Ask HN: How to Sell in an Unknown Market?
How do you sell in a market you find yourself into but know nothing about?
By knowing nothing I don’t mean specifically the products but more like the market dynamics, customer behaviors and so on?
By knowing nothing I don’t mean specifically the products but more like the market dynamics, customer behaviors and so on?
- You aim for what seems like a reasonable standard of quality in the first place
- You actively gather & respond well to customer feedback. Provide a personal touch if it helps you gather feedback & deliver quality.
- You develop a superior perspective on the dynamics of your own product: How & when it works well
- You start to place your customers into theoretical groups
- You test the dynamics (price reaction, product change reaction) of each group
- You rank the groups by most-interesting and refine the ranking over time, asking how this information informs your pricing & development plan moving forward
- You tighten this decision-making loop, making it fairly frequent (usually weekly at least) & ask how it's working out for you, and what needs to change
You can be doing this with < 10 customers if you want. Good luck to you
1 - I joined all of the relevant Facebook and Reddit communities, and spend about 30 minutes per day just reading HR problems/solutions/discussions.
2 - Every time I talk to an HR person during sales / customer success, I ask them where they learn from, what their career path has looked/looks like, how purchasing decisions are made, etc.
3 - I've begun searching and listening to the podcasts my competitor's founders appear on.
4 - I'm going to start a local meetup, hopefully expand it into a regional conference.
TL;DR: Join communities and consume content created by your target audience.