Best ways to acquire customers quickly?

Hey Sharon, we are in exactly the same position as you (or at least similar). We have to improve our product and survive at the same time. We need a growing community, a mixture of people who are enthusiasts for our idea and targets, but also beta testers and hopefully soon people who really benefit from the product as customers and who are perhaps willing to support us by simply paying for the product. What am I doing? Virtual community building: - LinkedIn: I've gathered 8k followers there (connect, connect, connect...), but I learned that it is very difficult to navigate them into the funnel, so I would not invest the same time and effort here again, but perhaps there's a way to use it that I have not understood yet. - Twitter: I only started in Juli/August tweeting and did not find a way to grow the audience quickly. But I see this also as a path of self-definition, brand-value-research and definition. I've fun doing it but you have to be interested in the process otherwise it's a pain. - I've made some interesting experiences in some subreddits with getting some massive feedbacks but this lead only to Karma points, nothing that can be really used for virtual community building and funnel feeding. If someone is interested I made a numeric analysis of the interaction patterns in some typical startup-channels there, interesting results, that I would be happy to share and discuss (perhaps on twitter?). Really helpful. - then here on PH, but here it's also extremely time-consuming and slow to grow the community, but I think that a really promising reward waits for us when we start early enough, improve the product constantly and launch it here then later. - then I slowly started posting our project to parts of this list: https://www.startupranking.com/b... - now I see some users coming to our webpage, which is only a few weeks old, so no traction yet, except of a few hundred users - then the Content Marketing, PR and SEO, writing articles, building content clusters, getting in contact with journalists, exchanging ideas with them, listing the Website somewhere, developing a founder narrative, writing Press releases (Uh, I'm a bit shocked listing here all the activities I'm doing). I think all of this will start to pay off 6-12 months from now and then grow massively in importance, also the things I'm doing now. Preparing a good foundation is key to later success. And the stamina to do all of this. The picture I use for this process is a machine with many, many cog-wheels and I'm pushing and rotating them all at once with the power of my hands and therefore feel sometimes totally exhausted. But sometimes I've the impression that one of the wheels has moved slightly by another power than me, one wheel has moved another one - that's magic. If we keep on improving our products, testing our stories by telling them from different angles, growing the community, then there will be a moment in time, when the machine suddenly starts to move on its own. I would be super happy to gather a small community of founders in a similar position and helping each other with real tips but also with building a content-catapult, retweeting, recommending each other, upvoting - imagine how helpful this can become for our launch campaigns, imagine 20-50 people really helping each other, even fewer could be super powerful. Oh, now I liked the idea so much that I created a telegram group "Founders Supportive". Here is the link: https://t.me/joinchat/DQ2lhhzAo6... If you like, we could cooperate there for a while and ease each others founders life in virtual community building.

If you are solely looking for feedback, why don't you have 20-30 minutes with your friends and get free feedback (that depends on your product type though)., Another way, although it is not the best way, is to provide a discount for a user if they leave their feedback. Also, maybe try Appsumo (if you get accepted), you give a huge discount, but should get a decent amount of users (if accepted). So these are three random thoughts that crossed my mind for quick feedback.

I'm currently working on something similar. What I do is I tap into community leaders and influencers, and ask if they want to be part of developing the product. Asking for their help and making them feel they are part of something big makes them feel good. Most would say yes. What's your product by the way?

I'm in the same boat! I've been super lazy with content marketing but that's been my major growth for getting viewers to my website which have converted to my early access mail list. It's definitely a consistent long term play especially since you need to rank in certain keywords. Otherwise apart from the methods listed by everyone else, try using pioneer.app. Every week, your product is shared to around 5 - 10 other founders and you give each other feedback. The community is actually pretty cool and I've gotten pretty good feedback!

Hey Sharon, whether you wish to go for Instagram influencers or run a $100 Facebook ad, it all depends on the type of business you are into. What may work great for one business, might not work that well for others. If you have a product-based business, I would suggest you create relevant content (blogs, videos, webinars) around the same, that can help your prospective customers. Trust me its the best investment you can make. Besides this, for every small business, it is important to hold on to your first 100 customers. You can use a tool like ProProfs Help Desk (that comes with a forever free plan) and offer awesome support right from the start. Good luck!