Not sure if this is helpful, but for myself, it was essentially a post on ProductHunt & emailing some journalists.
The ProductHunt post was augmented by the fact the product (https://uimovement.com) was clearly for a certain community (designers), so it was picked up and shared on other publications/social media accounts within the community.
From the PH post, it was picked up and shared on DesignerNews, r/web_design, Webdesignernews, Codrops, Smashing Mag, etc. The other sources brought in way more traffic than PH in the end.
For more long-term, but slower growth, automating social media has been helpful too, but that can only work for content-heavy products.
One other thing I'll say is having the newsletter has been really helpful. I imagine most of the traffic that came from the initial launch wouldn't have thought to ever return to the site if it wasn't for the newsletter & RSS feed.
If your product isn't content related (a SAAS for example), a curated newsletter targeted towards your niche could be easy to maintain using a tool like https://www.getrevue.co/ and is a way to keep potential customers in the loop until they're ready.
Out of curiosity, how were you able to get on the front page of ProductHunt? Was it in the early days or were you able to get someone influential to push you to the front?
I think its pretty well known/established (despite what PH has said) that getting exposure on PH requires intervention from an insider.
I flipped the switch to take the website live, enabled google ads and went to a friend's barbecue. We had the first customer before I was done with the first glass of wine.
The effectiveness of ads has unfortunately dropped over the years, but in the first 20 months or so built a roster of 10,000 customers or so who have stayed very loyal and allowed us to expand to products with much higher volume.
Would you say this strategy was a good way to go from zero customers to a foundation on which you could then use more effective ways to continue to grow? Can you offer some insight in why you think your early ad campaign was effective and how to go about doing this? Thanks!
- Starting in a niche, then expanding into really competitive markets worked we'll for us
- Try every that's cheap to try. In advertisement, you want to spend a few dozen $ on everyone who's willing to take them, then invest heavily when ROI is positive. There are many people who just do google and maybe Facebook. But while that's 90% of their market, you sometimes get lucky and find a niche that gets you as much revenue as the two combined.
Someone posted my game (http://hextris.io/) on Hacker News - from there it spread to a few popular outlets (major tech news companies, subreddits, obscure but popular blogs), all organically. Initially I tried submitting the game to game journalists / iOS app review websites, none of which responded to me - wouldn't recommend that route unless you have ins somewhere.
Currently not significant (few dollars a month), but it used to be a few hundred a month when it initially became popular. Monetization could have been much better if we had put in interstitial ads, etc.
For me (https://fridayfeedback.com) it's been a mixture of outreach (sales), writing in-depth guides about topics that are interesting to the target market (managers). I've tested some ads, but no dice yet.
I have a seasonal project that creates christmas/holiday cards from Instagram photos. It makes a few grand between halloween and new years (https://cheergram.com but the cert is expired rn)
Surprisingly, the best thing that I did to get it some traction was having a few influential people in the design/craft community post it to pinterest. A couple years ago, a single pin generated dozens of orders.
Other than that, some SEO fu has always helped. It used to be on page 1 for "Instagram christmas cards" and I'd get lots of traffic from that (currently on page 2). So, some SEO basics (good titles, good headings, a blog/news section) always helps.
A few thoughts from our experience growing Cronitor as a side project:
1. Hacker News has provided exposure but not a lot of direct business. Sometimes people find us on other channels but recognize us from HN. I would say, don't worry too much if you never front page here.
2. Working on SEO consistently over the years has been our most valuable source of high quality traffic.
3. Work with influencers in your industry. When a popular AWS blogger wrote about Cronitor and was tweeted by their AWS community lead Jeff Barr we added 8 subscribers that day that are still with us.
4. Re-marketing to sign-ups that didn't convert. Every month our product noticeably gets better in some way, and those early sign-ups to our free plan that didn't subscribe have been an invaluable source of later conversion.
Blog posts are content marketing, not about SEO, especially since we use Medium and aren't hosting a blog on our primary domain. There is plenty written about content-farm SEO strategies if anybody is looking for that.
One thing I'll say, if you're talking about a SaaS app and not something on the battlefield of big-time consumer SEO (which I also have some experience with as an engineer), it starts with crafting your website copy to address both prospective users and Googlebot. Iterate on it and continue improving. The text on your page matters.
Here are a few technical tips:
1. Many engineers do things like add ajax endpoints to robots.txt. Don't do this. Google can read many dynamic pages but not if you block them from loading the ajax requests.
2. That, and other issues, are uncovered by using the google webmaster tools. They will rank issues that are affecting your crawl.
3. In my experience, server rendered content still out-performs client rendered content. Server-render if SEO is a priority.
4. Duplicate content causes SEO problems and can be subtle. You can have an SRP like /catalog/results that can also be accessed when using your next-page/prev-page links as /catalog/results/1. That is a duplicate page.
Generally, though, I don't feel qualified to give much SEO advice without my own survivorship bias. Also, I would like to be doing so much better than we are, and continue to work for it.
So your SEO strategy was(is) website copy? Anything else, like "link building" or sth else?
Or if you want to answer in another way, how many hours a week/month/year does that SEO work take, before one sees the results you are talking about?
edit. you expanded your answer while I was typing. it seems you are mostly talking about on page and technical SEO, which doesn't sound like it takes that much time.
I think the best long-term reliable link building strategy is to build a good a product that is well liked and discussed by people organically.
Take something like a website widget that you build with useful and free content people can add to their Wordpress or whatever. Seems like the kind of SEO strategy a software developer can get behind. Then, a year later, turns out somebody used it for some "content" on 200,000 generated wordpress pages as part of their own scheme. Now you're penalized for this with a manual action from Google.
I guess my point is: to go this route means investing real time editing, curating and disavowing. I find it more profitable to focus energy on improving the product while Google and our users both notice.
No the OP was paying attention to the on site technical SEO that can kill a site if you screw things up badly refines and correctly optimised browse structures can make a huge difference.
I came across that Medium vs Self Hosted problem a while ago. For SEO self hosted is better, but sharing and discovery is better through Medium.
My questions are - What made you chose Medium as a domain (and would you chose it again?) and do you get a reasonable amount of traffic, with an appreciable conversion rate through Medium?
With Wokabulary (https://wokabulary.com) we did no marketing for years and just worked in our spare time on the product. Still we got some posts by magazines and blogs. Now we do a bit more like writing to review sites and journalists but we don't see much traffic growth by that. OTOH we are not really good at social media stuff.
To answer your question, for us listening to customer feedback and releasing new versions periodically worked best so far.
My newsletter, Tedium (http://tedium.co), has slightly more than 3,000 subscribers, and produces a lot of content each week—between 3,000 and 4,000 words over two pieces. My strategy for building it out has essentially meant being willing to syndicate these articles far and wide. I currently work with three different outlets (Atlas Obscura, Motherboard, and Neatorama) to republish the work, all of which bring in new subscribers frequently. Eventually, Digg started picking up its articles as well. Basically, it gives me creative license to write whatever I want in my narrow niche while ensuring the newsletter goes out far and wide. I try to reuse every piece so nothing goes to waste.
While it's not bringing in tens of thousands of bucks, it's brought in enough to make it worthwhile (in part through affiliate links—my strategy is to link to the weirdest things on Amazon I can find, with the assumption people will eventually go back to buy something else).
I've also tried to find ways to minimize costs on my end, including switching email providers so that the financial impact of sending thousands of emails every month is small.
Will have to look into it, but I don't personally have an Android device so it might be hard to check immediately. (The site uses looping videos in place of GIFs, which might be a factor.) I would recommend using another browser for now.
Hi Tapha! I run Indie Hackers (https://IndieHackers.com), a site where I interview the founders of profitable business and side projects. I just passed $1k revenue this month (you can follow along via my timeline here: https://IndieHackers.com/blog).
My number one marketing approach by far has been to tailor the site to the HN audience.
I do this primarily by asking questions that people on HN always like to see answered (how much money are you making? how did you come up with the idea? what tech did you use? what are your best marketing channels? etc). Lots of similar sites don't ask any of these questions, especially not the revenue one.
I tend to share the most interesting interviews with the HN audience every couple weeks or so, and they usually do pretty well!
Yep, this is it. I charge sponsors on a CPC basis. In the near future I'll be doing actual interviews with sponsors, so readers will get to know all about how they started their companies, too.
Yep, the SubmitHub story hit #1 and got 42.8k pageviews and 25.2k uniques yesterday. Today it's fallen off the front page, but I've still gotten 14k pageviews and 6.8k uniques.
Great work on this site! Very helpful resource. I looked at the timeline, how did you launch to 1000 email subscribers and get 300k page views in the first month?
I started with 0 subscribers and pageviews, but was at the top of HN for something like 30 hours (Thu morning to Fri afternoon), then only a couple days later I hit #1 on Product Hunt. That weekend alone got me to something like 200k pageviews and 800 subscribers. After that, I just added as many interviews as I could every week, and started sending out weekly newsletters.
I wrote about it here (https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/launching-to-300000-pagevi...), but basically I scoured "Ask HN" posts, built a list of 120 companies, tracked down most of their email addresses, and asked them to do an interview and share their revenue numbers for the site. I ended up launching with 12 companies a few weeks later. Since then most of my interview requests have been inbound.
I think this was meant for me? No, I'm not planning to interview myself, but you can read about my progress on the blog: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog
Quick question about your /blog page: it's more of a /timeline with some milestones + blog posts on it, rather than a blog, right? Is it custom more or is it made with some Wordpress plugin? And third question: you have $450 MRR as of last month. Did you more than double it this month? Is it recurring, or you just had some extraordinary income that you don't expect to last in the next couple of months? Thanks and kudos for the good work!
There are some flash-in-the-pan things and some that are evergreen.
When it comes to the former, getting HN front-paged, a Techcrunch write-up, PH, etc tends to lead to a spike in traffic and eye balls, but very rarely do you get your true base of customers from these things. (But hey, they don't hurt!)
In the latter category you'll hear things like SEO, content marketing etc. Those are all important and must-haves, but these days it's also table stakes since it's what everyone is doing as well. When it comes to getting differentiators that can take you from $1k to $2k or $2k to $4k you need a distribution channel -- preferably a partner or a distribution platform where you can narrowly focus on a small audience. Yes, this means you'll need to reach out and talk to people with similar audiences and folks who are willing to help. For those of us who prefer talking to computers (coding) more than talking to humans (eww emails and phone calls) this can be unnatural but is also extremely important.
I'm personally happy to chat with any part-timers looking to grow their projects or even become full-time entrepreneurs. Just hit me up via my profile here on HN.
My personal experience: I've started two businesses as side projects that went on to be full-time ventures. Ronin (https://www.roninapp.com) was started in 2008 (eventually went full-time, acquired, and then spun out). Later on Reamaze (https://www.reamaze.com) was actually a side project on a side project, but is now at full time with a small team and growing very nicely.
Hey I'm working on a side project, looking to grow it and would love to talk with someone who have done it before. However I couldn't find any contact information in your profile.
Follow up: I've actually received a good amount of emails as a result of this post. It's awesome seeing what every one is building and discussing ideas for growth. In case I don't get back to anyone immediately, I'm not ignoring you on purpose. I hope to be able to respond to everyone in time.
The product I'm working on helps businesses stay in compliance with financial regulations. Not necessarily as cool as other Show HN projects. Is it still worth posting it on HN?
I also ran across a Reddit post where someone created a Twitter bot which favorited and retwitted posts with certain tags to attract potential customers for a product the OP was marketing. Those who ended up checking out his Twitter page found a note which said that followers would get a deal if signed up. The OP mentioned he got his first 20+ paid customers this way. Not sure how effective this is but thought I'd share.
I'm the author of Trello Dojo https://leanpub.com/trellodojo Marketing does not come naturally to me. I feel like it's a good product, but I don't want to be spammy. By far the best marketing choice was to ask Trello to put it on their resource board. I was so nervous- what if they didn't like it? What if they sued me for trademark infringement or something? They did none of those things and put it up cheerfully, where Google Analytics says a majority of me references come from.
For my side-project, http://hackernewsletter.com, it has been simply time and being passionate about it. In the beginning I tried various things from reddit ads to guest blog posts, but now six years into it and 38k subscribers, I've found that simply showing up and doing it every week has been my biggest marketing resource.
But before and even after that, emails to game review sites were universally ignored (with Rock Paper Shotgun as the one exception). Even the Ars Technica guy who proclaimed it as his "latest obsession" wouldn't reply to an email.
I understand these people are inundated with emails, but I was still a little surprised.
That's on Android, and maybe half that again on iOS. It varies a little, but it's $500-$1000 a month at the moment (even split between iOS and Android). I'm pretty sure I could do better but I could never bring myself to do heavy monetisation. I hate aggressive IAPs, for example.
SyntaxDB (https://syntaxdb.com) was put on PH and HN and that gave it a significant increase in traffic.
It was actually posted on PH once before, but that time it wasn't featured. Almost one year later, I built an API, several extensions, increased the amount of content, and integrated it with DDG. Eventually I decided it was worth giving the PH people a shout to see if it would get reposted (they let you repost if your product makes substantial progress). It successfully got featured that time.
So do you use FB Ads only at the top of the funnel or do you also have have retargeting Ads? Just curious as I'm in the process of setting up this very process myself for https://redokun.com
Both. Mostly I send people to blog posts that contain some sort of an email optin in. But I've also regargeted website visitors via FB's pixel with good success.
All-in-all, I'm fan of "slow sell" via an email newsletter and FB's been great for getting people onto my list.
Since my video game https://basketball-gm.com/ targets hard core basketball fans, I post to /r/nba on Reddit in the NBA offseason. In the offseason, there's not much other content to compete against so my posts do well. And the type of people reading /r/nba in the offseason are exactly my target market.
Yep, mostly Google Consumer Surveys, which is a good fit for my audience of dedicated users eager to keep playing (although volume has been down this year, sadly).
Great question and thread. I launched my side project a month ago and have had zero conversions after about 200 click thrus from Facebook ads. It's a platform for freelance developers and designers to pick up extra work without me being a middle man; I introduce you to possible clients and the subsequent conversations and experience are up to you.
www.devzil.la
Then I got busy at work and haven't spent as much time marketing it.
When I click "Apply for Membership" -> "Create Listing" for the $20/month Silver Plan, I get taken to a checkout page that is saying I can pay $1/month or $95/year
https://destructible.io for sharing files temporarily with yourself across terminals, or others. I submitted to HN, got a huge spike of subscribers. Submitted to Reddit, got another, smaller spike.
Eventually other people started submitting it in response to questions online in forums like HN, where people would ask things like, "What's the Best Productivity Tool You've Found" or, "What Secret Thing Do You Wish Everyone Knew About." Started getting more spikes in users, then a regular base of users, then paying customers, then enterprise customers! Pretty cool organic spread.
It's definitely a side project, but making some money on it which is awesome.
Tried Google AdWords, total waste of (free up to coupon amount) money. Maybe one new user with $250 spent.
So I would say: Build a good product and maybe if people will like it enough you will get some organic growth.
edit to say: I'm still 1000% just doing this as a fun aide project that I built to serve a need I specifically had, but am happy to answer specific questions about what I stumbled through and did to kind of get off the ground enough to pay monthly costs and make a little profit.
152 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadThe ProductHunt post was augmented by the fact the product (https://uimovement.com) was clearly for a certain community (designers), so it was picked up and shared on other publications/social media accounts within the community.
From the PH post, it was picked up and shared on DesignerNews, r/web_design, Webdesignernews, Codrops, Smashing Mag, etc. The other sources brought in way more traffic than PH in the end.
For more long-term, but slower growth, automating social media has been helpful too, but that can only work for content-heavy products.
If your product isn't content related (a SAAS for example), a curated newsletter targeted towards your niche could be easy to maintain using a tool like https://www.getrevue.co/ and is a way to keep potential customers in the loop until they're ready.
I think its pretty well known/established (despite what PH has said) that getting exposure on PH requires intervention from an insider.
There are a few frequent posters that are fairly open to requests if you dig around.
Also 400+ points on HN brought 10x more visitors than being #5 on PH.
The effectiveness of ads has unfortunately dropped over the years, but in the first 20 months or so built a roster of 10,000 customers or so who have stayed very loyal and allowed us to expand to products with much higher volume.
- Starting in a niche, then expanding into really competitive markets worked we'll for us
- Try every that's cheap to try. In advertisement, you want to spend a few dozen $ on everyone who's willing to take them, then invest heavily when ROI is positive. There are many people who just do google and maybe Facebook. But while that's 90% of their market, you sometimes get lucky and find a niche that gets you as much revenue as the two combined.
Surprisingly, the best thing that I did to get it some traction was having a few influential people in the design/craft community post it to pinterest. A couple years ago, a single pin generated dozens of orders.
Other than that, some SEO fu has always helped. It used to be on page 1 for "Instagram christmas cards" and I'd get lots of traffic from that (currently on page 2). So, some SEO basics (good titles, good headings, a blog/news section) always helps.
1. Hacker News has provided exposure but not a lot of direct business. Sometimes people find us on other channels but recognize us from HN. I would say, don't worry too much if you never front page here.
2. Working on SEO consistently over the years has been our most valuable source of high quality traffic.
3. Work with influencers in your industry. When a popular AWS blogger wrote about Cronitor and was tweeted by their AWS community lead Jeff Barr we added 8 subscribers that day that are still with us.
4. Re-marketing to sign-ups that didn't convert. Every month our product noticeably gets better in some way, and those early sign-ups to our free plan that didn't subscribe have been an invaluable source of later conversion.
One thing I'll say, if you're talking about a SaaS app and not something on the battlefield of big-time consumer SEO (which I also have some experience with as an engineer), it starts with crafting your website copy to address both prospective users and Googlebot. Iterate on it and continue improving. The text on your page matters.
Here are a few technical tips:
1. Many engineers do things like add ajax endpoints to robots.txt. Don't do this. Google can read many dynamic pages but not if you block them from loading the ajax requests.
2. That, and other issues, are uncovered by using the google webmaster tools. They will rank issues that are affecting your crawl.
3. In my experience, server rendered content still out-performs client rendered content. Server-render if SEO is a priority.
4. Duplicate content causes SEO problems and can be subtle. You can have an SRP like /catalog/results that can also be accessed when using your next-page/prev-page links as /catalog/results/1. That is a duplicate page.
Generally, though, I don't feel qualified to give much SEO advice without my own survivorship bias. Also, I would like to be doing so much better than we are, and continue to work for it.
Or if you want to answer in another way, how many hours a week/month/year does that SEO work take, before one sees the results you are talking about?
edit. you expanded your answer while I was typing. it seems you are mostly talking about on page and technical SEO, which doesn't sound like it takes that much time.
Take something like a website widget that you build with useful and free content people can add to their Wordpress or whatever. Seems like the kind of SEO strategy a software developer can get behind. Then, a year later, turns out somebody used it for some "content" on 200,000 generated wordpress pages as part of their own scheme. Now you're penalized for this with a manual action from Google.
I guess my point is: to go this route means investing real time editing, curating and disavowing. I find it more profitable to focus energy on improving the product while Google and our users both notice.
My questions are - What made you chose Medium as a domain (and would you chose it again?) and do you get a reasonable amount of traffic, with an appreciable conversion rate through Medium?
To answer your question, for us listening to customer feedback and releasing new versions periodically worked best so far.
I have heard that facebook also adopted a similar strategy in the very beginning. I have no doubt that it works.
While it's not bringing in tens of thousands of bucks, it's brought in enough to make it worthwhile (in part through affiliate links—my strategy is to link to the weirdest things on Amazon I can find, with the assumption people will eventually go back to buy something else).
I've also tried to find ways to minimize costs on my end, including switching email providers so that the financial impact of sending thousands of emails every month is small.
My number one marketing approach by far has been to tailor the site to the HN audience.
I do this primarily by asking questions that people on HN always like to see answered (how much money are you making? how did you come up with the idea? what tech did you use? what are your best marketing channels? etc). Lots of similar sites don't ask any of these questions, especially not the revenue one.
I tend to share the most interesting interviews with the HN audience every couple weeks or so, and they usually do pretty well!
I started with 0 subscribers and pageviews, but was at the top of HN for something like 30 hours (Thu morning to Fri afternoon), then only a couple days later I hit #1 on Product Hunt. That weekend alone got me to something like 200k pageviews and 800 subscribers. After that, I just added as many interviews as I could every week, and started sending out weekly newsletters.
Love ur website btw. Thanks a lot!
When it comes to the former, getting HN front-paged, a Techcrunch write-up, PH, etc tends to lead to a spike in traffic and eye balls, but very rarely do you get your true base of customers from these things. (But hey, they don't hurt!)
In the latter category you'll hear things like SEO, content marketing etc. Those are all important and must-haves, but these days it's also table stakes since it's what everyone is doing as well. When it comes to getting differentiators that can take you from $1k to $2k or $2k to $4k you need a distribution channel -- preferably a partner or a distribution platform where you can narrowly focus on a small audience. Yes, this means you'll need to reach out and talk to people with similar audiences and folks who are willing to help. For those of us who prefer talking to computers (coding) more than talking to humans (eww emails and phone calls) this can be unnatural but is also extremely important.
I'm personally happy to chat with any part-timers looking to grow their projects or even become full-time entrepreneurs. Just hit me up via my profile here on HN.
My personal experience: I've started two businesses as side projects that went on to be full-time ventures. Ronin (https://www.roninapp.com) was started in 2008 (eventually went full-time, acquired, and then spun out). Later on Reamaze (https://www.reamaze.com) was actually a side project on a side project, but is now at full time with a small team and growing very nicely.
I also ran across a Reddit post where someone created a Twitter bot which favorited and retwitted posts with certain tags to attract potential customers for a product the OP was marketing. Those who ended up checking out his Twitter page found a note which said that followers would get a deal if signed up. The OP mentioned he got his first 20+ paid customers this way. Not sure how effective this is but thought I'd share.
I'm actually interested in using the Twitter bot you mentioned too...
Cater to the audience and engage with the founders and it has a steady flow of increasing subscribers.
I just make sure my newsletter has good content consistently for my readers.
But before and even after that, emails to game review sites were universally ignored (with Rock Paper Shotgun as the one exception). Even the Ars Technica guy who proclaimed it as his "latest obsession" wouldn't reply to an email.
I understand these people are inundated with emails, but I was still a little surprised.
It was actually posted on PH once before, but that time it wasn't featured. Almost one year later, I built an API, several extensions, increased the amount of content, and integrated it with DDG. Eventually I decided it was worth giving the PH people a shout to see if it would get reposted (they let you repost if your product makes substantial progress). It successfully got featured that time.
All-in-all, I'm fan of "slow sell" via an email newsletter and FB's been great for getting people onto my list.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1j1e6q/i_made_a_single...
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/3enrzh/i_made_basketba...
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/4tfaph/i_made_basketba...
The reddit posts all repeat "completely free (note: free does not mean "freemium", it means totally fucking free)".
www.devzil.la
Then I got busy at work and haven't spent as much time marketing it.
Eventually other people started submitting it in response to questions online in forums like HN, where people would ask things like, "What's the Best Productivity Tool You've Found" or, "What Secret Thing Do You Wish Everyone Knew About." Started getting more spikes in users, then a regular base of users, then paying customers, then enterprise customers! Pretty cool organic spread.
It's definitely a side project, but making some money on it which is awesome.
Tried Google AdWords, total waste of (free up to coupon amount) money. Maybe one new user with $250 spent.
So I would say: Build a good product and maybe if people will like it enough you will get some organic growth.
edit to say: I'm still 1000% just doing this as a fun aide project that I built to serve a need I specifically had, but am happy to answer specific questions about what I stumbled through and did to kind of get off the ground enough to pay monthly costs and make a little profit.