Growing gSweets 📈 – Oct. 18, 2020

The top-level numbers

• Starting gSweets users: 45
• Ending gSweets users: 59

Growth strategies used

Outbound

PersistIQ

I continued using PersistIQ to reach out to a list of potential users. I only had 2 users respond this week out of 89 emails sent. The open rate continues to be 75% which I’m really happy with, but according to PersistIQ’s tracking, almost no users are clicking on links to the demo video or the Chrome Webstore. Next week I’m going to switch to a different list of leads to see if they are higher fit.

LinkedIn targeting

I took the time to identify high-fit users on LinkedIn and used Hunter to find their emails. These people all worked in content marketing or product marketing at companies like Webflow, Spotify and Drift, some were consultants.

I sent 22 emails but only had a 27% open rate so far and 1 positive reply. I used the same subject line as my ProspectIQ emails so this was definitely a disappointing open rate.

That being said, it was great to have one person from a top-tier company want to try it out and I wouldn’t have reached them without this method. I’ll be doubling down on it next week.

Twitter

This week was a great week in Twitter outreach. I searched for tweets mentioning “Notion + Google docs” or just “Google docs.” It’s wild to see how many thousands of people are publicly talking about Docs every week. It takes a long time to find high-fit tweets and users, but there are lots of them. 4-5 strangers responded positively to DMs out of 7-10 messages sent which felt great.

I’m definitely going to continue this effort, it’s not built for scale but feels perfect for our current weekly goals.

It’s also just worth noting how easy it is to find users these days who might use your competitors or partners products. We can find hundreds of users daily @mentioning Google Docs with feature requests or bugs which it itself a good sign that they’re engaged with the product.

Slack groups

This week I posted for the first time in Slack groups focused on our target market. Since we don’t have a website (and analytics) yet I set up bitly links to be able to track. The results were the following:

1. Write the Docs (Technical writers) – 33 visitors to chrome webstore
2. ProductPeople (PMs) – 10 visitors to chrome webstore
3. UX Design Community (Designers) – 4 visitors to chrome webstore
4. Online Geniuses (Marketers) – 1 visitor to chrome webstore :(

These communities are thousands of members in size (mostly inactive) but there’s clearly more people who could benefit from gSweets here. I’ll try posting to new channels and direct messaging this week.

Although the numbers aren’t that high, they were a great source of some positive feedback!

Learnings:

One key learning this week was that it can take a few days to see installs show up in your Chrome Extension portal. Don’t expect to see immediate analytics the way you would in GA.

We likely drove 60-80 visits to our extensions chrome page, but only saw ~15 installs. That’s a pretty good conversion rate, but I would expect it to be even higher, this early on. We’ll continue iterating on our messaging to try and push this metric up.

This post originally appeared on our Substack blog. Subscribe for more updates like this.

Have a sweet week,