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How I growth hacked my way to +500 waiting list subscribers 📈

It's about a year now since I started to work on my personal CRM 🤖

While my technical founder is doing all the hard work, I figured I could do my part and get us a lot of high-quality beta users. In this article, I'll explain how I used Product Hunt, PhantomBuster & Twitter to achieve my goal of creating an ongoing stream of interested users to our Upcoming Product Hunt page.

1. Find qualified users

The first step for me was to find such high-quality users. The niche I'm looking into are tech people, between 18-35, that are looking for a lightweight CRM that doesn't need manual data input and that will help them to stay in touch with their friends and network through reminders.

Luckily for me, I'm not the first one trying to build this and I found about 20 similar products that had launched on Product Hunt. Of course, none of these products solved my problem, but it was clear that people who were interested in one of those products, would be interested in mine.

A few examples of similar products on PH (Product Hunt)

2. Export users in a meaningful way

That's where PhantomBuster comes into play. Thanks to their API, I was able to scrape every single PH user profile who had upvoted a similar product to mine. Most of the users on PH link their profile to their Twitter account, that's the key part of my growth hacking strategy 🤩Altogether, I scraped about 11k profiles.

PhantomBuster scrapping data...

3. Reach out to users in a constructive and non-spammy way.

3.1 Automatically like their latest tweets

This is a simple and light way of getting someone's attention and there are tons of tools that allow you to do so. My automation simply runs in the background and likes about 300 profiles per day. Since I've started this automation, the average volume of daily visits to my twitter profile has increased by 500% and the average amount of new daily followers, by 50%!

Since my Twitter profile contains a description of my product and a direct link to my sign-up page, this has significantly increased the number of sign-ups I've received. I'll let you guess when I started this automation 👇
Product Hunt waiting list graph

3.2 Personally reach out to key beta users

After playing around with the CSV file and creating a few pivot tables, I was able to find a few key beta users based on the number of PH followers they had and the number of similar products they had upvoted. I then reached out personally to those.

3.3 Send out promoted tweets to all users

Twitter allows you to create custom audiences based on CSV files that contain twitter usernames. You can then target those with ads.
Polls to get to know your users better, call to actions, articles and so on are a great way to create engagement with your early users and drive more people to your sign-up page.

Example of twitter polls and call to actions

That's it! You've just built a lasting way to find great beta users! 🏆

  1. 3

    Liking their tweets was a nice touch - will have to explore this approach when I’m closer to my launch date. What tool do you use for the Twitter automation?

  2. 2

    @Webbiger hey mate what did you use to do the auto-tweet liking? :)

  3. 2

    Thanks for sharing this Nathan. I've been looking into getting started with PB and this explained the usage and journey very well. Running a community based platform Im pretty convinced I can interact with both contributors and clients this way. Keep up the good work!

  4. 2

    Yo Nathan, very interesting and creative approach.
    Thanks for sharing.

  5. 2

    This is a great set of tips! I had not heard of PhantomBuster before but it looks like a great tool for this. Thanks for sharing!

  6. 1

    I love these clever workarounds to find/target users!

  7. 1

    This is awesome! Just came across your post while searching for new ways to deploy phantom buster and I really like the idea of engaging with your prospective audience based on their previous upvotes on product hunt.

  8. 1

    Hey @Webbiger, this is great! I'm currently developing around user growth and would love to include your content as a case study - Would this be okay? (Will include link to your site of course!)

    1. 1

      Yeah sure! Send me the link!

  9. 1

    This is a fantastic tactic @Webbiger!

    I'll try PhantomBuster asap.

  10. 1

    Hey @Webbiger this is awesome.

    What is your next step? Would love to hear and exchange ideas!

    1. 1

      Hey! Sorry for the late reply :) Definitely gonna do more direct sales. You get more feedback that way :) But the prospecting strategy will stay the same!

  11. 1

    Anyone know of any free social media liking automation tools?

  12. 3

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 2

      This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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