How I got 7000+ beta customers in less than 2 weeks with a $0 marketing budget

My oh my oh my! I launched the beta for TripFate (https://tripfate.com) about 8 months ago (right before Christmas) with a single post on IndieHackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/how-i-met-my-wife-and-why-i-built-yet-another-flight-price-tracker-34fb46049e).

I then shared that post on several sub-reddits and Hackernews… Being a first time maker, I honestly thought that I might get about 50 beta subscribers, if I’m lucky. Following the footsteps of some of the famous makers in the community, I challenged myself to not spend any money on marketing - it was mostly an experiment… plus I’m a little frugal.

Anyway, I wake up the next morning and have maybe 100-150 comments on my threads - awesome! I replied to every single one of them, and went to work. When I checked my dashboard that night, I had more than 1000+ new subscribers! Honestly, I really couldn’t believe it and thought my captcha implementation had gone wonky and I had fake signups - but that wasn’t really the case! 10 days later, I had more than 7000 subscribers!

I was kind of shocked, and decided to not post anything else until I was really ready to get out of beta (which is now - woohoo!) - I didn’t want to get more people to sign up until I really felt ready.

Now I’m not a marketing-guru, but I guess I did several things right. I’m sharing my thoughts below:

1. Find your target audience: It’s really important to consider where your target audience spends their time on the internet, even more so if you don’t want to pay $$$ to Facebook/Google/etc. to target those audiences for you. In my case for example, I figured that the people most likely to subscribe would either be early tech-adopters, or folks who actually enjoy traveling. Hence, I posted on platforms (and subreddits) where these groups were mostly likely to hang out.

2. Time your posts: To add to the first point, I believe it is also somewhat important to try and spread your posts across the day - again, it made sense to share the post when most people in that community (or subreddit) were active. Reddit kind of makes this easy by telling you how many members are online at that particular time. For other platforms, a simple Google search should tell you what times might get you the most number of viewers.

3. Listen and participate: The first two points should help get at least a few people to look at your post - yay! But now that you have their attention, it’s super important that you listen and participate in discussions. For example, if someone makes a recommendation, be open about implementing the change quickly - or tell them why it might not make sense (but ask to be challenged, and thank them for their time!). Several kind people reached out to me with ideas, suggestions, and proposals. One person just reached out to me over the website’s chat to say “Hi” and we discussed some great destinations if you’re traveling solo - it was awesome!

4. Be a part of the community and contribute: You might have already heard this before, but it’s really a great idea to share what you learnt with others! Go check out other people’s projects, leave comments, give feedback, be nice, and genuinely be a part of your target audience’s community! Remember, part of the internet is a global village - the more people look up to you, relate with you, or like you, the more they are likely to share news about your project(s) with people they might know. Also, try and treat your customers as humans and not as data or emails in your database. If you’re able to build a community around your product / project, the more likely it is that people are going to stay and care about what you do.

5. Be honest, be human, be vulnerable, stay motivated - your product won’t be perfect when you start out, and you’ll have people who might complain or fail to understand the value. It’s okay! Listen, and be ready to be wrong, but remember why you started it in the first place - don’t give up if you don’t see success in the first few days. Moreover, it’s vital that you remain honest - the majority of people value genuine responses than generic corporate fluff. If you’re the only person working on your product/project, don’t use “We”/”Us”/etc. in your communication or website (unless maybe you’re required to do so for some weird legal reason). One reason why I think that post got so much traction is because a) I shared a personal story, and b) I discussed an issue that I actually care about.

So yeah, there’s really no secret sauce to this exercise, but it’s all about being nice, active within your audience communities, and building something that you genuinely care about… or let me know if I’m wrong. I’d love to listen to what has worked for everyone else! :)

Ciao!

P.S. - https://tripfate.com is in beta until October 1st, so give it a shot if you like what you see! Thanks!