Slack off and Get Customers: The Definitive Guide to New Customers via Slack.
Slack is one of the best ways to get new customers and users for your startup. This is the definitive guide on how to network, prospect and sell on Slack. As with any early online community, Slackers are happy to help each other, talk and network. As Slack communities start to grow so will the noise and these techniques just won’t work as well. So read on and learn how to get customers from Slack. The obvious caveat: your customers/users need to be the type of person that hangs out in Slack communities.
Join the right Slack communities.
Since you’re reading this on Medium Slack is probably your 3rd favorite word after “disrupt” and “IoT” and you know it’s spectacular for team communication. But it’s not just teams, Slack is blowing up for communities for everything from developers, startup-lovers, product-hunters, gamers, to digital nomads.
Join communities with people that make sense for you. Some ask you to pay a nominal fee; it’s worth it 4 outta 5 times. So just do it. I personally like finding communities on Chats.Directory and SlackList. Sages also speak of the mighty google as a place to find more communities.
Don’t Suck.
You’re here to network, learn from people, and build relationships so make sure you look good and play nice. Skip this section if you’re already a good internet citizen.
Do fill out your bio, add your name, add your company! This is how and why people will be interested in you and your story.
Do use a real profile picture, unless you’re really scary looking in which case this is fine. It’s amazing how differently you feel about a chat box with a randomly generated coloured-block versus a human face.
Do introduce yourself in the #general or #introductions channel. Tell people who you are, why you joined the community, what you work on, and how you can help people in the community. People will reach out to you if they’re genuinely curious. It’s also nice to let people know that they can feel free to DM you if they’ve got questions.
Do join the #channels that have a lot of people in them. You’ll run out of bandwidth if you start poking into channels with less than ~10% of the user community’s user base.
Do not scrape everyone’s emails and send them messages.
Do not write a bot to DM everyone.
Do not send everyone the same cut & paste message via DM.
Do not use @everyone, @channel, etc.
Do not get caught with your pants down. Please don’t show up in the iOS Developers slack and not know how to program. These communities welcome and support newbies but if you’re going to try and sell someone something make sure you’re competent and add value to their community.
This is not a place for the tried and true “do it anyway and ask for forgiveness later”. You just won’t end up building the quality relationships that you want.
Step-by-Step Techniques
Technique I: The “Scroll and ping”
This is my favorite way to meet people in these communities because I end up learning about things I never though I’d learn about. Once you get through your initial backlog you can just spend 5–10 minutes each day per slack community starting new relationships. The initial backlog can take a few days per community.
Here’s how you do it for a single channel. Repeat the process for all channels.
- Scroll all the way back. As far as Slack lets you, this takes patience.
- Start reading. Seriously, read what people are saying.
- Identify interesting people. It’s easier than you think, people who share blog posts, links, products, opinions or introduce themselves are there because they want to have conversations.
- Reach out to each “interesting person” via DM. Read their blog or link. Try out their product. Read their introduction and offer to help them with what they’re looking for or just ask them more about what their company does. My workflow is: scroll, find interesting person, reach out, go back to scrolling from where I was. If you know the type of people/companies you want to reach out to then you can check their e-mail domain before you message them.
- Have a conversation. If you need more detail or explanations here then you’re probably a sociopath. Be human, be friendly and be genuinely interested. Don’t do this if you don’t care about they’re doing. More often than not the other person will ask you about your startup and you’ll have an open invite to pitch them!
- Enjoy. This is the best part. It’s crazy what you’ll learn and who you’ll meet. I’ve met people from my hometown, given and received introductions to investors and users, met people for coffee and forged genuine friendships form Slack.
Once you’ve cleared up the enormous backlog of un-seen messages you can put this on the back burner. I like to come back each morning and just check the new messages in the channel and perform my outreach from there. It usually only takes a few minutes. Obviously, be responsive and communicative with people as they reach out to you. This can be distracting if you’re doing other things though.
Technique II: The Search
This method is less thorough but it can help you cut through the noise and find exactly what you’re looking for. Use the Slack Search bar to find people who have been talking about relevant things. It’s up to you to figure out the right search terms.
Search for “wearables, apple watch, fitbit, etc” if you’re looking for people who care about wearables. Go wild, get creative, may you find many people. Then, reach out to them and tell them you read what they had been saying! Oh yeah, add something of value.
Technique III: Try something new.
I haven’t tried it all yet, you should try some things and tell me how it goes in the comments or shoot me an e-mail: ashutosh@sunsama.com
Rookie Mistakes & Pro-Tips
Watch out for these rookie mistakes:
- Don’t message someone twice. In the more popular slack communities your history gets erased from time to time. Keep track of who you’ve talked to and about what.
- Refrain from making asks in the main channels. They’re too noisy and there’s only ever a few people looking at the chats in real time.
Here are some Pro-tips to optimize your workflow:
i) Use your company’s domain for your Slack e-mail. This is how people look you up and ask you: “Hey! What’s Sunsama all about?!”.
ii) Slack’s DM area is a bit hard to use. Use SlackBot reminders to keep relationship alive. For example: “/remind me to message @ashutosh tomorrow” inside your DM thread so you know to pick up later. Don’t worry, the other person can’t see this.
iii) Get the Slack Mobile app on the ready. A lot of people you’ll message will be doing other things and they won’t back to you until they’re good and ready. You might not be slackin’ it up when they’re back, install Slack for mobile and be ready to respond!
It’s pretty simple. Join Slack communities, reach out to interesting people, talk to them and get more customers.
