Your First 1,000 Users

I have started a host of companies over the years and it's so funny to me that it always starts out the same way. No matter how awesome you think your new product or service is you have got to get people, other than your mom, to try it out. So how do you do this? How do you build that first 1,000 users?

I've just spent the last 18 months with my team here at Clearfind.com rethinking the way people search for and find software. It started out as a pet peeve back in 2017, when I observed just how hard it was for enterprise companies to find the right software for their specific needs. As I dug into the problem I came across people like G2 Crowd, Capterra, and Software Advice which only further inspired me to fix this issue. You see, everyone else in the market is not trying to find you the right software, they are just trying to sell vendors listings. In the process, they are actually making the tasks of finding the right software even more challenging for you as a buyer.

So we dug in and saw that we would have to take a radically different approach if we were going to really help people with this challenge.

Just think about the last time you were looking for a new software tool for your business...

The biggest problem we found was a lack of data. You know how when you look for a flight you can pop on to a site like Kayak and just type in the destination and suddenly you have a list of possible flights, with times and prices, boom, at your fingertips. Well until we created Clearfind.com this was just not possible with software, nobody had the data, nobody knew what features different software had, or how good they were at delivering on that feature. How can you search for what you need if nobody has bothered to collect the data, quite simply you can't.

So we spent a year working out how to find this info and then collecting it for the top 50,000 software products, go and have a look here https://clearfind.com/categories to see the breadth of the workload.

Once we had that we then faced our next challenge how do we get the user to share what they're really looking for so we can find them the right software. That led us to create our own algorithm, Smart Match, this nifty piece of code is able to ask the buyer questions and then, based on their answers, refine the next set of questions and resulting matches al in realtime. After six months of testing, we knew that we had cracked it.

So now we have Clearfind.com, we have a great brand, the only data set in the world of software features, and a market-leading algo to genuinely match buyers with software vendors for the first time. Yippee!

And now what? We first thought let's try Google Adwords. We know that lots of people use Google to try to find software, so we kicked off a campaign and got some crazy but interesting results. It is really not the best place to try to get people to try a new unheard-of brand. Why? Well firstly we are interrupting their existing search with not a solution but with another way to search, and secondly, they had no idea who Clearfind.com is.

So how do we do it? How do we get our first thousand customers?

We have something really special, something that not only saves you time and money, but that is just so much better than what is on the market today. We need advocates. We want champions, people to try clearfind.com, and to share what they experienced. So I wrote this piece to appeal to you and say give it a go, it's FREE to use, please tell me what you think.

We'll even give you 5% off any software you purchase through clearfind.com. Just use the code "James1000" and please feedback on it.

Its an exciting time for us here at Clearfind.com and we'd love you to share what you think of our new baby.