How to promote your startups?

First of all, make community

Nice tool! Have you ever considered sharing your tool on Reddit? e.g., responding to posts where people ask about things that your tool can solve.

For example:
https://segue.co/?topic=Tools-for-automation-and-daily-tasks&subreddits=automation,calendar,productivity,simpleliving

• Tools for automation and daily tasks
• Any recommendations on good productivity software to keep track of tasks throughout the week?
• Any good alternatives to Google Calendar + Tasks combo?
• I'm looking for a way to schedule/structure my day
• Free Task Planner Software / App
• Suggestion for personal task management app

I wrote this for someone else but it's good advice for you too.

I'll copy paste it below but you can read the website version here: https://www.younglingresearch.com/essays/slowgrowth

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I’m an entrepreneurial scientist who studies marketing for a living. Unfortunately, academia has done an EXCEPTIONALLY bad job of communicating research outside its little bubble.

As a result, and I see this constantly, people just don’t understand the definition of marketing. Let alone understand how to use it.

From your question, it seems that you (like almost everyone in the maker community) equate marketing to distribution.

You make a product, ship it, then start “marketing” to find customers.

This is completely wrong. It’s not that this can’t work or that it can’t be a valid approach (e.g. you’re just interested in shipping product X), but this isn’t how marketing was designed to be used. This is a high-risk approach to starting a business as opposed to medium-risk or low-risk.

In this framework, marketing is the gold flake on the cake:

@lili234674 The most expensive cake in the world,guess how much?#fyp #foodtiktok #food #foryoupage #GEICOLipSync #chocolate #cake #foryoupage #rainbowfood ♬ original sound - Cheese sweetheart
But in reality, marketing is sugar, or flour, or eggs. It’s an inherent and inextricable piece of the value of the product. In fact, it’s so important that Professor Drucker said only marketing and innovation are profit centers (generate money), everything else is a cost.

If you need a heuristic, I’d much prefer you equate marketing to research instead. Especially qualitative research as a small indie hacker.

In 1960, Professor McCarthy created the framework now know as the 4P’s of marketing: product & price, place & promotion.

As you can see, the development of “product” is in there. It’s one of the levers that can be used once the diagnostic & strategic phases are done.

At the most fundamental level, you as a founder + marketer, have 3 jobs:

I. YOU NEED A WELL-DEFINED MARKET SEGMENT
There are many people that could benefit from your idea. This large amorphous collection can be subdivided into subsets of customers with similar preferences. These are called segments. But since you don’t have the resources to cater to all segments, you pick one to serve. This is your target segment. (I call this “your audience” when I’m teaching my students.)

Now that you have a target segment, you can study them to find out what their star problems are. A star problem is a problem that is serious enough that they’d pay money to get it resolved.

This framework doesn’t really work for consumers but that’s fine for now. Selling to consumers is much more of a black box than selling to businesses. The reason being “star problems.” If a business has a $10,000 problem that you can solve for $2,000 that’s a no-brainer. With consumers, it’s more about feelings.

To study the market, big companies use sophisticated techniques to figure out the segments, like K-means clustering for example, and other quantitative marketing techniques.

You can forget about all that. Just focus on ethnography. Digital ethnography specifically. This means identifying the places where your audience (or target segment) hangs out online so you can study them.

See How to Start a Business and Get Your First Customers; Also see Define a Target Audience (or Picking a Niche).

Why online?

a. It’s easy to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.

b. You don’t have to worry about social desirability bias.

This is a cognitive bias that causes people to “lie”. Either to themselves or to the researcher because they want to come across better. Suppose you ask people “Are you a generous person?” Almost no one will say no because they don’t want to view themselves as selfish or might be ashamed you (the researcher) will judge them.

Ii. FORMULATE A STRATEGY
There are books, blogs, and substacks full of confusing, overly complicated “advice” on what strategy is.

It’s simple. Someone is at A and they wish to go to B. A strategy is simply the path you choose out of the total collection of paths to go from A to B.

The strategy I recommend is to “demonstrate you can help your audience by actually helping them”. (Again, this doesn’t let itself well to consumers but it’s great for B2B).

You already know A and B because of your qualitative market research, so now you simply help close the delta ever so slightly. This builds trust and helps establish you as an authority. (This is going from an audience to a tribe)

See this essay by my friend Professor Bruce Clark on the A-B delta: Helping Customers Avoid “Bad” Choices.

You can then get a subset of those people onto a list.

This is special because it means two things:

a. I have this expensive problem.

b. I trust you to help me solve it.

Keep in mind that getting a person to sign up is already a sale with the price being $0.

Iii. EXECUTE THE TACTICS
The very last step is the place where everyone starts. The tactics. But how can you execute tactics if you don’t have a strategy? How can you have a strategy if you don’t know who you’re serving? How can you serve them if you don’t know what you’re helping them with? If this seems ludicrous, it’s because it is.

So this final step is really just the implementation of the strategy. What exact tactics will you use to accomplish your strategy? This is also where your iteration comes in.

Not in the strategy but in the execution of it.

A NOTE ON RISK REDUCTION
But to answer your question directly, you should absolutely continue at the macro level.

You should, however, have zero loyalty to ideas. In order to reduce the systemic risk, you need volume. This is where @dvassallo ‘s Small Bets idea comes into play. You try a bunch of things and then see what the market connects with.

See Birds and Frogs on how to think about the fragility of systems in complex environments.

Andrew Mason (Groupon founder) once said: It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are, you’ll never be smarter than the collective market. So ship a bunch of things and iterate.

Right now you can do one of two things: scrap the idea and go to the next one or start at step 1, the diagnosis of a market segment.

Your main job until you’re successful will be to get comfortable going through this cycle by doing just that many times. The job of a comedian is not to write and deliver a terrific set, it’s to get comfortable writing bits (jokes), going on stage, and bombing. If you get comfortable with this process, then the good bits will take care of themselves. The same holds true for you. Just continue to show up and do the work.

Good luck.

P.S. I see you’re doing AI. Be careful hopping on trends. They’re dangerous for three reasons:

i. Lots of competition.

ii. You’re unlikely to be passionate about it which means you’ll quit when it gets rough.

iii. Easy come, easy go.

If the money comes easily it tends to go easily as well when the fad is over. During Facebook, everyone built a social media thingy. During Foursquare, everyone had a location app. During IG, everyone built a photo app. During Groupon, everyone did coupons. During Airbnb, everyone did sharing economy. During Uber… you get the gist.

I have the same confusion as u. I launch a new product on ProductHunt.com, but there are few people to add to the waitlist. And there have someone to check my Product?

Hi, I am Hieu - Founder of GoingViral, a SaaS-based approach to replace traditional marketing agency for startups which focus on solving 2 common problems with startups, especially tech startups

1. No/limited knowledge and human resources for marketing
2. Limited budget for marketing or just throwing money away to buy followers/subscribers from the internet without organic user interactions.

Take a look at my landing page and shoot me a dm if you want discuss further
https://www.goingviral.digital/

Basically, it depends on the type of service you are about to provide. Whatever the business/service might be, the digital platform is at its peak when it comes to branding and other kinds of stuff. That's why I always prefer creating an online presence for the startup that might be a boost for your business. Once it has the right audience set, your specific brand would be unshaken by other rivals.

When you get into promotion for your startup, it is always challenging because we have to bring in traction

• Find your audience
• Know your buyers persona
• Mark a Strategy for your Startup

If social media (Optimize the Bio of your page)

• Consistency (remember all channel doesn't fit for all product) - you have to find that (But make your presence in all channels)
• Give important to design and content as well
• Post videos
• Use hastags (relevant to image, content, brand, audience)

Website:
Optimize your website content (with keywords) user is searching for
Use more multimedia in your website (to reduce bounce rate)

• Use email marketing for Startups (Use effective subject line and pre-header line)
  (try using different subject line - always it is A/B testing method) It shouldn't be more salesy.

• Try for Guest post, podcast collaboration

• Try affiliate marketing

• Make your presence in forums

If your SaaS Product (startup) you can try SaaS Marketplace like

• https://saasmantra.com/
• https://stacksocial.com/
• https://www.dealify.com/

Building in public has been a very effective way of promoting for many Indie Hackers. Kind of a slow burn if your audience is small though.

Few ways to promote your startup

• Start a blog
• Build an audience on social media
• Launch product on ProductHunt
• Guest posting
• Partnership with other related product
• Build an email list
• Join startup communities like https://startuphunt.online/community

Engage in communities, especially in those where your target audience is.
For example, my target audience is developers - they live mainly on Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews. So posting and engaging there in a meaningful way is the first step that usually already yields really good results.

You can also try cold DMs, those worked great for me as well!
Shameless plug here, I built Twidd to write lots of DMs to my target audience, while keeping it personal!

1. Hire a person who understands marketing & promotion. Let him/her do the job.

If you're unable to hire someone, you will need a lot of free time + knowledge to do it yourself. It's not that easy as it looks at first sight. Some comments here cover great points, but have in mind that some points may differ for every product / project. Covering too many points might be overwhelming for a team of 1 person. I'd suggest starting with your target audience and listing all possible ways of reaching that audience. Strip that list down to only a few doable key points. Also do not forget to define clearly what goal you want to reach. Many just try to spam and post everywhere without a clear goal which usually leads not knowing what works and where to go next.

Hi Lyla,
Consider to start with essential SEO and promotion of your product, to get organic users and growth.

1. You should start with social media. It is very poor on content, just 1 post on Instagram. There are free web-sites where you can add a post every day, for all social media.
2. Create a short video explaining what the product is and why is the best among others.
3. Get real reviews, with links.
4. Newsletter/subscriptions section is missing.
5. News and blogs.
6. Find you customer (LinkedIn) and go to offer him your product, having all above done.
   Good luck!

There are many places to start. Here's what I'd do.

If you have 0 users - Go ahead and reach out to companies that you know and offer them a trial of the product. That's cold outbound marketing or cold sales. It's hard in the beginning but works.

If you have users - Start a content strategy on socials and your website so you can start leveraging inbound lead generation

Any questions?