How an indie hacker gained +500 users for his AI assistant

Vítor Soares launched AskCory in 2024. His 9-5 is about building startups (How cool!) and AskCory is a part of it. AskCory is an AI marketing assistant who makes your product go from zzz to making money by suggesting marketing plans.

He and his team follow the “bullseye” framework, which consists of 19 different marketing channels. But, no one has the time to explore all the marketing channels. Right? So he and his team built an AI assistant to do that (They are solving their own problem)

His amazing product attracted over +500 users in just five months and generated close to $1k in revenue.

But, 500 users! How? (That was my reaction)

He and his team followed four different marketing channels to gain users for AskCory

Since AskCory is a marketing tool, they used the AI assistant to gain users for itself 🙂

He is also social selling on LinkedIn. His LinkedIn profile has 500 connections (500 connections. 500 users. Is this what it is? No!)
He thinks you need more than direct selling or pitching to get users. Ask for feedback and people might be happy to try your
product (if they don’t become your users, at least you got valuable feedback)

He also listed AskCory on AI directories to gain traffic and get backlinks
Last but not least, he and his team also ran Google search ads (which resulted in 600 website visits with 17% conversions)

Vitor: I wasn't just pushing a product but offering valuable insights and sparking conversations. People started seeing me as a thought contributor (I hope)

Every week he dedicates 5-10 hours to social media. He participates in discussions and shares curated content (related to Askcorey) and if the persona starts to feel related to him, he starts direct messaging too

What is AskCory’s pricing strategy?

When they were first starting they asked their initial users how and what AskCory should be priced

Their main pricing plans are subscription but they also have a pay-as-you-go option (Offering different pricing plans provides flexibility for users)

He also shared a little story about getting the first paying users for AskCory. They had two interviewees who were part of their network. After Victor and his team showed them a prototype, they were excited and eventually upgraded.

Key takeaways:
Try social selling on platforms such as X, Reddit (be careful, lol), LinkedIn
You’re not a salesman, so avoid pitching (Instead, try asking for feedback )
Marketing is all you need, the more you do it the better results you get
Leverage your network or your audience if you have any

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