I'm active on a few Facebook groups which is where my first customer came from.
4. I have traffic to the website but I'm not sure if the price point is a blocker for many people - I'm still experimenting with this.

1. Alignr
2. Alignr makes it easier for companies to develop a strong product strategy & product discovery process. Discover what will be most valuable to your end users, simplify your roadmap, and validate that it's working.
3. Started with my network and started setting up meetings with product managers, CEOs, and tech leads that I knew. A lot of these chats felt like they were turning more into a two way therapy session 😅 . After I got a good understanding of the problem I started addressing it and went right back to those people early and said "Hey take a look at this thing I think will help with that problem we we're talking about".
4. I would have had more of those conversations and created a better system for synthesizing notes. Another thing - talk less & listen more... This can be hard when you're soooo passionate about what you're doing.

1. Pirsch Analytics
2. A privacy-friendly web analytics tool with a strong focus on usability, API, and backend integration.
3. Our first customer came from betalist.com, so they started using it while we were still in Beta and did not charge anything.
4. Definitely include real-world users even sooner and put the word out as much as possible.

1. https://smol.pub
2. tiny blogging service
3. I posted the link on hubski.com and started to see some sales.
4. Build the best product you can. Don't focus on marketing, but focus on improving your product. It's hard to build something with a lot of features, but it's harder to build something with less features. Be obsessed with that!

1. Startup: BuildwithFramer.com

2. What it does: Selling ready-to-deploy website templates for designers, developers, founders, etc.

3. How I made 1st $$$: I shared the idea on Twitter and asked designers who'll be interested in making their portfolio website live in a few hours. Got a lot of response and learned that the work of designing, coding, making the site responsive, etc, is a lot for people in launching their website (in designer's case, their portfolio website).

I made a quick gumroad pre-order page explaining how I'll help designers launch their portfolio site in a matter of few hours. Made my first 4 pre-order sales in 2 days, without even actually designing the template yet.

4. Learned that process of market validation never fails. If one can test the idea without building an actual product, we should do that. A pre-order listing is a great way to gauge the interest of potential buyers.

1. Odin
2. Bookmarking app
3. Twitter!
4. Talk to users more

1. https://tradly.app
2. Provide headless api and a simple no-code Option to launch mini marketplaces, directories, community platforms (currently provide few templates but we are still looking for developers to build templates to sell to our customers)
3. I started doing seo before the days we started coding our product. Content hacks

• competitor A vs competitor B vs your name (this hack worked for us)
• how to build something like (worked for us for sometime but too much competition now)
• alternative to your competitor name (works well)

4. As someone said, sometimes it’s hard to sell the product when it’s not ready. However it’s better to have the call with inbound leads. This will help us to understand what they are expecting. And rare cases somebody doesn’t even need a lot of functionalities. They are okay with what we have currently. Honestly we had only one option whchh is android app built on our headless api. But now we have everything in different frameworks. We didn’t wait for everything to be finished. This lesson is very important. And I apply this often

Recently we made a partner directory template for saas companies. But we wrote landing pages even before we had it. It’s not like we are trying to sell which we don’t have, but only the partial is done and not the full thing.

All the best to everyone who is building! If you are looking for any help from us, let us know.

Hey there,
I am at a stage where I launched my website
https://theminimilitiaapk.com/ visit us thankyou

I'm not really a company, still very much a side project but answering as best as I can:

1. Crash Catch - https://crashcatch.com
2. Simple and affordable crash and error reporting no matter your development stack focussed towards other indiehackers and small statups.
3. I actually couldn't tell you. Its kind of a funny story (at least I think so). I wasn't really pushing Crash Catch at the time, because I was reworking the backend with a bit of a rewrite so didn't really want any customers using it (other than myself) otherwise I would need to migrate the data from the old backend to the new. But somehow, someone managed to find it (I don't know how or where from) signed up straight to the pro plan and been using it for the last 6 months ish sending around 50000 requests a day.
4. Didn't really learn much as unexpected, but something I want to improve on this year is my marketing (which is basically non existent) and SEO for the landing page (doing some improvements as I type).

1. Poddin.io.
2. Provide a fast, accurate transcription service for podcasts to boost podcast SEO and grow audience.
3. Cold outreach, I think one of the benefits of my niche is that the podcasters are mostly active on social media, so it's very easy to be able to find them.
4. Free trial, Free trial, Free trial. If there's more, it's all about building your own audience so that your first 10 users will be very easy to get.

1. Nifty AR - https://www.niftyar.app - https://twitter.com/niftyarapp

2. I sell consumer products for people to flex their NFTs in AR.

3. I'm in Discords for a few NFT projects I own. When I first got the idea for Nifty AR two weeks ago, I started making a demo app and laser cut a prototype "Nifty Card" to show off the NFT of whichever group I was messaging in. Got lots of "dude, that's awesome"s and "omg so 🔥🔥🔥"s, so enough validation to keep going. Set up a website and a twitter (THE space to be in the NFT community) and ran giveaways for two of the popular NFTs I owned and posted the links to the tweets in each Discord; people had to follow and retweet to win 1 of 5 free Nifty Cards for each giveaway. One tweet got 62 retweets and the next 168 retweets. I had an email waitlist set up (it's all presale right now, the iOS app and Nifty Cards ship Feb 15th, Android app coming Q2) and got 37 signups during those five days of giveaways. After the winners claimed their free cards, I tweeted that the site was live and emailed the waitlist, both with a promo code for $10 off their card. I've had four sales since launch on Thursday. Not really raking in the dough just yet, but I actually got some cold, hard validation (cash), so I took the next step and turned on facebook ads (NFT ads against Twitter's ad policy :/) and retargeting ads this morning. No conversions yet, but so far the ads are getting a 14.29% click through rate at $.18 per click, which I think is pretty good (I'm an iOS developer not a marketer 😂). Hopefully the retargeting will start closing deals pretty soon.

4. Honestly, things have gone pretty well on this project: concept to 4 sales in 10 days. I think that's the culmination of years of slow or failed projects and the lessons learned from them. Primarily, start as minimal as you can and validate as quickly and often as you can. Also, I've been an iOS / AR dev for quite some time and already had working code for other projects, so I was able to build on that super fast to make the demo videos (which are super slick, imho lol). Finally, we're still super early to NFTs (which are a blast, by the way... I know there's a lot of confusion/disdain for them here on IH but after years and years of clients asking me to do crypto / blockchain / and more recently NFT projects for them, which I've ignored as a fad, I finally took the plunge this last October and dived into the world, and I've just gotta say again... it's a blast. Highly recommend.), so there's lots of room to disrupt the space and frankly, I think Nifty AR is a fantastic idea and the app is already pretty polished and the AR / parallax tech is pretty eye catching, so hopefully it'll start gaining traction soon.

I plan to start with smaller NFT influencers and give them affiliate promo codes to give to their followers, where their followers get $10 off their card and the influencer gets $5 for each order using their code. Once it starts gaining traction (and I have the infrastructure to keep up with demand), I hope to work my way up the influencer chain. Probably totally naive of me, but it'd obviously be so sick to get a shout out from Neymar, Steph Curry, Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, etc. at some point 😂 Right now I'm only selling the Nifty Cards (metal cards the size of a credit card), but I'll be rolling out Niftees (AR t-shirts) and Nifty Cribs (AR "homes" you and your friends can go out to the park and set up life-size-ish AR models of the Nifty Cribs with galleries inside and each friend can show off their favorite NFTs in their own section of the crib) soon.

1. Crewcharge.com
2. Cookie-free Customer analytics, targeted marketing automation & feedback widgets.
3. Offered to work for free on Facebook groups and Subreddits and manually did what my software was able to do.
4. I WON'T build a landing page. I WON'T code. I will reach out to audience through cold email, LinkedIn and facebook groups, send them a video of what my software could do. Manually do it for free first. See how many customers it attracts, then build.

I built a mailing list for Deployment from Scratch. It started by a post on Reddit + link on my blog. Once I had an alpha release, I announced it on the list and got the first sales!

1. Baseline
2. Automated brand guide creation and on-brand design templates.
3. I think I got the first sale after posting on r/webdev on reddit.
4. Reddit has worked out nicely as a place to get early feedback, at least for me. It's a bit of a wildcard and I've heard many horror stories but for me it works.

1. (Our Web Hosting)[https://ourwebhosting.co.uk]
2. WordPress hosting for the UK based SME
3. Via a creative agency we work with
4. We were supporting a creative agency with a key customer by providing additional tech support. We suggested our platform for a mini site to save the agency a lot of time making it from scratch (clone site to new hosting).

They liked the support we gave them regarding current hosting and were willing to swap over. To them it's the same end product but as we are smaller we can charge them the same price but via invoice quarterly. This saves them the hassle of monthly expenses forms from personal credit card.

From this we learnt we could charge a bit more for the same product if we can demonstrate extra value. That and SME like invoicing over credit card to cut down on paper work each month.

Typed on phone, sorry for any mistakes.

1. Blogging Site: BlogCD.Com
2. I create beginner-friendly blogging resources to help people learn to blog accordingly.
3. I'm active on a few Facebook groups which are where my first customer came from.
4. I have traffic to the website but I'm not sure if the price point is a blocker for many people - I'm still experimenting with this.

My mom's a fan of my work .
Practice Probs - programming practice problems to help you learn.
Waiting to publish a bit more content before I turn my focus towards marketing and sales.

1. Remote Frontend Jobs (https://remotefrontendjobs.com)
2. Aggregating the 20 largest job boards into a single feed of exclusively remote frontend jobs.
3. My first customer found me on Polywork. I re-share every product update about Remote Frontend Jobs on there so their founder saw one of those and reached out to me
4. I learned that there will be a lot of support requests coming up my way unless I try to automate some things in advance. For example, there were some requests of changing the advertisement after it was posted which I had to do manually since I haven't set up a technical process for it yet. Also, I had to create a Stripe payment link just for this sale, because I haven't had the chance to set it up properly yet.

1. Page2API
2. I've built an intuitive and powerful Web Scraping API
3. I posted it here on IndieHackers and got my first customers from the IH community.
4. Having a Live Demo really helps people understand what is your product doing.
   I thought that this would be enough. However, if I would go back, I would provide a Free Trial plan from day 1, so people would have a possibility to test the product right away and have no friction integrating it.

• PriceWell

• A tool to collect, manage and optimize subscriptions in less then an hour without coding needed.
  Imagine it as a billing team for your company, from UI to invoices and taxes optimization without having to hire a developer or bookkeeper to do it.

• we went on Fiverr, started a gig on Stripe Checkout integration and asked our first leads to do it for them automatically. Once they realised how much time and effort we saved them, one of them upgraded!

• Not build before proper validation. We were lucky that there’s demand for the product, but people might not have taken it with such warmth. (Thank you for that 😊)

I am at a stage where I launched my product sociomata.com (social media content scheduler) this month. People are signing up but none have converted as a paid user so far. I am still confused how to get the first paid user.