Give to receive. The universe has a way of rewarding good deeds.
This is true in personal life as it is in business.
If you look at it, business itself even in the capitalistic sense is about giving to/and receiving.
In our personal lives, kindness is pretty straight forward and you do it all the time, it can be as simple as saying thank you often.
How then do we translate selflessness and kindness to business and the products that we build in a way that also improves traction and revenue?
One really great way for small and large products alike, especially those serving a niche customer base is usually by creating a free useful resource that is related to the main product.
This useful resource is usually meant to either show the customer that the problem really does exist and the main product is meant to solve this problem for them or to simply help scratch an itch that is related to what the main product offers.
With one of our products Uzakitu, a Shopify like alternative for SMEs (wholesale and retail) and manufacturers of consumable and non-consumable products, we realized that one thing that a lot of these businesses lack is proper graphics to make the website look neat.
When we onboard them for the first time, we also provide the graphics for free so that the website looks presentable.
FounderPal which offers a marketing strategies product to indie hackers also offers free tools such as a value proposition generator and a really cool business ideas generator. These other free tools help scratch an itch for indie hackers that’s directly related to the main product being offered
Another very common way of giving to receive is having a free tier, trial or demo for your product. Free tiers can be tricky for small products but can be very good for large established companies with software as a service product.
Trials and demos are good for small/medium products because they help the customer understand how your product works and what they are getting into before they buy. They allow users to interact with the product and see how it works in real time.
SiteGPT does this well and reported $95K revenue in February.
This also usually works well for pay as you go kind of products where one can get free credits to try for their first attempt.
A third great way to give is by providing quality customer care. Customer care is hard especially for solo founders and small businesses because you have to constantly give your time and energy to respond to customers promptly while also building this product.
It is hard but it pays off because when you respond in a timely manner you create trust and trust is the natural way of promoting word of mouth/referral marketing, which has and will always be the best kind of marketing.
Respond to questions and suggestions on social media, in your DMs, email etc and watch your growth gradually take an upward trajectory.
Cool Finds:
🤯 Get real product ideas based on real people problems.
🤖 It is hard to self-promote on Reddit, this AI can help.
💸 Nigeria’s Access Bank acquires National Bank of Kenya.
📍 WhatsApp now lets you pin up to three messages in a chat.
SEO is not easy and with Google’s new changes it will only get harder unless you put out great content consistently.
Snippet from a chat on MicroConf slack channel.
Thank you for reading this far. Tell a friend to tell their brother.
