It wasn’t easy but my app ClusterStack finally reached 1.1k users. It’s was an effort to discover how to advertise it but a takeaway from what I’ve discovered:
Facebook groups is a good place to advertise it. Find groups that where your niche is concentrated and you’ll have more people down to use it.
Reddit is good too, I’ve posted about my app on r/reactnative and got a lot of support and downloads. But , again, if it’s not your niche , those users won’t go back.
Twitter and Instagram are good too if you use proper hashtags.
Facebook ads didn’t worked properly for me. I believe I need to spend more time studying it to make it work
Google cpc works really nice , but more expensive , I’ll use it more once I’ve more budget for that.
i'm sure more great answers will keep coming in from others, but meanwhile, you can check out this roundtable post i did with successful founders on how they found their first users.
we published founder interviews and distributed them to hacker news. back in those early days it seems like 1 in 5 interview articles would make it to HN's front page. we'd then capture much of that website traffic in our newsletter. by month two, we'd hit 1,000 subs.
the next month, courtland built this forum. it would be many months of grinding before we'd hit 1,000 registered user accounts on the site. by "grinding" i mean things like:
we both created a few fake user accounts to create the illusion of a busy early forum
we continued to write and publish interviews and newsletters
This is so insightful, So you built an email list first before the main forum.
Nowadays it seems like only programming news make it to the front page of HN.
So IH didn't experience any "viral growth" i mean a spike in users or was it a slow 5 users, 20 users, 3 users, 1 user, 60 users, 0 users , 100 users per day?
We released the free version of our first product Shade, (a collection of free & premium HTML landing page templates) on ProductHunt, and we were immediately on the top 3 on that day and ended up with #2 PRODUCT OF THE DAY. This actually gave us first 300+ users within first 10-12 days.
After that we got some quick backlinks from other websites and twitter and those links brought us 1000+ users within 40-45 days.
I had some subscribers on my list who initially helped to push this on the top. I also shared this on some Facebook groups after submitting on PH. That also helped.
People wanted to export to mobile in a competing product, but it didn't support it. So I made a blog post on how to export to mobile in this competing product. Which it couldn't of course, and then guided them to mine :).
Google picked this up and so all people searching for that ended up on my blog.
I knew users wanted this because of the many questions on forums and reddit.
From analysing hundred of projects it seems to be...
Engaging in specfic Communities like Indie Hackers
Enage in social communities: Reddit, FB Groups, Slack, Discord
Twitter growth
Marketplaces like AppSumo that can get your product in front of a lot of people
Thanks :)Reddit can be though
so far i've leveraged twitter only
Okay Dokay
It wasn’t easy but my app ClusterStack finally reached 1.1k users. It’s was an effort to discover how to advertise it but a takeaway from what I’ve discovered:
Not tried buying ads yet.
Thanks for sharing :)
i'm sure more great answers will keep coming in from others, but meanwhile, you can check out this roundtable post i did with successful founders on how they found their first users.
Thanks for sharing, How did IH get its first 1000 Users?
we published founder interviews and distributed them to hacker news. back in those early days it seems like 1 in 5 interview articles would make it to HN's front page. we'd then capture much of that website traffic in our newsletter. by month two, we'd hit 1,000 subs.
the next month, courtland built this forum. it would be many months of grinding before we'd hit 1,000 registered user accounts on the site. by "grinding" i mean things like:
This is so insightful, So you built an email list first before the main forum.
Nowadays it seems like only programming news make it to the front page of HN.
So IH didn't experience any "viral growth" i mean a spike in users or was it a slow 5 users, 20 users, 3 users, 1 user, 60 users, 0 users , 100 users per day?
I happened to create a post to the r/webdev subreddit and within a day over 1000 people signed up. Proof
Makes you a marketing legend, What was the post like
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/nt6gus/i_created_a_browserbased_video_editor_100_free/
Thanks :)
We released the free version of our first product Shade, (a collection of free & premium HTML landing page templates) on ProductHunt, and we were immediately on the top 3 on that day and ended up with #2 PRODUCT OF THE DAY. This actually gave us first 300+ users within first 10-12 days.
After that we got some quick backlinks from other websites and twitter and those links brought us 1000+ users within 40-45 days.
When launching on PH did you have a previous following or got a Hunter?
Was the retention of the pH users good?
I had some subscribers on my list who initially helped to push this on the top. I also shared this on some Facebook groups after submitting on PH. That also helped.
Oh, Never found success with PH will try again at some point
AppSumo Marketplace
the Better Sheets story on StarterStory
Huge Noah kogan fan on YT
Its a saas?
Better Sheets? no. it's a course, a community, products...
BetterSheets.co👀
Seen it.
Thought appsumo was for only paid saas
appsumo, yes
appsumo marketplace, no.
Oh ok
So appsumo got you your first 1000 Users?
yes.
first 7 users: Posting on Indiehackers, &own socials
From 7 to 2,250: AppSumo Marketplace
Thanks for sharing :)
Really appreciate :)
People wanted to export to mobile in a competing product, but it didn't support it. So I made a blog post on how to export to mobile in this competing product. Which it couldn't of course, and then guided them to mine :).
Google picked this up and so all people searching for that ended up on my blog.
I knew users wanted this because of the many questions on forums and reddit.
So content marketing worked for you