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This question gets asked repeatedly every day on this site in many different facets, but essentially boils down to this:

I made a product. How do I get customers?

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Can we make this community wiki & protect it against newbies? – dnbrv Feb 20 '12 at 22:52
this is probably a duplicate of this: answers.onstartups.com/questions/23489/… – Neil McGuigan Mar 1 '12 at 19:04

4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Well, if you built a product and you don't have customers yet - probably you wasted a lot of time/money. The reason for me saying that is that you should constantly talk to your prospective customers while you're building your product. If you did not do that - there's a great chance that you built something that nobody wants.

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Perhaps more accurately he built a prototype. Potential customers won't talk to you unless you have something to show. So now that he has something to show, the next step is to find someone to show it to. – Sergei Veinberg Feb 21 '12 at 7:14
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@SergeiVeinberg, without talking to customers and understanding their problem, you can't reasonably build a prototype of anything and expect it to adequately be the solution. At least, not without a lot of luck and hope, neither are which are ideal strategies for success. – Nick Stevens Feb 21 '12 at 11:13
up vote 4 down vote

The answer is simple: sales and marketing.

Sales

Marketing

If you have a specific question on this sales or marketing, go ahead and ask it. But if your question just boils down to "How do I get more customers?" you are in the same boat as every single entrepreneur in the world. And if the answer was simple and able to be found on an internet website, you'd have no business advantage. The difference between whether you succeed or fail is whether you can answer that questions yourself by educating yourself and executing on your idea.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is the key. And there are no shortcuts.

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Your link to books on sales is a 404. – Josh Feb 20 '12 at 21:13
up vote 2 down vote

The premise and question is somewhat awkward/backwards. The better scenario is to find customers FIRST, then build the product.

But, of course, this is not a perfect world and many of us have built a neato, whiz bang product and are now looking for customers.

I realize Michael Pryor is not asking for himself and that this Q/A exercise is for creating THE ONE answer, but it is still worth noting that the order of

Build product

Find customers

is not the only way to do things.

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Maybe better as a comment? – Wayne Werner Feb 21 '12 at 17:53
Yes it is - however it is difficult to convey the same information in a comment and i certainly can't format the text. I thought it was worth its own answer... – TimJ♦ Feb 22 '12 at 2:58
up vote 0 down vote

In addition to what Michael said, I also like this guy - http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ and his book (Stay Small). He's very down to earth and practical.

Oh, and on Mixergy.com you can find some really good tutorials, especially this one: http://mixergy.com/free-first-sections-pr-on-a-budget-course/

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