A lot of times, I’ve wondered how to get more customers for the apps that I run. I’ve done a few different things to solve that particular problem, but one of the simplest has been to take a close look at my current customers. These are people who see enough of a need for my product that they are already paying me. That’s a great indicator of who I should be focusing my sales/marketing on, because a lot of times when I’ve built something for one type of customer another customer in a different industry discovers my app and sees a use for it. Going through your list of paying customers, then identifying their industries and how they are using your product to solve their needs can give you valuable insight on how to expand your market.

For instance, we built Dispatch to pull information out of emails and send that information either directly to other systems where it’s needed, or to perform different actions using that information. One of our customers is using it in a completely different way than we imagined. They have a copy machine in their office that can send image attachments via email, so they added their Dispatch email address to their copy machine, and now every time they scan something in a specific way, the copy machine emails Dispatch, Dispatch processes the email, pulls off the image and adds it to their Zendesk account. I never imagined that sort of use for Dispatch when we built it, but it’s solving a real business need.

Are My Sites Up White Label was built for web agencies who want an easy way to make recurring revenue from their existing customers. Recently I’ve found that other tech-related business types that have an existing base of customers, such as computer repair companies also see a need for that sort of service. So now we are working on targeting/better serving those types of customers.

Let your current paying customers inform your marketing decisions when you’re looking to expand your market. It’ll give you a head start!