Does forum marketing work?
I hear founders refer to forums as an initial source for traction? Have you found success with this? If so, are there any best practices or guidance you can offer?
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I hear founders refer to forums as an initial source for traction? Have you found success with this? If so, are there any best practices or guidance you can offer?
Works for me man, have a look here how I made 640ARR with one comment: https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/
put yourself at the reads POV, would you enjoy reading the post? would you find interest in the writer?
It's easy to get clicks and interest if you are genuine and relevant to a group even without direct links.
The more strict the place against self promotion spam, the more trust and quality you would get if you can do it right.
Be different, be unique and be consistent. Freshness is important, helping people on a personal level if you have a high value per person.
Thanks - this seems like good advice and the direction I was thinking in.
I do think so, personally I moved a lot to Discord/Slack, but I would see these as "modern" forums, same can be said for Facebook Groups not?
What's your opinion on that?
yes, omg yes. i still manage a
#defiforum that i started in late-2017... and it became a top-25,000 website in the world at the height. it has 17k+ members and still grows daily.so... fuck yes.
amazing! How did you achieve that?
just built it... and let them show up. created video content daily... 8-10 videos. insane: https://blog.patreon.com/monetization-strategies-bitcoin-pub/
that dedicaton matters!
communities aren't born organically... someone literally bled over keys to make them work.
This is a good advice
it's the wonderful grind.
That is fantastic - congrats!
However, I think the angle I was coming from was less about starting a forum and more about using forums to identify discussions/conversations about a topic or problem space a bootstrapped product addresses, serves, or relates too.
For instance - I've heard people mention, even here on Indie Hackers, that in the early days they hustled by engaging with conversations on forums that were related to their products. I use the term forums loosely and maybe its not well suited to my meaning here, but I'm referring to things like Quora, Hacker News, Reddit, Indie Hackers, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, etc.
The reason I am asking is because I'm curious if there tools that assist with this where "this" equals the watching/alerting of conversations I find pertinent to the domain my product is in. Think Google Alerts but with a focus on conversations in forums, configurable email alerts, web hooks, and a Zappier integration so I can wire it up to my CRM
i just found this: https://www.pmalerts.com/
Thanks for the plug :)
This might just be perfect for what I need! Thank you. Do you have any idea what the “pm” stands for? Product/Program Manager maybe?
i have no idea. i just had a quick chat with the creator though.
For whatever it’s worth, I tried PMAlerts for a few days and it’s a little noisy. A lot of misinterpretation of the key words. For example, I want to know when people are talking about a technical term called “swagger” but I get all of the memes about people losing and regaining their personal swagger.
I was thinking about a tool that would potentially be more of a productized service that could allow me to communicate what topics I’m interesting in following, why, and would integrate with Zapier, CRM’s, Airtable or other things we use to keep track of outreach and marketing efforts.
Given the acute knowledge of what I want to tune into, the service would be less noisy and put my radar up to very relevant conversations happening in communities, forums, and social media.
If Sparktoro is the thing that helps me find where they talk and hangout, this is the tool that lets me listen in and engage a bit more. Maybe Sparktoro does this too. I’ll have to have another look.
I could really use this as I work on finding folks to talk to about servicemocks.com, the product I’m currently working on.
Hey jgaerke - if you'd like to brainstorm around potential queries that might generate less noise on PMAlerts, feel free to email me at [email protected].
sweet! thanks for the loop-back!
Program Manager was the original meaning (I'm building it for fellow PMs at work) :)