How we marketed our AI product for free. With real results!

I’m really tired of those articles giving out free promotion tips because most of them are just full of nonsense.

They say things like "Send out emails" or "Try affiliate marketing". But honestly, those tips are too vague and not practical. Where do you even find email addresses for newsletters, and how do you start an affiliate program?

So let’s switch things up I’ll just tell you what we did at Letterly and how many people actually downloaded the app.

But first, let me make something clear:

• I’m not talking about ASO. All the numbers I’m sharing already count the people who found us organically.
• We’re only focusing on Apple stuff, not Android.

Launch

The spike when we launched happened because the App Store likes to show off new apps to see how they do. Plus, we told our friends and shared the news on social media. After that, downloads settled down to around 10–20 a day, mostly from people finding us in the app store.

Hacker News

You can promote stuff on Hacker News in two ways:

• Show off your product in Show HN. Just make a quick post there. Here’s an example.
• Share interesting tech articles from your website. Example. We only did the first one — Show HN. Our post didn’t do great (just 10 upvotes), but it got some attention.

Peak day result: 55 installs.

Reddit

You can get a lot of views by posting on Reddit. I posted in the subreddits r/Entrepreneur and r/SideProject.

The tricky part about Reddit is that you have to be active and popular to get noticed. That means you have to post and comment a lot without just talking about your own stuff.

But for us, Reddit didn’t bring in many installs:

Peak day result: 26 installs.

Product Hunt

We launched Letterly on Product Hunt and got to be the top product of the day by planning ahead and getting lots of support.

And it really paid off. Here’s what happened:

• Saturday: 203 installs (launch day)
• Sunday: 181 installs
• Monday: 330 installs (we were in an email they sent out)
• After a month: 109 installs (they mentioned us on Twitter)

And a good chunk of those people who downloaded the app later paid for it.

Newsletters

This is a tough one since they pick who they talk about. But after getting to #1 on Product Hunt, some AI newsletters started noticing us.

One big one was Superhuman. It helped keep the buzz going from Product Hunt:

Peak day result: 168 installs.

Betabound

We stumbled upon this one. It’s a platform where you can launch your app before it’s fully ready. You can send out a Testflight link or a landing page or just a survey (which is what we did).

People like it because they get to try new stuff early.

There are people there! I recommend Betabound for building up an email list of early users.

Result: 300+ emails

We couldn’t track how many of them actually downloaded the app, but we got feedback and noticed more downloads on the days we sent out emails.

Directories

You might have seen those lists of "9999+ app directories".

Well, they didn’t do well for us. Practically none of them made a difference.

Result: Nope

Betalist

Betalist is kind of like Product Hunt but smaller. We didn’t see any big bumps from posting there. To put it in perspective, we got 670 people from Product Hunt and just 53 from Betalist.

So, you could give it a shot for the sake of a few dozen people, but don’t expect much.

Result: Barely noticed

Final thoughts

We’ve still got lots of other things to try. I hope what we’ve done helps you figure out where to put your time and effort.

I wrote this article in a flash with the Letterly app I just talked about. I jotted down my thoughts and got a draft, then added details later.

Good luck with your startup!