Where to find e-commerce software developers communities?

Discussions
#1

Me and my team are struggling to get more signups to our API platform. So far we’ve managed to collect ~50. 5 of them tested our software thoroughly and seem to be really interested in buying the subscription. One of the channels that works good for us is just content e.g. on posts Stack Overflow or our profile at Programmable Web. However we get the feeling this is not the fastest way to attract new leads.

Now we’re wondering how to get in touch with software developers or CTOs at larger scale. We’ve submitted our product to Show HN, it’s even got to the first page but we ended up with poor signup rate. We’d like to ask for feedback on other developer communities related to e-commerce before we start cold emails. Do you know any?

#2

It takes time. The approach you are following is the correct one, keep doing it. Once you build momentum, word of mouth will kick in.

That has been my experience too. For one blog, I had 25,000 visitors in 2 hours, 10 people sign up to my email, 1 person buy.

And that’s why you avoid places like HN. Too many link clickers / time passers, not many buyers.

Why dont you share your link here? If you cant post links yet, do something like abc dot com

#3

Thanks @shantnu

The product is called voucherify io

#4

@sedzia I am a developer who frequents HN, but your platform isn’t really something I would be interested in as the type of software I write on a day-to-day basis wouldn’t ever use vouchers. You need to niche down who you are targeting. Maybe look into something related to WooCommerce or Spree.

#5

I would switch to billing in USD. People are used to USD payments in Europe way more than they are to EUR payments in the US.

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#6

There was the old Association of Software Professionals, if they’re still around.

But rather than focus on software developers & CTOs, why not focus on marketers & people who sell online? Voucher functionality is relatively easy to develop, but I can see marketers wanting all kinds of tracking analytics, graphs, anything that can give them insight on which marketing channels & promotions are working best. Being able to set up coupons without diving into code would be useful to marketing.

As a developer, a voucher API isn’t attractive to me - my credit card processor even has vouchers built-in already, and I quickly rolled out my own voucher solution so I wouldn’t be tied to an external vendor anyway.

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#7

That’s a good point, and worth thinking about. Would most people find it easy to just roll their own solution? Especially if you are targeting tech types (HN readers).

#8

Our original plan is to remove pain from software developers twofold. First - provide a robust API so that they don’t have to build it from scratch. I mean the voucher machinery itself but also GUI for marketers, backups, brute-force protection, monitoring. Second - facilitate coupons maintenance. This means reducing their work when handling marketer multiple requests such as: creating/stopping campaigns on the fly, countless questions for metrics, resolving customer’ issues with vouchers, distributing promo codes etc. We had this problem ourselves when working for one of our clients and we didn’t find a good solution. We ended up with a frequently changed custom code on top of parse db. Do you think tech team could benefit from voucherify in this scenario?

#9

Would it better for you to target non-tech companies? Small ones, that don’t even have an IT department? Because it looks like they would be the ones with this problem.

And most of them don’t hang out on HN, or even have CTOs :smiley:

It seems you need to rethink who your customer is, and how you will reach them.

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#10

Thanks, we’ll consider it in a couple of weeks. At the moment we have a few leads matching our original profile (I’d say it’s more CTO than software developer) that want to buy. We feel we need to reach out to more of them to get more feedback.

#11

Going to events, Facebook groups, HN is a big one, and just being out there. There’s ecommerce fuel as well