130+ upvotes on reddit, but need help figuring out marketing/growth
Hey guys, I released a tool I was working on a few weeks back. Posted it on Reddit and immediately got good feedback. But last week traffic flattened. I can’t figure out my next marketing steps, and next set of feature releases.
About the tool. It's a visual application stack composer, and exporter of docker-compose.yml code (kubernetes coming later). Users can also import existing yaml code to get started quickly.
About the users, and features I am thinking of releasing. The tool has regular users, not many, since I never did any kind of marketing beyond those 2 reddit posts. However, these users are very involved in this tool, they frequently report issues/feature requests on GitHub, they just started sharing it within their own orgs, and some are asking for me to open source it. I think open sourcing is a good idea, it can help with speeding up dev and “I think” adoption. My next major feature release is to let users deploy the apps they composed directly from the tool, into their own private servers or my own. What do you guys think about this?
Finally, the marketing. I can’t figure out for the life of me how to do this. Everyone I speak to suggests different or conflicting ideas. Some suggestions are; create a blog and embed graphs the tool generates, use Medium also, run some Google Ads, reach out to influencers, use Twitter (I’m trying but cant get followers). Any ideas on how to sustainably market and grow while keeping up with development, I am the only developer currently.
Thanks.
Relevant links.
https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/guk6mz/visual_dockercomposeyml_file_generator/
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't look like you have any form of monetization yet. Maybe others will disagree, but I think spending ad dollars before you actually have something to sell is the wrong move. Or at least have some way of capturing some value from the leads. I don't see any email list signups or anything. There is user signup, but it is fairly hidden.
This is a cool little app, and you're off to a good start. People are using it and like it.
But I think you should work on figuring out who you are really targeting for the initial version of this application and the value you're going to deliver to them. And from there how you can sell it to them.
Checking out the Reddit thread, I see several people mentioning it not working properly on mobile. I think this is a prime example of when not to listen to people. The reason they are noticing mobile issues is that they browse Reddit on their phone. If they were going to use this for work, they wouldn't be building docker-compose YAML files on their mobile device. It would be good to have a nice read-only mode on mobile, but any functionality there should be a low priority.
Side note: if you ever want to take this to the enterprise, I'd work on tools like this for Kubernetes rather than docker-compose. I work in the DevOps space and have spoken with hundreds of enterprises going through DevOps transformations and if they are doing containers or making the move, it's on Kubernetes, not compose.
100% agree with @wicked_prophet that if you don't have any way to capture revenue from the ad traffic, then ads is just a dumpster fire to burn your cash.
And even if you do sell something, you want to first make sure organically that given every 100 visitors, you are capturing $X in revenue, and thus you need to spend <$X in ad costs to see profit. Without baseline conversion, sales and LTV numbers, you're wasting your money on ads.
As for next steps, which is your bottleneck?
Your product isn't good enough for conversions?
--> Work on improving your product until you get conversions that are above baseline for your product type.
Your product is good enough that conversions aren't a problem?
--> If this is the case, do you want to start testing with monetization now or do you want to focus on growth first?
------> If monetization first, do you have enough existing customers to make offers to and test what they buy?
-------> If growth or not enough customers to test monetization, to me what stands out is you said your existing users are extremely active and engaged. That's an awesome leverage point that marries growth with your strength - development. How can you leverage this engagement (inside or outside your product) to acquire more customers?
Hope this helps!
Hey, thanks for this helpful feedback.
You are right, I dont have anything to sell yet. This is the part that I am trying to figure out now. My original idea was to let users deploy their compositions to their own private servers (free), or my own "hosted" servers (paid). So for example, they can integrate Heroku/DO/AWS into this tool, and do free deployments into it for free directly from the tool. If they dont have a server, then they can pay to use my hosted servers. I can charge based on their resource requirements. Any thoughts on this?
I made mobile "viewable", the first version didnt even work.
In terms of Kubernetes, I was thinking of generating the K8s configs "service.yml/ingress.yml/deployment.yml.etc..." the same way I do now for docker-compose. And click to "Deploy" can target a k8s cluster. Any thoughts on this?
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The marketing suggestions listed in your post are all great places to start. They're not conflicting ideas; they're supplemental ideas designed to reach your audience in different ways. Let's go through them one by one.
I think the best course of action is google ads. My SEO sucks, so I have to improve that also.
Best of luck! Consider Cohoist if you want to stretch your advertising dollars. We create campaigns promoting 4-8 online businesses at the same time so you can get your brand in front of 4-8x more people for the same price. Figured I'd drop a link just in case! 😀
This is interesting, but I don't understand how it works. Are these all "view" ads? Can someone interested in my add click a link to my website? Or only to a landing page? Why would I want a landing page if I have a website? Thanks.
Let's say 8 websites are operating in a similar niche and pay $50/mo to join the middle tier on Cohoist. We would group them together and design a joint landing page that serves as a "hub" to direct visitors to their own website. Each business would get an above-the-fold card on this page and we'd pool their money together to buy up to $400/mo (50x8) worth of online advertising to draw people to this central hub.
We make ads with the names/logos of all 8 businesses together and a call-to-action that lands people on the "hub." You're able to update the image, text, link and call-to-action for your site on this hub at anytime. It's important that we put all 8 names/logos on each ad because it means your brand is getting impressions on up to $400/mo of ads instead of just your $50 - this is good for building brand awareness.
For social media ads, we take the extra step of tagging your account in our ads. Our social media ads don't always link to the central hub. Instead, we'll often run campaigns where we simply tag all 8 businesses and encourage people to follow them. Turns out, running campaigns like this is a very cost effective way to get your business in front of more people.
Can I tailor my own ad on your platform? Also, I tried signing up and it looks like you guys are in development. Can we try running some ads now?
You can create and customize your ad unit that's displayed on the hub anytime. You have a business profile on Cohoist where you can update your link, your ad headline, your ad description and a custom-tailored promo image of your choice. To give you a better idea, here's what the first page of the ad builder looks like with a sample ad:
The Ad Preview column on the right shows how your ad will look on the hub. The image and headline are the best ways to grab your audience's attention on the hub. There are more fields you can control too, like your Twitter handle, Facebook page, and logo. We use all the information in your business profile to create campaigns and graphics for the social media, display and search ads.
I noticed your other comment about landing users on your website directly from the ad. That's how online advertising normally works, but you're not able to pool money from multiple businesses if all the ad traffic goes to 1 site. Cohoist is just an alternative to help you expand your reach if that's what you'd like to do. Your logo, business name and social media accounts get seen by more people because the ad costs are shared and each ad contains info about all 8 businesses. It's ideal for building brand awareness and letting more of your target audience know your business exists (and for gaining followers on social media).
I just sent you an email about joining our next phase of ad testing before the public release if you'd like.
Exactly what I was going to ask. This whole landing page thing is like a science. Why not just land the user on to the website from the ad if there is already a website. From what I read online, a "landing page" can be more focused and to the point than a website, and somehow this is better for "conversions".
Hi @corpulent, 130 upvotes is great! Looks like you have something good in the offing. happy to help. I have been helping Hackers with marketing advice to help them scale up. It’s pro-bono. Please feel free to drop me a note at digitalacquisitionstrategy@gmail.com.
Email contact just helps me stay on top of things and respond back.
Good luck!
Thanks, will email you in a few hours!
Hi @corpulent, congratulations on your success on Reddit.
You wrote, "I think the best thing to do right now is to improve the site with additional text, and start running google ads."
I agree that it would be a good idea to improve the content on your site https://nuxx.io/.
I found myself wondering is "who is this for?" and "how is it better than alternatives?"
Consider adding some really specific examples of the kinds of people using this -- and why. For example, you could write:
"Nuxx is for engineering architects who need to communicate their architecture to teams managing dependencies."
"Nuxx is for engineering managers who need to quickly teach new-hires about their team's technology stack."
"Nuxx is for InfoSec teams who need to understand application architecture to protect against attacks."
Another technique is to state how you are better than alternatives. For example, you could write:
"Unlike diagrams on a PowerPoint slide, Nuxx makes it easy to document environment variables for each technology."
"Nuxx is faster and easier to use than ____."
If you can more narrowly define the target user and the competitive offerings, then you will be able to target your ads more effectively and get more people to use your site.
Use words like: "Nuxx is for...", and "Unlike {competitor}, Nuxx...."
@corpulent - were these suggestions helpful? If you want more like this, then I think you'll like my website, SplashPad. SplashPad helps you write about your product more effectively by suggesting language as you write. See https://getsplashpad.com.
Very cool product. Good luck.
Wow! Those are some really good use case examples right there! Since I am not sure who is the ideal target is, I can just list out all use cases on the front page under "Use cases" and see what sticks.
Since I am not sure who my ideal user is, I've been looking for a tool that tracks visitors, but also creates a visitor profile that gets saturated with more and more data every-time that user comes back to the site. Im sure a tool like this exists, but I can't find it...
I joined your waiting list on SplashPad! Looking forward, every little bit helps!
Cool, I may know of a tool that will help. I'll follow up via email.
Have you tried these?
It doesn’t sounds like you have spent enough time testing and learning from the advice you have already received. Some people have made millions just marketing off Google Ads as an example. It doesn’t work for everyone, but there is only one way to find out.
How many Google Ad tests have you run? How many blogs have to published? How many influcencers have you chatted with?
Actually I have not tried anything beyond reddit. I think the best thing to do right now is to improve the site with additional text, and start running google ads.
I always wondered how the whole influencer part works. What is in it for the influencer to promote my project? I am assuming some monetary compensation of some sort.