I’m experimenting with a pivot for my JAMstack web design and build productized serviced called Sweet Jam Sites. Maybe instead of trying to offer a website with free hosting, I can leverage on the benefits of JAMstack—the speed and security—to Wordpress site owners who are frustrated with having to deal with a seemingly endless and futile, Sisyphean cycles of security updates and software bloat.

But where does one find frustrated customers of any product or service, for that matter? What are some smart ways to find out where they hang out? Knowing where to find them is the first step to establishing a scalable way to find leads. It’s easy to find customers of a product or service, but frustrated ones? Yes frustrated customers probably hang out in the same Facebook groups or communities as happy customers, but it’s likely to be in poor taste to be promoting an anti-Wordpress service to a community who’s there to use Wordpress, isn’t it? 

Going into a competitor’s forum to share is likely not work well too, like say Webflow. If they are already in Webflow, they had made the switch already. What I want to do is to catch them before they switch.

Talking to people on Facebook and Twitter, here’s some possible solutions:

• Scan through reviews of Wordpress on e.g. the forum page Requests and Feedback Fourm, find reviews that speak of that frustration. Key words being “slow”, “not secure”, “got hacked!”.
• Content marketing: create content that targets similar key words to help people ready to switch from Wordpress to something else. Help them compare Wordpress and JAMstack side by side.
• ‘Gig’ marketing: Offer Wordpress-to-JAMstack gigs on Fiverr, Upwork.

[13 July 2020 - additional points after asking around on the interwebs]

• Entrepreneur type of communities: For people just starting up and looking to create their own website, participate in those communities and offer advice and provide value to help them decide which web builders are suitable for them. If they want something faster and safer, provide JAMstack as a suggestion.
• Searching key words of Wordpress problem phrases of people complaining on Twitter, Quora, Reddit, Youtube (tutorial videos), Stack Overflow, Facebook groups, Hacker News, Product Hunt. Search for Wordpress-related accounts to follow, and engage their followers. For communities, find the forums of the competitors of Wordpress like Webflow and Wix (see next point).
• Reverse engineer the marketing strategies of Webflow, Wix and Squarespace. Surely they would have figured this out by now. This tactic is kind of like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
• Beside selling the pros of speed and security over Wordpress, also address the higher perceived risk of switching to a younger JAMstack platform (that has less support, resources, solution to problems solved, talent if they need to find a developer). Also must address the pain of the migration process out of Wordpress.
• Use tools like BuiltWith to find people running older, outdated versions of Wordpress or plugins, or some crappy shared hosting platform. And then reach out to them in a scalable way.
• Don’t overthink this – anyone with a Wordpress website would have suffered the pain of it. Just reach out to anyone with a Wordpress site.
• Look for industries/fields where its members use Wordpress a lot, e.g. bloggers, publishers, writers, news, media, small-medium business owners, non-technical bootstrap entrepreneurs, project managers (or anyone who makes decisions on which tech platform their company should use). Find those communities. 

Any other ways to find out where frustrated Wordpress site owners hang out?