Hitting 1k registered user with Engineering as Marketing
Recently, my logo design tool Typogram hit 1,000 registered users. it's just me and my co-founder behind this tool (no funds, 100% bootstrapped), and it's been a journey full of grind, ups and downs. I'm super proud we achieved this without buying any ads.
I want to share one good growth tactic that works for me regarding growth:
Engineering as Marketing.
As someone who identifies as an introvert, this was a comfortable way for me to market my product. We create small side projects in addition to our primary logo design tool. The most successful one is codingfont.com. Because many potential users were web devs and people who spent a lot of time in IDE, we wanted to create a fun little website where they could find their dream coding font.
When we released it, it got on the front page of Hackernews and featured on top blogs like BoingBoing. We got newsletter sign-ups and sales from this project and continuous referral traffic. An unexpected benefit was also SEO. When coding font got picked up on several prominent sites, its Domain authority/ SEO improved. I utilize this to improve the traffic and SEO of my main project.
However, there are some downsides: this way of marketing costs more time/concentration over a short block of time, and sometimes it is hard to predict success. There are more cost-effective strategies than this. Creating extra projects costs time( from my experience, it helps a lot if you know no code tools).At least in my experience, several projects have returned success. So, if you need help with marketing your saas, consider this strategy.
wishing everyone best of luck, and here is Typogram if you feel like checking it out. I would appreciate any insights on growth or traction.
Typogram looks way too mature for 1k users tbh.
I would definitely pay for similar product if my use case aligns.
Thanks so much for your kind words!
I am currently struggling with marketing. Can you please explain how you grew your user community? Your product has 400 upvotes on PH. Did you achieve this before or after having 1000 users?
that was before we hit the milestone!
we recently wrote a guide about what works for us, but it's generally been:
feel free to check out the guide here: https://typogram.co/blog/how-to-start-and-grow-a-business-without-money/
Thanks, this article is really helpful. However, I encountered a lot of problems when I tried to post on Reddit in the first step, just as you mentioned. Most subreddits despise self-promotion, to the extent that even if I write a lengthy and meaningful post (sharing experiences, seeking feedback, etc.), I easily get permanently banned and the post gets deleted as soon as I provide a link in the post. How can I avoid this issue? Moreover, there have been recent changes in Reddit's community policies, leading to many communities migrating away.
I'd be willing to purchase a similar product if it fits my specific needs. Thanks You Sir
Nice article and thanks for letting us take a peak behind the scenes. I am just starting to think about how I can launch my MVP. I hate sales and marketing so I am not to excited about starting. Besides BoingBoing, Hackernews, Reddit, where else do you recommend exploring?
IH, twitter, Product Hunt, and try writing a newsletter!
This maybe my gateway to marketing !
I can build for 10 hours straight, but will be dragging my feet with marketing. Thank you wentin
no problem, glad it was helpful!
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Hey Wentin, congrats on hitting 1k users with Typogram! That's a huge milestone, (especially taking into account that you guys are boostraped)
I'm really intrigued by your "Engineering as Marketing" strategy. It sounds like a great way for introverted engineers like me to market our SaaS products. I have a few questions:
Any advice for other engineers who are considering using "Engineering as Marketing" to grow their SaaS businesses?
I appreciate your honesty about the downsides of this strategy too. It's important to be realistic about the time and effort involved.
hey Robin! thanks so much for your kind words. ofc, as an introvert, I understand - marketing never came natural for me !
Coming up with Ideas
brain storm a list of things my niche is interested in, write it down, and see if anyone has already made a project for it on Hackernews. if there is already an existing project , I could potentially make one with my flavor, and get some marketing buzz / traffic.
another way someone has mentioned here that we are also trying is create free mini tool related to our main product - like ahrefs with their keyword/DA/traffic tool, I think that could be an interesting experiment as well - I will report back on that.
Time Allocation
This one personally is a tricky one for me. I am a terrible multitasker, and I like to focus one thing at a time. so usually when I work an engineering as marketing project, it may take a good amount of time away from working on the main product. I'm lucky to have a co-founder.
So far, codingfont.com has been the most ambitious project. Before we released the project, I got in touch with retool (the no-code tool I used to build coding font) and they wanted to feature us on their blog, which really motivated me to release it.
symbols.wentin.net took less time (it was originally on Notion) but was worth in terms of conversion, however there was very little seo benefit / after launch buzz.
So I think in retrospective, it really depends on your goal.
Success
I mostly look at conversion: traffic. how many newsletter sign up, sales we get, press mentions and features. I think of them as lead generation tools.
Advice
I would say look at what you can offer in your tool as free, or look on HN and see if anyone did any similar projects for your tool. Launch a small one using the stacks you already know, Or alternative, launch a small project using a stack you want/have to learn to test the waters.
Hope this helps!
Great stuff. Basically, you are using small mini-apps as lead magnets.
One great way to think of lead magnets is "solve one problem with the lead magnet, which opens up a new problem (which is what your core product solves). This may not always apply in your case, however it could be a helpful framework for thinking about other lead magnet options.
that makes sense to me, it's like ahref and their free tools!
thanks so much for this great insight!
Congratulations that sounds amazing! Do you feel the more side / niche projects you build, the more faster you get at releasing publicly ? Do you try to reuse as much code/designs as you can ?
I try my best to reuse!
to be honest, I'm on the slow side, since I tend to be a little perfectionist 🙈
I try to tell myself to just launch it!
Congratulations on Typogram's great milestone.
Thanks so much!
Congratulations on Typogram's milestone. Given the success with codingfont, do you plan to launch more niche-focused side projects? Also, have you considered collaborating with others to expedite these ventures? Keep up the great work!
thanks so much for your kind words! and yes we do plan to launch more
We recently redesigned and improved one of our no-code, engineering as marketing project coming up: https://symbols.wentin.net/
and also, coding font 2.0! we are launching both of these soon : )
Sometimes we ask for friends to collaborate together.
Checked out the app, simple but brilliant. Makes me wonder where else similar approach can be used, perhaps by crowdsourcing the bracket results. Perhaps A/B testing without having to build the full landing page?
thanks so much for your kind words, and A/B testing is never a bad idea!
we are actually working on codingfont 2.0, planning on launching it soon - one thing we are working on is making it more sharable! definitely doing some test before we build it
Great post! I'm trying to do something similar with the product I'm solely bootstrapping, but I hadn't considered it a solid approach before. I'll definitely think about building more free tools.
It's time consuming, and hard to predict success sometimes, but really pays it off in my opinion! also, comes with great SEO benefits!