There were no silver bullets, just compounding growth and showing up each day. 90% of our traffic and revenue comes from non-paid sources, so building a brand has probably been the most important thing.
Facebook ads we've never managed to make work. Every year or so we speak to a new agency or marketer who raves about them, but everytime we've engaged someone to work on them the figures have just never added up.
I think one key has been at each stage of the process, to create a valuable product (by solving a need), which is bug free and offers an excellent user experience. We've gone from essentially just having an email editor to send emails out over Amazon SES, through to a fully fledged platform and although our feature set has moved quite slowly our focus has always been on offering exception value at a reasonable cost.
Thanks. Definitely agree with the Facebook part. With a few exceptions I've never seen it really work (at least not for B2B/dev products). Affiliate and content marketing seem like better choices.
About 4 years for us at EmailOctopus!
There were no silver bullets, just compounding growth and showing up each day. 90% of our traffic and revenue comes from non-paid sources, so building a brand has probably been the most important thing.
What wouldn't you focus on, in hindsight?
Facebook ads we've never managed to make work. Every year or so we speak to a new agency or marketer who raves about them, but everytime we've engaged someone to work on them the figures have just never added up.
I think one key has been at each stage of the process, to create a valuable product (by solving a need), which is bug free and offers an excellent user experience. We've gone from essentially just having an email editor to send emails out over Amazon SES, through to a fully fledged platform and although our feature set has moved quite slowly our focus has always been on offering exception value at a reasonable cost.
Thanks. Definitely agree with the Facebook part. With a few exceptions I've never seen it really work (at least not for B2B/dev products). Affiliate and content marketing seem like better choices.
Not there yet, but soon 😅.
At the moment our traction comes from our GitHub, blog and Twitter.
The underlaying key driver is to provide a valuable service for a lot of people. I recommend Compete against luck on this topic.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.