Ask HN: How did you establish and maintain relationships with your first users?

I love that people share their latest projects, chat about experiments. 3D printing is such a creative hobby and I'm constantly amazed with the ingenuity I see. Really helps me stay motivated through the night/weekend grind.

A few stats about my beta program:

* Roughly 2,200 applications for the private Beta program

* 200 beta invitations sent

* 100 actually used the product

* 180 hanging out in Discord

* 6 months of nights/weekends development

* 10 paid Beta spots offered, sold out in 2 days

I do support over email or Discord.

I think event-based analytics like Posthog are more valuable than a chat bubble integration, if you have to choose 1 to implement. People often tell you more with their actions than with words.

(Edited list formatting)

1) Most people will happily give you feedback. Some of it will be good, some of it you won't agree with, but keep an open mind, and always thank them.

2) I go out of my way to tell new users that I appreciate their taking the time to check out the site.

3) If you get the opportunity, engage with your early users and talk on a human level. Many times that simple act of connecting and having a conversation with another person will spark an increased interest in the success of the project and you'll find that people will reach out to you when _they_ have an idea or suggestion.

4) List your email and/or a phone number if applicable, and likewise if you're having a good conversation with someone, ask if they'd be ok with you emailing them with some follow up questions. I've had a few people whom I got to know a fair bit and have exchanged multiple emails.

5) Lastly, I've made one specific mistake that I'm learning from, which is to _not_ neglect your early users. That is, when people start to show interest in your product, make sure to show up each and every day to interact with them and keep the interest up. I've had a few periods where I went into a development k-hole for weeks on end and wasn't as active on the site, which led to a decrease in overall activity.

Good Luck!

Also, if you are offering your product/service for free initially, I would say, "it's free, but in exchange you gotta give us 20 minutes on a call every week/every other week". This ends up being super valuable.

1. Buy a tollfree phone number and list it your website. Some people like to talk to a support agent rather than email.

2. An official email makes the business appear legitimate. Have an [email protected].

Don'ts:

1. I didn't have good experience with website chat widgets as I found them confusing to configure and that generated numerous low quality interactions.

2. Since the volume of emails is low initially, better to avoid email automation as that can take up a chunk of time to set up. Start with manual emails and once you know which email copy evokes a response, you can think about automating them.

Mechanically, regular communication that offers value via email, plus actual conversations that are informational not sales-y.

From being the person doing this at both B2B and B2C companies in early stage.

I tried doing a Discord server for it recently but it doesn't have the anonymity effect.

You want to be open to radical departures from the current implementation. You may think you know everything but before you have customers you actually know nothing

I also run a honey business. I tell people to follow our facebook page so they get an alert when we have a harvest since quantity can be limited. I'm also working on a website with an email list.

Do people really just start showing up if the service has a free tier? I'd assume you did some basic marketing.

I would guess the best marketing you can do for a developer tool is to create tutorials around whatever problem you tool solves. I know I tend to stumble across stuff when googling "how do I do...".