"How tf do I find customers?!!" A guide to finding your Clubhouse
1 Marketing Breakdown
What’s popping young and eager mind?!
Yesterday, I saw Jay Clouse post the following:
Completely agree.
As a Solopreneur, your job is to:
Identify your audience (who do I wanna serve?)
Find their clubhouse (where do those cats hang??)
Establish Authority (demonstrate that you can help them by getting them results!)
Turn them into a reader, viewer, listener (so you can deepen the relationship and keep building Authority as well as “top-of-mind-awareness” aka coming to mind first when they’re ready to buy.)
Present an irresistible offer (an offer so good they’ll full stupid to turn it down.)
So a natural question is:
Yea, okay cool, but how tf do I go about finding those clubhouses then???
Here’s exactly how you find the places where your Audience hangs
1/ Identify your audience first
Tell me… how do you find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for?
So many white belts rail against niching cuz they’re scared to enter the game.
As long as they don’t pick something, they got an excuse for why they’re not finding it.
The minute you say “I’m looking for sweet & sour zero kcal candy” your excuses for why you can’t find it go out the window. And gone is the possibility of lying to yourself.
People (armchair entrepreneurs) stay in that phase for years or even decades. (Looking at you entrepreneurship subreddits.)
So just commit to an audience and go.
It literally does NOT matter who. Cuz even if you pick the “wrong” audience, you’ll still get the practice all the other 90 things you’ll need to learn.
To use the comedian analogy once again: even if you go on stage with material you know will bomb, you still learned so much. It’s another rep of getting comfortable while bombing, being comfortable on stage, remembering your set, presenting it as well as you can, using your body, voice, tone, the right way, dealing with hecklers, and so on.
The way you lose is not to make mistakes (which is what everyone thinks and which is why they procrastinate so long), it’s to not get in the fucking game.
The only thing you need to do here is NOT pick inaction, that’s literally it.
You’d be surprised how hard this is. It’s the #1 reason my students fail.
2/ Use your Google-Fu
Once you've got a name, use Google to find clubhouses.
Here’s how:
The community keyword technique
Type in stuff like [X community], [X subreddit], [X forum].
Audience: bootstrappers
Google Keywords:
Bootstrappers community
Bootstrappers subreddit
Bootstrappers forum, etc.
Different labels for the audience technique
Different labels for your audience can 10X your number of search queries.
What do they call themselves? On job boards, what would companies call them?
Bootstrappers
Bootstrap
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapped
Indie Hackers
Indie Hacking
Indie founder
Indie entrepreneur
Indie solopreneur
Solopreneur
Solopreneurship
Makers
Maker
Creator
One person business
One-person-business
Etc.
This list, in combination with the community keyword technique, now 10Xs the number of queries you can type into Google.
If you’re looking for developers, different languages (Swift, Ruby, etc.), or even the level (Jr. or Sr.) multiply the number of keywords you can search for.
Same for marketers, are you looking for brand marketers, marketing strategists, copywriters, landing page creators, technical SEOs, etc.
The tools & methodologies technique
What tools do they use? What hardware? What software? What methodologies?
If I’m targeting bootstrappers, what methodologies do they use?
Lean startup
Customer development
Customer personas
Customer discovery
What tools do they use? Are there books they read? Conferences they attend?
The MOM test [book]
The Lean Startup [book]
The $100 Startup [book]
The 4-hour Workweek [book]
Company of One [book]
Gumroad [tool]
Lemonsqueezy [tool]
Kajabi [tool]
YouTube [tool]
Substack [tool]
Stripe [tool]
The thought leader technique
Who are they listening to for advice? Who’s already got the audience you’re seeking to serve?
Jay Clouse [thought leader]
Justin Welsh [thought leader]
RJ Youngling [thought leader, the greatest, according to himself & his 8-month old daughter]
Kieran Drew [thought leader]
Arvid Kahl [thought leader]
Daniel Vassallo [thought leader]
Rob Fitzpatrick [thought leader]
Jonathan Stark [thought leader]
All these things can be combined with your audience into a search query you type into Google:
“Gumroad Bootstrappers”
That in turn can lead you to a Reddit post in a Clubhouse where a member of the audience you seek to serve is asking a question/answering a question.
Now you’ve found your clubhouse.
The thought leader’s audience technique
Go into the audience of your thought leader.
What questions are their followers asking?
The cry for help technique
What kind of questions would your audience ask?
“I made a product but can’t find customers”
“How do I find customers?”
“How do I do a sales interview?”
“How to do customer development?”
“What tools should I use to accept international payments?”
“How do you talk to users?”
Same thing. Typing this into Google can lead you to a forum where a member of the audience you seek to serve asked that. Tada, you’ve got your clubhouse.
The conference technique
Is there a conference for the audience you wanna serve?
If so, those sites can be a goldmine for getting Google fuel cuz the language on them is already validated by the market.
They know their audience and you can get inspiration for all the categories listed above.
Even what you should call your audience.
Maybe you call them indie hackers but you find a conference for bootstrappers instead. If it didn’t occur to you to search for bootstrappers, you know got a new label for your audience that you can combine with all the keywords from the other techniques.
The Google Autocomplete technique
When you begin to start typing in a search query, Google will suggest ways to complete it.
Those are all extra things you could search for.
Now what?
This will give you about one million times more keywords than you will EVER need.
Cuz, in reality, you only need 1 or 2 good clubhouses.
It’s ridiculously easy to find a clubhouse.
Where people fuck up (common pain point) is treating this like school.
Your job is not to get an A on some test.
Your bank account, or your coach, me, don’t give a hoot about how much time you spent or how many keyword permutations you created.
You’ll probably find a good enough clubhouse in your 10th attempt or so.
Once you got it, move tf on!
I’ll share what to move on to on Monday…
What does a good clubhouse look like?
Look for these things:
Interconnectedness: you want a forum style where all the “nodes” people are talking to each other. Not one-to-many like YouTube.
Proof of Buying Behavior: If people ain’t spending cash money, they ain’t serious. This is straight from the Staten Island Business School: Professor Wu Tang.
See if people are buying stuff to solve the problems they’re complaining about. How much are they spending? This gives you Willingness To Pay.
What do they love about the competitors’ solutions? What do they hate? This gives you your product roadmap and your positioning.
See also:
Is it alive with lots of cries for help? The goal of a Clubhouse is to perform qualitative market research but also to start building your audience. To do the second one, you need a place where people are asking (crying) for help to solve their painful and expensive problems.
If it meets these 3 criteria, you got a solid Clubhouse.
Alright, that’s it for today.
Go enjoy your weekend.
Wood. Water.
RJY
P.S. if you enjoyed this, come join my Solopreneur community and let me help you personally get to $10,000 a month while you’re surrounded by peers.
There’s a reason why people love the tight-knit communities of boxing, football, dancing, or even learning guitar. The pedagogical model works. So join us here.