12
15 Comments

How do you pre-market your app?

Hey IH! 👋

Over the past few weeks, I've worked on finalizing my idea for a simple, yet effective, daily journaling app where you reflect on something you:

  • "glowed" at ✨
  • and one thing you can grow at 🌱

When I started my first "business" (buildfaster.co), I jumped straight into building HTML templates instead of marketing my product.

This time, I want it to do it the right way.


Some prior knowledge I have on pre-marketing contains the following:

  • Building a signup landing page to collect emails 📩
  • Let people know of your product/app 💬
  • Build an MVP 👨‍💻

So, how do you pre-market something?

Thanks. Any advice/tips are helpful.

  1. 3

    Hello @BraydenTW
    My Pre-market strategy consist of:

    1. I would prefer to go with the individual posting in the niche blogs or groups, but you don't have to spam out the links instead what you can do is, you can help out that audience with dropping your valuable comments and then proposing them with your service/product.

    2. Create a content piece (blog, post, podcast episode, e.t.c) & here comes the 80:20 rule in which 20% you have to focus on creating content then 80% to distribute it, and distribute your content over reddit, Linkedin,twitter in different formats.

    3. Reach out to Infleuncer in that domain, to spread a word about your product, or share your product social account page.

    You can checkout our product: http://talkie.team/

      1. 1

        Thanks, @BraydenTW Hope you signed up for early access!!

        1. 1

          Sorry, but it’s not something I would use. I know a few people who might so I’ll be sure to let them know.

    1. 1

      Man, this is so awesome product idea!

      What I miss the most in slack is the ability to send voice messages to the team when I am on the move.

      So not sure what is your roadmap like but mobile apps in my opinion should be a must!

      1. 1

        Thankyou @TheEcommerceGuy for the kind words.

        We'll soon launch with mobile app as well, but currently, we are more focused on pc, mac and linux version.

        You'll get an update soon, if you signup for the waitlist.

        Thank you 🙂.

  2. 2

    I've recently launched a private beta for https://firelab.io and here's what I've learned:

    1. Building a product for my existing audience is MUCH easier than entering a new market. I already have an email list for https://usegravity.app (customers, plus blog followers etc) so I was able to tap into this to get my first users.

    2. It's hard to manifest an audience from nowhere. #1 above is the result of putting out lots of content over the past 2 years. Always be building an audience.

    3. Lead magnets are powerful, especially when combined with Facebook lead ads. I've generate 100s of leads with a 6 page PDF called 'The Secret Formula for Profitable SaaS Ideas'

    4. You need to warm your audience up after their initial touch point, once someone downloads my lead magnet or tries a demo, I put them into an automated sequence of emails where I provide more and more value - tips, tutorials and random funny stuff.

    5. Building a personal brand makes it much easier to pre-market and launch products. Even better if you're zeroed in on a niche.

    1. 1

      Great tips! Thanks. What online tool do you use for marketing? Mail chimp? Convert kit?

      1. 1

        Mailerlite, it's great for automations :)

      1. 1

        Yeah I think its one of those situations where someone doesn't follow any particular recipe but just thinks about the next step and it works and then it becomes something you can use as a reference. Like he says, provide value before asking to commit, repeat to give you confidence, then charge. For me its one of the several (not loads of) examples on IH that show clearly how someone picked their way through the forest.

  3. 1

    I created a webflow landing page (https://www.28hrworkweek.com/), posted it on Hacker News and got ~500 emails. Its certainly product dependant though, I wouldn't expect this approach to work for everything

    1. 1

      Makes sense. Great story though!

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments