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Acquired 50 new leads for building this mini-calculator app for main product in just a few hours!

I have to say Product Hunt is quite amazing to get attention and build valuable mini-apps to help with acquiring leads for our main product cenario.

Built this app using Vue.JS in a few hours - https://www.cenario.co/free-ads-spend-calculator

Building relevant mini applications to help drive acquisition seems like it could be a very effective strategy for growth, especially in the early stages. The likes of Hubspot and others have done very well with this particularly in their early phases of growth. Helps with SEO too.

What cool "mini-applications" to help drive the growth of the main product are people doing? :)

Love to know what others are thinking for this in their respective industries/target markets!

  1. 4

    Quite a strategy. Amazing stuff.

    1. 1

      Glad you like it! :)

  2. 3

    Thanks for sharing!

    I'd love to see the math behind this! Based on 50 leads, how much do you expect to make? What was the cost of building the app, spending the time to market it, etc?

    I've considered doing this for CoderNotes, I proposed a mini-app to IH a few days ago that didn't get enough responses to validate the idea.

    It seems like a really cool strategy, but I'd like to see more companies sharing the numbers around it :)

    1. 2

      No worries at all and glad you like it :)

      Yeah so great question about the math. To keep it simple, here's a quick breakdown;

      • Time: $100 per hour (example of my consulting rate) = $400 total to build (so four hour build).
      • Leads Acquired = 50
      • CPL of time (not paid media cost) = $8
      • 50 to convert into paying customer.. hopefully 5-6 paying customers = $40 x 6 = $240 (so around a 10% conversion to paid)
      • Obviously then if we keep them for a period of time, then LTV should be good, so return should be at least 4-5 x (we hope! Still early stages for us haha :).

      So we don't have paying users of just yet but we only did this 3 days ago and people are still on the free trial. Time will tell :)

      Either way, we are already ranking for this page and will optimise + use this for paid advertising. We will probably add in some more things too and then relaunch again.. why not right? :)

      Anyway yeah hopefully a good strategy moving forward! Have to wait and see :)

      We got other cool mini apps to do also and will update the Indie Hackers Community when we launch them :)

  3. 3

    Super cool Dan! Well done!

  4. 2

    A great example of engineering as marketing

    1. 1

      Thank you I'm glad you like it :)

  5. 2

    Well done - those mini apps are a great way to build unique value vs. traditional content marketing. Keep it up!

    1. 1

      Thank you + yes exactly! Especially where google cares more about content in various forms rather than just typical "how-to" or "listicle" type content. Anything to ensure more people engage with your page is a great signal for google to help rank it quickly. It's also more "shareable" too!

  6. 2

    I am often tempted to do the same but what looks like few hours usually turns into few days or even weeks. I would advise others to be careful with that strategy.

    1. 2

      Well that's very true - if you are not able to comlete it in a day, then throw the idea away.

      1. 1

        So both points are right above 100%! If you can't build it within a few hours, then it's probably not worth it! Having said that, if you're trying to rank for a term, or want to build something you feel could be shared a lot, or even build mechanics within it to make it more shareable, then yes it's worth putting the time into it. Even better, worth putting the time into something where you can capture emails and then nurtrue.

        My business partner and I have other ideas around even running cheap Facebook Ads to collect emails through something were we provide value and up front/free. Then we educate people around the journey of our main paid product.

        It's a hard one especially if time poor and potentially not having enough resources at disposable, but we believe it's a strategy worth pursuing! Will update Indie Hackers community more often about this strategy and if it's something that works!

  7. 2

    You've given me something to think about!
    A side note - your cookie/gdpr disclaimer is very stringent, made my eyes widen. Do you really need the paragrpah with the separate link to opt out of selling personal data? I haven't seen similar before. If your business does actually need it, then kudos for including this.

    1. 1

      Hey! Haha yeah I'm not a fan of it either but we need to do it I'm afraid! However I am open up to using other tools instead for cookie banners! Any good ones you know of?

  8. 2

    That's a nice example of side project marketing.

    1. 1

      Thanks Rosie :) - Glad you think it's a nice example!

      1. 1

        What are you working on currently? :)

  9. 2

    I just checked out your tool. Interesting and I see that it can be very helpful indeed for people looking to calculate their business metrics.

    Congrats!

    1. 1

      Thank you I appreciate it :) - let me know how you go playing with it!

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