How we got our site to 10,000 views in one months without a penny of ad spend.

The black and white fire project is an unfunded, bootstrapped free application with a mission to give everyone in the UK the tools to understand and plan their financial futures, and retire early if that is their goal!

Launched on 31st Dec 2023 we've managed to get 10,000 views without a marketing budget.

How did we do it?

We didn't have a mailing list or any social pages or the time to create and maintain them. And quite honestly we don't have any real experience in SEO (we are finance nerds not search engine experts!) so how did we drive 10,000+ views to our website in January 2024, from people interested in our niche and the majority of the traffic from UK residents?

We realised we were already a part of pre-made communities with the exact demographics we were after! Reddit!

As avid readers of r/UKpersonalfinance and r/FIREUK we had an audience we had something valuable to share with them!

Over the course of the January we've posted 6 times to reddit with a link to the site and requested feedback from the community (who have been amazing!) and what we found very quickly was that our tool SUCKED. It was restrictive and the UI sliders we had were near impossible to use on mobile (which the majority of our users used!).

This negative feedback was the perfect motivator to engage with the community we wanted to serve and we iterated HARD. Each post showing what we had responded to the community in terms of the features we had listened to and acted on. We no longer needed to ask for feedback as people would just share their feelings! And we started seeing more and more positive feedback, greater engagement and more views!

We also focused on when we posted, this was really important to boost the views on the tool and get the community talking about it, instead of it sliding down the 'hot' rankings. This involved checking the average online users intermittently throughout a week to identify high traffic periods.

Our first post got just over 20,000 reddit views that translated into a big bump in our site traffic! And one of our more recent big posts got nearly 70,000 reddit views which translated to the highest traffic ever!

A few tips if you plan to do this:

• don't bug the community, only post if you have something valuable to share.
• images in the post tend to draw more views
• engage with as many responses as you can even if its just a thank you!

The hardest thing has been having the time between posts to rapidly develop the solution to be able to give the community more value!

If you want to use our free tool you can check it out here: https://blackandwhitefire.com

We also maintain a roadmap of planned features as we have big future plans for the solution! You can check out our ever evolving live plan here https://blackandwhitefire.com/roadmap