How we grew from 5 to over 320 paying customers in a week.

Launching a new product is often challenging.

You do everything by the book, put lots of effort into creating campaigns to support the launch, keep your hopes up.

And then a bummer. Why is the traffic so low? Why did you only reach 30% of your signups goal? What’s up with the low engagement!?

The final outcome often ends up being less satisfying than you anticipated it to be.

This is what happened to us at Piktostory.

At least until we decided to change our tactics, think outside the box, and try a more daring approach to boosting signups and engagement.

This is our story of how Piktostory managed to grow not by 10x but by 60x in just one week.

I hope this will inspire you and prove that moonshot-style growth is still possible in the startup world.

At the beginning of this year, we launched Piktostory - a video editing platform that turns longer videos into bite-size clips ready for social media platforms.

We planned our launch carefully and promoted it via different channels (paid and organic).

While we managed to acquire over 3,600 signups for it relatively fast, getting our first paying customers proved to be more challenging.

After we finally monetized Piktostory, it took us almost 3 months to acquire 5 paying customers. Despite trying various marketing tactics (that seemed to work for others) things were still moving slow.

It was time to think outside the box.

We brainstormed different ideas and looked for online communities that would potentially be interested in our product.

That's how we came across a Facebook group LTDF. It's a closed community of tech enthusiasts who are always looking for tools to increase their productivity or, in general, make their work easier.

We contacted the group admins and did a coordinated live launch for their community on Facebook.

This obviously wasn’t as easy as it might sound. We had 3 weeks to mobilize the whole team.

We launched a dedicated landing page, implemented a tracking system, and updated our payment mechanism to support a special deal.

We put in additional hours (often at night) to answer tons of questions. We even implemented a public roadmap to keep the community in the loop on future product developments.

But it was all worth it. Big times.

After just a week, we managed to increase the number of our paying customers from 5 to 320 (that’s a +60x increase). That number continues to grow.

But more importantly, we received a lot of feedback on the product which helped us push it in the right direction.

The key learning from this experience was to be open to test out the not-so-well-known strategies.

Take a risk.

Go out of your comfort zone and you will be surprised by how much you can achieve.