Marketing to Small Business Owners
I've worked as a software engineer for about 5 years, so I've learned a lot about building software products. Marketing, sales, distribution, and customer acquisition are areas where I still have a lot to learn.
I built an AI product that's actually been useful for me: https://passiveagents.com/
The other day, before going to a friend's birthday, I added around 10 tasks to a project board and let it run. When I came back, it had made progress on those tasks, which was pretty nice.
I've heard Alex Hormozi talk about dominating a puddle before trying to dominate a pond, a lake, or an ocean. Instead of trying to market to everyone, I'm thinking about focusing on small business owners in Columbus, Ohio and personally helping them get set up.
My hypothesis is that the big AI companies are focusing on small business owners and they also need help getting set up and learn about how to use these AI tools in the most effective ways. I could target a need where small business owners would like to get more done than they have time for and need help getting started. Things like competitor research, content creation, marketing planning, documenting processes, and other projects that keep getting pushed back.
I'm considering cold emailing local businesses and offering to set everything up for them so they can see whether having AI agents work on tasks in the background is actually useful.
If you were trying to get the first paying customers for this product, how would you approach it?
Would you focus on cold email, local networking, a specific niche, free onboarding, something else, or am I thinking about this entirely the wrong way?