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How I got 500 Users in 5 days for my productivity tool?

Hey everyone!

What happened in the last week?

After the successful launch of Ruttl's beta version and hearing positive feedback from the community, I decided to make my next tool public to use.

I have been using this tool for the last few months and it transformed the task management scenario in my life. While making this tool, a simplistic yet powerful UI was my first priority. So, I went ahead, developed it, used it and finally decided to make it public for the community.

What is BruTask?

It is a free and simple to use To-Do list platform for small companies or teams who work on daily scrums and have regular stand-ups (or even individuals who just want to improve their productivity!).

The experience is pretty much like writing your daily tasks on a sticky note. Organizing your daily tasks can improve your productivity & lead to enhanced work quality.

https://brutask.com/

Why did I create BruTask?

When we were just a team of 5 members and operating from an apartment, everyone used to note down their tasks on a sticky note and paste it on the work table. As a manager, I could see everyone's task and the status of completion.

We could have used a lot of other tools but we wanted to keep it very simple and thus kept ourselves limited to those sticky notes. It was old school but helped us in using our time efficiently and productively. We just tried bringing that sticky notes experience live and available to all the team working remotely now.

How did I get 500 users?

Getting to 500 users was definitely a herculean task for sure. Not only did I have to be dedicated to my methods, but also I had to experiment bunch of new user acquisition methods. Here are some of things that I did right after I made the tool live for public use -

  1. LinkedIn is the single best platform right now that is giving the maximum organic reach. Prior to the launch, through my agency page, I began publishing posts regularly for BruTask. These posts were explaining the importance of developing To-Do list habit and talking about how BruTask can help in this process. If you want a reference of the LinkedIn post, you can check out the page directly over here.

  2. One of the best resources I had was to approach a bunch of founders that were already connected to me via LinkedIn. I tried sending them personalized direct messages to begin a conversation and rapport. Once they were interested in the idea, I showcased the benefits of using BruTask to manage their teams (which they seemed to love a lot!).

  3. Through my previous clients, I had a email list ready to use. I began cold emailing the clients by letting them know that I have built a completely free to use tool which can help them manage their employees effectively. This idea seemed to catch them and because they had already worked with me, the open rates were fairly good.

  4. My entire agency team promoted about BruTask via their personal profiles that truly gave the social media push really needed in the initial phase! They all went ahead and shared their personal experience with productivity and how BruTask has helped them improve the way the work every single day! This acted like a social proof on LinkedIn as more people began coming through it and signing up for the tool.

  5. Finally, there was another trick up the sleeve that I decided to use in the initial week. I had submitted BruTask landing page to several feature pages on the internet. Guess what? People loved the design and BruTask was featured on several landing pages websites, such as Lapa Ninja and LandingpageFolio. I believe this contributed largely to the big push of the user acquisition!

What next?

I would like to invite the entire indie hacker community to try and build this powerful habit of maintaining To-Do lists!

Don't worry if you feel BruTask is not right for. If you are comfortable using sticky notes or any other apps that work for you!

The biggest point behind this post is to push you guys to implement this positive impact that will impact every area of your life!

Have a wonderful day ahead!

Start using BruTask on -> https://brutask.com/

  1. 3

    Awesome platform! I've been using LinkedIn but not really sure how to get the most out of it. Do I need to work on making a lot of connections before posts pick up traction?

    1. 1

      You should try to build up your connections as much as you can! That really pushes your content to more people, with more people commenting on it.

  2. 2

    Great work on the simplistic design of BruTask @harshvijay!

  3. 1

    Hey @harshvijay

    I wanna say the website is beautiful. Super clean and high quality!

    1. 1

      Thank you so much for the feedback!

  4. 1

    It looks like an interesting product, that remove the clutter around tasks management.

    Have you considered building some integrations?

    1. 1

      Yes we have couple of integrations planned in the coming year. Do sign up to stay tuned with the updates!

      1. 1

        I can probably help with it. I'm building a product that enables small teams to ship the kind of integration than big team do, with really little time and money.

        1. 1

          Let's stay connected then, might be use to both of us!

          1. 1

            Okay. I've just followed you on Twitter. Do not hesitate to follow me back to stay updated.

            I'm currently working on https://www.integrations.love

            1. 1

              Sure thing!
              Keep up the hustle mate!

  5. 1

    Great work! I'm interested in understanding what sort of content you posted on LinkedIn? Was it directly advertising your product or just general value around to-do lists and productivity? When I've just directly marketed a product on LinkedIn in the past, I found it didn't work so well with me. Maybe I did something wrong though.

    1. 1

      @fadedred LinkedIn is a tricky platform to be honest.

      You need to ensure that you are giving out value first, then marketing the product. That's what I did and it worked out pretty well.

      I would also suggest you to use the right hashtags and post only between 9:30am - 11:30am on weekdays. That's the best time to get the right reach.

      If you want to see the kind of posts I did for linkedin, you can check out the posts on this link.
      Might help you understand better!

  6. 1

    This is great, I'll be taking a look! What's the tech stack here? looks fantastic.

    1. 1

      @liam_d It's based on web-proxy frameworks!
      Cheers!

  7. 1

    Nice website design. Which account did you publish posts? Your personal account or BruTask?

    1. 1

      I used both, personal account as well as my agency account of Brucira to publish the posts. Our entire team further accelerated the marketing efforts by individually posting about Brutask as well.

  8. 1

    Landing page and agency website are obnoxiously beautiful! Congratz G

    1. 2

      Thank you so much @RjYoungling! Glad to hear that feedback!

  9. 1

    Just FYI the link in the third line "After the successful launch of Ruttl's" doesn't work.

    1. 1

      I see that there is the same issue with the link in the sentence "The entire team at my agency, Brucira also posted on LinkedIn"

  10. 1

    Animations on the landing page are clean! Both on Brutask & Ruttl.

    Any tips on how I can make one of those videos? Working on improving our landing page for Zorbi.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the feedback @Deagler! You can use Adobe After Effects to create one of these videos. Interaction videos do really well on landing pages!

  11. 1

    Just loved the simplistic yet powerful UI of Brutask and I am using it :)

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