Lesson: App Prototyping with Erin Parker

Step #8 Customer Discovery: Understand when and how to find customers for feedback

In the early stages before we launched to the App Store I actually created a Meetup group called "Women Who Lift" because our audience is women who are into exercise and they want to get into strength training. Maybe they did running, maybe they did a marathon and injured their knees and want to get stronger. I knew that I used to be that type of person. So I would Google "Are there women weight lifting groups in San Francisco?". So by creating this Meetup group, keyword optimizing it, I was able to attract a steady flow of women who were actually looking for strength-training guidance and then I was able to reach out to them from there.

Another way I found just a lot about different users is through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. There's tags, there's Facebook groups, they're all out there and they're all wanting to connect with other people who are like them. So it actually wasn't that hard to find people who are users. Usually, reaching out to them and just asking for their feedback they're really, really receptive. I don't think I've ever gotten, I've gotten no responses, but I don't think I've ever gotten straight-out rejected, "Don't email me".

So don't be afraid as an entrepreneur to reach out to people who you think are in your target demographic because, if they really are, they'll want to help you and they'll want to use your app.

If you look for "workout", "gym", "fitness" hashtags, there's a variety of them. "Strength", "weight lifting", "get strong", tons of them. I mean, you can even do a hashtag search and then look for "top fitness hashtags on Twitter" or "top fitness hashtags on Instagram". Usually marketing firms put these together. If you just click on each hashtag, look at the search results and then go to your user, see what are they hash-tagging, or what are they posting. Try to understand, can my product help them with this? Or, can my product help them do this better?