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17 Comments

Good organic acquisition channel early on?

What's a good organic acquisition channel that a solo founder can leverage really early on?

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      This is very helpful, thanks!

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    I guess it depends on your product and audience you are trying to reach but one that worked well early on (and still works) for Plausible Analytics is searching on Twitter for people talking about relevant topics and replying to those people.

    I use Tweetdeck and search for people saying (mostly negative things) about Google Analytics and then I reach out to them telling them about Plausible Analytics. It's a great and pretty much real time way to get out to potential customers, get them to check out what you're doing, get feedback etc.

    And it's all organic and free. Just needs time to manually check Tweetdeck few times per day and respond to people it finds. It's still to this day one of our top traffic sources.

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      This is a great suggestion, will definitely try it out :)

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        hope you find it useful!

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          Thanks, Marko. I did the same over the last few months and it converted. Reaching the people during their problem/pain helps.

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    basic on page seo and then launch platforms like PH, HN, and Indie Hacker pretty much organic and easy to do and then lifetime deals to get some early customers

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      Interesting...Lifetime deals sounds quite interesting. Has that worked for you?

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        planning to try myself but have seen peers getting great results

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          I see, let me know if it works :)

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    there's no magic channel, it's going to depend on your product and your market. who are you building for? where you can find lots of those people or how can you reach them? that's your channel. indiehackers might be a great channel if you're trying to reach startup founders, but probably a terrible channel if trying to reach chefs or tennis players.

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      True, I've seen a lot of fake accounts and inauthentic traffic come in through popular launch platforms, hence I was wondering how to go about this. I'm building a SaaS product for small startups.

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    If there was an easy organic acquisition channel, we would all be millionaires. I think optimizing for SEO early on will always pay off well in the long run. Also depends on what you're selling. Tech products can have great success with HN or Reddit, other products might do well on Instagram.

    If you have a little capital to invest you can try sponsoring podcasts or IG influencers. Again, completely dependent on your product.

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      I agree that SEO early on is a great focus. I think whatever you decide to focus on, consider creating content around the problems your product solves. You can promote that content in different places and drive traffic initially that way.

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      Agreed. I'm sure many here are millionaires judging by the MRR 😉

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