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14 Comments

Can an app get an audience without advertising budget?

Yeap, this is the question.
What are your experiences? Do you have someone who accomplished this? What are your ideas to get the audience without creating expenses?

  1. 5

    It pretty much depends on how you define "audience". At Logology I spent the last 2 months at building a product awareness here and on Reddit. It was enough to validate our MVP and iterate on it.
    So far we got ~6000 unique visitors and ~1100 signups without spending a dime :)

    Got where your potentials users are and talk to them, if your product fix a problem you'll get traffic.

    1. 2

      Genius! Well done and congrats.

    2. 2

      I got it, you are helping people while advertising your product, oh my god! This is my illumination! I was struggling to advertise on Reddit without getting caught by admins! :D this is your secret right :D

      1. 1

        It's about being part of a community, not really "selling". You ask for feedback, you (truly) help people, you participate etc… If you drop a link out of the blue you're gonna be ban for sure yes!

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

        1. 1

          Great, can you share a link here?

    3. 1

      Wow that awesome, usually Reddit is very strict against self-promotion.

      1. 1

        You need to find the right subreddit and really understand the community there before posting. If they are truly your customers then start interacting with them before you post anything about yourself. Treat it as market research if anything!

        The key is that you add value to the community, and the tricky part is usually figuring out what they find valuable - not always obvious at first glance!

        For example, I am building digital board games with https://gomobo.app so the best subreddit for me was /r/digitaltabletop. I joined that community a year before I posted anything. I was just a regular member before that!

        1. 1

          That's make sense, by contributing to community you build trust on them.

          Thank for sharing.

        2. 1

          This doesn't sound like a regular marketing approach that we could adopt, since you've been in that community for 1y then start posting.
          1y is too long if you have something working on right now.

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            I don't mean to say that 1y is a requirement of any sort, but I do mean to emphasize that if you want to post on reddit, you need to be respectful of the community you are posting to!

    1. 2

      Yeah you should definitely check out my article where I explained more in detail how we did it for Avocation. Its definitely possible!

  2. 1

    For my product Watermark.ink the only thing I did was to post it on ProductHunt two years ago. There is no landing page with SEO keywords etc. My intention was to make the app usable from the time it loads, none of those SEO ranking rules are used/applied. Watermark has decently number of users and almost always on the first page of google search.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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