A not succesful marketing experience and learnings for one man team product with nearly 2k registered users in 2024
Hello,
I am working on a LaTeX based resume builder product as a one man team.
As with many engineers, I didn't anticipate that marketing is extremely hard to learn and run. Here's a summary for my experience on different marketing channels:
- Submitting to directories: except for Product Hunt, other directories bring poor traffic. You hardly get any traffic share, and ranking on Product Hunt itself requires effort and luck.
- Social networking: it is quite a lengthy process to grow a social account starting with less than 100 followers.
- Reddit: most high-traffic subreddits have “no self-promotion” rules, posting promotions will likely result in subreddit bans or account suspensions.
- Blogging/SEO: too slow, and you need to write many posts to slowly see some effects. According to ahrefs data, most pages that rank in the top positions on Google take 2-3 years to get there,
- Email marketing: cold emails are likely to be flagged as spam, and data compliance requirements are becoming increasingly stringent. Sending bulk promotional emails without user consent is likely to be non-compliant with regulations such as GDPR. Meanwhile, building an email list to get user consent is a full-time job in itself.
- KOL: some require payment, and KOL traffic would decline to almost zero after a month or two.
I wrote a blog post for my 2024 recap which listed all the learnings for the product and marketing.
Checked it out if you feel interested.
