How i'm launching a review site that doesn't suck
Review websites suck.
Most people buy things based on the trusted recommendation of other people they know (or know of).
Yet, reviews:
- Aren't trusted - Businesses incentivize customers to leave good reviews for free product and discounts
- Aren't from people you know or know of
That's dumb.
So I thought...why isn't there a place you can see all of the software tools & service providers other founders use to run their business, how much they pay for them, with a real review / score
So I made this little project: www.FounderStacks.co
There's around 20 founders up there so far with all of the stuff they use and recommend (including people you know like Shaan Puri and Nick Huber)
Some I collected manually and some I curated from what they have said online.
Now, I don't know if this will work, but here's how I'm thinking about getting intial traction as a complete business noob:
1. Automated email outreach to founders to get them to add their stack
I have 4 secondary email domains sending about 20 outbound emails per day to founders through instantly.ai. This will slowly ramp up to 200 / day.
So far with the little emails I've sent I'm sitting around 16% reply rate.
To set this up I bought domains through Squarespace that were similar in name and forwarded them to my main domain, then I bought google workspace accounts for each domain, and set up the DNS records before I started warming up the emails for 2 weeks before sending.
2. Launch on Product Hunt
I've never done it before, but here's how I think I can get some initial upvotes:
a. Find active members on product hunt, connect with them on linkedin, tell them I'm launching soon and I will support their launches in exchange.
b. Reach out to everyone I've talked to about this project and see if they could upvote. (including mom 😂)]
Also, search through all of the Indie Hackers posts related to PH to see what other people found success with.
3. Launch on other relevant channels
Here's a list of subreddits where I think promotions are allowed. Gotta be careful here to not get banned:
r/RoastMyStartup
r/AlphaandBetausers
r/GrowthHacking
r/Digitalnomad
r/Promotereddit
r/Entrepreneur
r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
r/IMadeThis
r/IndieBiz
r/SideProject
r/SmallBusiness
r/Startups
I'm not going to spam but I will ask for feedback.
And I'm also going to go to newslettersdirectory.com and reach out to every relevant newsletter to see if they want to feature Founder Stacks, talk about it, or have me contribute at all to their content in exchange.
