How do you double-down on scaling without spending?
Our AI product was born earlier this year, and so far, we haven't done any heavy marketing. We don't have any revenue model for our product at the moment too (it's currently free), so we wanted to avoid any promotions that involves paying (such as affiliates, paid ads, paying to get featured in newsletters, etc,) as much as possible for now.
Our top website traffic drivers we have at the moment are:
- Microsoft Appsource Store traffic (our product is currently only available on Outlook)
- Getting our product listed for free on several websites for referrals such as G2, Futurepedia, Theresanaiforthat, etc.
Through these, we're getting about 1k users/month. Being newbies that we are, I don't have any benchmark to gauge if this is already good or not, or if we can still improve this without resorting to ads.
Was wondering, do you guys think this is already a good number? How do we double-down on scaling? How do you guys do it without ads?
Hi, marketer here. I worked at the #1 German marketing agency. I started with e-commerce drop-shipping and then got into building more sustainable and long term e-commerce brands. Now I'm currently building a SaaS.
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Is there any specific reason why, you don't want to do ads besides saving money, when the majority of businesses will be paying for their customers upfront in 2023?
Is it possible to build something organically? Sure! I wanted to let you know that operating on probabilities will always outweigh operating on possibilities. Scaling horizontally, slow and steady with advertisement while doing organic stuff on the side, will drastically decrease the overall time to achieve your revenue goals.
Doing organic stuff is always good, but you will make your life harder than it can be, by refusing to do advertising.
Advertisement, media buying, and paying for customers upfront are part of the game. And there is no way around it.
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Before you consider doing any advertising, though, I would highly recommend you, to set up a proper tracking foundation, where you can exactly control the flow of your traffic and track every single metric humanly possible.
Tools that I highly recommend to you:
Setup Facebook just for retargeting purposes later on, but don't run any ads there. (too many costs for the beginning)
Setup Google Search and TikTok and run ads there.
Use Billo for UGC content, which currently works best in display advertisements on TikTok.
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Again, there is no way around it. It's part of the game.
I think "good" and website traffic are hard to correlate without an email list.
Do you have an email list you've been building?
Getting to 1,000 visitors a month is a milestone so I'd certainly celebrate that.
I'd love any tips you have that work for marketing an AI app. I'm currently working on one and need to find AI-focused communities.
What do I think a good number is? I focus on conversion rates because at the end of the day the website visitors should lead to emails/contact info which would lead to sales over time if you communicate/nurture the audience.
For me I like to get a conversion rate of at least 10% on any web page I'm marketing. Once I hit 10% I market it heavier (I judge this based on the first 100-250 visitors). If I don't hit 10% I change the landing page or redo it entirely.
How to double down on scaling? If you're not making money I wouldn't recommend "scaling". You'll want to validate that you can make money. An "easy" example, would be asking people on your email list if they'd be willing to buy and at what price point.
From there you'll have knowledge on how to start selling (if possible get sales before you start scaling the audience).
If you want to scale without revenue be prepared for costs to go up whether it's costs for your AI, customer support, or the time you spend doing the work to grow the audience.
Actually how to double down on scaling? You need to hone in on your Customer Factory as Ash Maurya calls it. How do you take people from not knowing about your product to learning about it to using it? Document this pipeline and focus on refining it (if you have 25-100 users you probably know where they came from and can focus on doubling down on that channel or cross into similar channels)
What's my process for scaling marketing without doing paid means?
Understand your target audience/community
Provide value to them in the form of posts and media
Link to where they can put their emails
Send a referral email or ask for a forward/share in the intro or follow up email
Talk to people on this list to understand who they are
Based on the people on your list (or even better who are customers) you can target these audiences.
As an example I'm working on a community called Task Slayerz which is a gamified productivity community. We were thinking productive gamers, but by targeting productive gamers we've realized we can also target streamers and VTubers (some of the most productive gamers).
By understanding different personas that engage with your project/product you'll understand where to find those personas and how to interact with them to grow your audience.
Hope this helps!
This is solid feedback, thanks!
To clarify, we're getting 1k new users/month, with traffic conversion rate of about 30-40% in the last 30 days. To follow up, how do you usually build email lists?
We do collect email addresses on our landing pages so we can retarget web visitors who don't convert in the next few hours of landing. So far we're getting about 40% conversion from retargeting. Other than this, would you have any other recommendations on how we can build our email list?
All in all though, I do appreciate your thoughts about how we should be prepared that costs will go up if we try to scale up without revenue. I'll flag this over to our team and think how we want to go over this.
For the email list I think it'll help to position it as similar to your landing/home page (an asset to help drive potential customers to taking action)
Your email list can be used to help build a form of "marketing retention" where over time you'll gain trust with you audience and begin converting people who didn't convert "easily".
To gain this trust it's great to provide free value. Similar to blogging you could provide industry info, developer sneak peeks, highlights of deals, and additionally you can use it to help get partnerships for marketing (telling another founder you'll send an email with a link to their product if they do the same for yours).
As you provide you list with value you can start sharing old newsletters as blogs to help drive more subscribers by showcasing to people the value you provide on the newsletter.
HOWEVER the best way to build/grow the email list are lead magnets of some sort. Finding a way to trade value for their email (this could be a checklist, ebook, free tool, free trial/tier [not exactly a lead magnet but can be used as one], etc).