28
19 Comments

How ruttl Scaled From 500 To 1000 Users In 1 Month!

ruttl has finally touched the mighty "1000 users" mark guys! But the most exciting part of this process was actually the rapid
testing->figuring what works-> scaling the marketing methods

Here are the major things that I did to acheieve this -

1. Google Ads Campaign

  • Calculated max monthly budget beforehand to avoid any cash burning on ads.
  • Ran ads in 4-5 different regions ONLY that are popular for design industry.
  • Experimented with 2 types of adverts only.
  • Kept changing keywords every 3 days to test effectiveness.

I want to thank the community because I got some great tips and suggestions to make my ads effective! 👐

2. SEO Optimization

  • Researched and created a directory of keywords my competitors are using.
  • Publishing blog regularly with focus on top 15-20 keywords that I feel would be highly relevant to ruttl.
  • ruttl is already ranking on the first page for few keywords. I can see the numbers are growing consistently in search console.
  • If you want to try a quick hack which I felt worked nicely for me, check out this post that I shared on indiehackers a while ago.

3. Community Outreach

  • As always, community support has helped me ever since I have joined indiehackers.
  • After someone pointed out a small issue in my approach with this community, I quickly realized the mistake and corrected myself.
  • Now I keep sharing valuable posts that might help the community. This has helped me in creating a strong tribe of people who are loving ruttl's progress :)
  • More than the numbers, the biggest thing that I have got through IH is feedback and new ideas that have directly impacted ruttl's product development!

4. Retargeting Waitlisted Users

  • Although my waitlisted users did go inactive a while back, I shared this issue in a IH post and got some ideas.
  • The best way I managed to reactive few of them was by sending them useful blogs published on ruttl for a while.
  • After 2-3 engagements and ensuring they were warm leads, I then re sent follow up emails to invite them to sign up on ruttl.
  • While the numbers aren't astronomically high, this definitely did help me get 20-30 sign ups.

Shoutout my entire ruttl team who have has made this achievement possible by constantly putting in dedicated efforts and work relentlessly to make ruttl into the best visual feedback tool!

Hope you guys found this post helpful!

Got your own story of scaling your product? Do share it in the comments with everyone, would love to hear and learn from them! 👇

Have a great day!
Harsh 💯


In case you are curious about the illustration at the top, my co-founder @siddhitaupare and our creative team specially made it to celebrate this 1000 user milestone on ruttl! So all artwork credits go to them!

  1. 1

    Hi Vijay, great post. Few questions:

    • What were your ad-spending limits? Were you targeting some specific CPC / CPA?
    • How long did it take for you content marketing efforts to start taking off?
    • What was the issue in how you approach this community that you mention?
    • How did you grow your user waitlist?
    1. 2
      1. Not targeting specific CPC but I am spending on average about $10 per day. I try to keep the CPC under $2 wherever it's possible.

      2. Can't put an exact date or timeline on it but content marketing efforts are surely coming into effect since last 2 months. My co-founder and I have been writing blogs for at least last 6 months (1 blog per week). It's been helping us showcase our expertise and increase brand awareness in the market too.

      3. Initially when I was new to the idea of communities, I was answering questions of other members by relating it and back linking to the website of Ruttl in several comments. Someone told me that it was giving the sense of spam marketing. So I stopped doing it and rather just focused on sharing value that's possible from my experience.

      4. Huge chunk of my waitlist came through marketing to existing clients of my design agency, promoting Ruttl on my personal LinkedIn network of designers and developers and Indiehackers of course was a big contributor too!

      Hope these answer your questions @palmik!
      Let me know if you have any questions 🙌

      1. 1

        Thank you Vijay for taking the time to write such a long reply! Very useful.

        1. 1

          Happy to be helpful!

  2. 1

    This is fantastic man. I also love how beautiful your website looks!

    1. 3

      Haha I'm glad to hear your positive feedback!

  3. 1

    Thanks for sharing! could you share more around your SEO optimization process? Just launched a blog for Adflow and I'd love to understand how to make the most of the content marketing effort.

    I tried to look for the link you mentioned but couldn't find it 😔

    1. 2

      @lorenzosignoretti Happy to help! So here's what I did

      • Went through competitor websites in detail and looked for all technical keywords that were relevant to ruttl like "visual feedback website", "website review tool" and so on.
      • Once around 70-80 keywords were in place, I started incorporating them into my blogs, by using them wherever possible and relevant.
      • After a while google starts indexing and catching up on there word patterns and if the content is actually good, your ranking goes up.
      • Further more you should also try doing technical changes to site like Title Optimization, Meta Data and Alt tags. Here's a useful link for that.

      Also, here's a link to the older post I mentioned above.
      Cheers!

      1. 1

        Thanks for the breakdown @harshvijay 🙏

  4. 1

    Great read, thanks for sharing!

  5. 1

    Great read, congratulaions! Could you elaborate a bit more on the following two points:

    After someone pointed out a small issue in my approach with this community, I quickly realized the mistake and corrected myself.

    Now I keep sharing valuable posts that might help the community. This has helped me in creating a strong tribe of people who are loving ruttl's progress :)

    I'm loving this community, and reading stories from fellow hackers thus far, and I can't wait to start sharing some thoughts and asking for feedback as well! Would love to hear if you have any specific insights on how best to go about that.

    1. 1

      @wouterbesems Thanks for asking this question. Here's what happened -

      Initially when I came on to indiehackers, I used to comment on other members posts, I would read it->understand->comment based on reference to my product. However, someone from the community pointed out to me that I was spamming and marketing the product links on every post.

      This was a quick awakening call for me and I realized the mistake I was doing while communicating here. So, I decided to block certain number of hours only to create and share content that would be highly useful to the community.

      As a result, although it takes more effort but now several members follow ruttl closely and are very active on my posts. I love the way it's a mutual exchange of knowledge.

      Hope that answers your question!

  6. 1

    Congrats on the milestone bro. I have been noticing all your hustling a lot on IH and that's an inspiration. The UI/UX is spot on and am sure Ruttl is success in the making.

    One piece of advice I can give is to ask your existing user for a referral for some incentive, say a free top-up for a week or two. Have a look at this post www.shorturl.at/jnAY5 (not mine, it's a starred medium post, so your warned :))

    I think given the fact your user will share the tool with their client there is a strong word of mouth factor. I would equally focus on conversion and retention from the early on. No one likes a leaking bucket. Take care.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much for the good words @shaqqs! Just doing what I love haha!

      I saw the link your shared and it seems like an idea to try out. Will surely try working on this. I have a referral system in place where if someone shares about ruttl on twitter, they unlock 1 more free project in ruttl.

      Do you have any new incentive ideas apart from this, that I can offer? Something better?

      1. 1

        So let's say your ideal customer is freelancers and agencies who have a client who needs a tool to give feedback. I know you will have founders use it from their own startup but that doesn't have the loop where others know about your tool and get the word of mouth going.

        I think you should reach out to agencies and give them an offer they cant refuse for a limited time. Once they are hooked it should be an easy convert plus all their client will know about your tool which they would ask the next freelance or agency they work with.

        I know there are a lot of assumptions here but the key to getting more lead eye balls. Plus get direct feedback to close the leaking bucket.

        1. 1

          @shaqqs sorry for the late reply, got caught up with work last few weeks! Yes I have been now reaching out to other agencies directly. Just one small issue is that the cold mails aren't converting very well. (like 1 in 25 i would say). Testing new ways to get communication with them right now.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments