April Roundup: The Gang tries to do marketing

After many months of just shipping features and adding more books to Better Morning Reading, I was determined to spend all my efforts in April on getting more users to join. I have no idea what I'm doing so tried a bunch of different things.

1. Launched again on product hunt
   I'll admit this was a total flop. The first time I launched several months ago, the product was significantly worse, but the reception was very warm. A few dozen upvotes and 15 signups resulted. It felt great. This time around I posted the link to product hunt everywhere I could on social media, and only got 4 signups, including two people I know personally. Oh well.

2. Started a twitter account for the site (https://twitter.com/reading_better)
   I haven't gotten many sign ups from this but it has at least been fun. There is a lively community of writers and lovers of literature out there. It quickly occurred to me that to get any attention you need to add something to the conversation. Thus far I've been retweeting interesting things that pertain to classic books and writers, writing about new features, and posting made up fun facts.

3. Emailed Book Riot to ask them to write about Better Morning Reading (as per policy on their website)
   They didn't write back 😞

4. Said screw it and paid for some google ads
   Part of building the book club feature over the past several months was delivering a new use case that would market well. For the ad campaign I set the lowest spending limit they'll let you do ($90/month) and targeted the phrase "online book club" in the US and UK. This got me 7 new users! The campaign generated 122 clicks and cost about $50 before I paused it.

In all, I got 13 new users into the site. None have upgraded to the paid plan (yet!) but I'm satisfied with the results in general and have 51 users total now. Phew. Back to coding...