Eng as Marketing to Number 2 on Show HackerNews
Summary:
For our video creation and editing app, vidds.co, SEO is our long-term strategy, so we've been brainstorming free tools - engineering as marketing - that can provide value to users while not costing tons of money.
We found a way to make some simple video editing tools in the browser without a backend, and spent 2 weeks building it.
We posted it to Show HN to promote the tool, and reached #2 on Show HN!
The results:
3.8k visits(1) -> 160 uses -> 98 upvotes (~12 hours at #2 spot) -> 20 comments -> 15 app signups (no paid users)
(1) Google Analytics reported about 1.6k, the web logs seemed more accurate?
The post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26580333
The tool: https://vidds.co/free-video-converter/
Why Hacker News?
HackerNews is known to be a brutal audience. But we thought it would be a great place to post this tool because (1) HN has visibility and (2) the tool uses bleeding-edge tech.
In a normal post, we would talk about how our tool is simple and free, but that obviously wouldn't fly on HN. We looked at popular posts and focused on the tech, and went with a title that wouldn't do well anywhere else: "Show HN: WebAssembly and ffmpeg = Quick clip, overlay, resize and GIF-ize videos"
We highlighted the interesting tech first (what this audience cares about), but still saved room for what the tool does (how the tech accomplished a task). Even with this title, I honestly didn't expect much for a tiny tool that took 2 weeks to build. We were pretty happy with how well it did, as well as the positive comments we received!
Why Engineering as Marketing?
Eng as Marketing is barely a footnote in most marketing guides, esp for indie hackers. But I think it's particularly well-suited to people like us. First, indie devs tend to struggle to write great content consistently. Second, we generally have time but not money. Eng as marketing leverages our skills to give something unique to the world.
There is a common piece of advice marketers give: If you solve people's problems, you gain credibility and trust. For developers, writing a blog post that explains the solution to a problem can be harder than writing the code that just does it.
Last, web technologies are getting downright crazy - the browser is practically an OS at this point. When I learned ffmpeg had been ported to WebAssembly, I wanted to play with it for fun. Building a useful tool for people that doesn't require any backend server resources (only bandwidth) was icing on the cake.
How did we find a project?
My cofounder, @EdwardThomas, was already using SEO tools to find out what blog and tutorial posts we should write. We knew these topics were popular: converting videos, trimming videos, adding text/images to videos, and creating GIFs.
This was a no-brainer for us. Make a simple tool with these features.
These are long-tail keywords, and there are free tools like the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension to help you find them, and figure out search traffic estimates.
Should you do it?
I can't answer that. We still have to wait a while to see how it pays off for us. But here are some general thoughts on when it's worth considering:
- you're focused on long-term growth
- your users are web-focused and you know how to minimize backend resources
- your ideas seem to be useful even without long-term data storage
Thanks for the write up, especially about posting to HN with the interesting keywords that their audience responds better to.
(Check out this article @gianu)
For sure! Since you're building an API, HN might be a good option, but don't assume it's the only one :)
Dev.to, PH, and Subreddits could also be good options for you!
did you post how many sales?
Yes - none :'( haha
3.8k visits(1) -> 160 uses -> 98 upvotes (~12 hours at #2 spot) -> 20 comments -> 15 app signups (no paid users)
Thanks for rubbing it in! Just kidding haha
all good! now's the time to follow-up... get those sales!
Thanks! Advice I definitely need to hear (and take action on)!
well done !
As a non technical person, I don't really get HN, so those kinds of write-ups are great, thanks !
Glad you liked the write-up :) I totally understand the feeling - there are a ton of audiences I don't get.
I think it's also good to recognize we don't have to be good at everything, and we can focus on our strengths and build on the important skills we actually need.
Definitely follow in a week or a month once you get results.
Don't want to do a full write-up on this right now, but this ended up working out pretty well for SEO!
I think it exceeded our expectations, but at the same time hasn't led to any paying users, but this is a long game, and we think it's going to help us quite a bit.
That's still awesome! How much of that is attributed to this specific engineering as a marketing tactic vs the other things you tried?
Let's see. We had 466 impressions yesterday. Of those:
/online-video-cutter: 222
/free-video-converter: 180
So 86% of our impressions are for the eng as marketing tool. Day before was 90%.
And I think that 86% is low, because I'm pretty sure those pages are actually helping the rest of our site links rank a little higher.
Also, the luck from ShowHN probably had a lot to do with this. I don't think they'd be ranking as well if it weren't for the initial backlinks.
But if someone were to build something similar without HN, getting a blogger to link to them (which is way easier with free tools) would probably get similar results since our backlinks weren't particularly high quality.
I'll try!
Have you thought about eng as marketing for Capsule? I think your free account + chrome extension kind of counts.
Just want to drop this IH link here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/im-going-to-add-free-tools-to-my-website-instead-of-blogging-will-this-work-with-seo-faeb61da62
I posted a comment, hope he can respond with a little status update!
"Eng as marketing", the way you have named it is interesting. I have one off-topic question. Have you ever considered a demo link on the landing-page without asking for emails like veed.io or motionbox.io? If not, what is the reason?
I didn't come up with "Eng as Marketing" :) I don't know where it was coined, but I remember it being a channel in the book Traction. Looks like it's number 11 in this list:
https://medium.com/@yegg/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to-get-traction-93c762d19339
I just think indie devs should think about it more - it's so up our alley :)
Oh man, you're gonna give me prioritization nightmares! haha
We've thought about that, and I think we want to have a demo. We just have to balance everything we do as a 2-person team with an endless list of ideas to implement :)
I did it for one of my first indie hacking projects, and it takes work to either mock out the API and keep it updated, or make the existing UI work when a user isn't logged in.
I think I've read arguments against it, like you might lose an e-mail lead, or the barrier qualifies users. But I don't give them much weight, so it's mostly a matter of deciding when to do it.
Wow! Amazing results.
Also really great to see a HN success story (and breakdown of how/why you did it) after hearing how difficult it can be to impress the crowd over there.