How we went from barely any visits to 30 sign-ups per day
Hey IHs,
This is not a massive success but it's been a huge progress for DoTenX.
For the past couple of months that we were building DoTenX we barely had any visits to our website. I tried building in public on Twitter but didn't help much.
Now it's the third week that we consistently have an average of 30 sign-ups and this is the list of the things I believe have worked for us:
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Making the entire project open-source (well technically it was partially open-source even before but we planned not to make the entire project until we're ready)
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Posting on relevant sub-reddits
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Posting on dev .to
Number 1 and 2 are the biggest factors. It's worth mentioning number 1 has been the key factor in receiving endless feedback from users. If you can make your project open-source just do it without any doubt.
These are the things that have never worked:
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Twitter
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HN (At this point I believe they protect their portfolio companies from competitors - I'll write about that later)
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LinkedIn
Thanks for sharing! I think it definitely depends on your situation. HN can work (it doesn't hurt to try, since it's low effort), but twitter and linkedin work if you have lots of followers.
I find organic marketing that works better is focused marketing rather than passive marketing from making your own posts.
I do the same for reddit, but rather than making posts, I respond to people experiencing pain points that could be solved by my product.
For now, I don't even have a website nor a product, but I've already built my pre-launch channel on discord to over 600 members in just a few weeks.
FYI, my product is an API that allows you to run our AI models on the cloud, one of the AIs we're going to offer after our initial launch is an uncensored text generator.
I mainly leveraged the frustration people on reddit had with OpenAI's chatgpt and GPT-3, which has extensive censorship but mainly leaving comments and replies to people.
I usually offer some advice or relevant info before leaving the self promo though.
This comment is actually a good example ;)
If you're curious to see more about my product, feel free to follow on twitter: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch
I'll definitely try engaging more with people too. Just for that you really have to find the perfect communities I guess.
It's great that you have already built a community before offering the service.
Also, if you like, you can add your API as a service to our platform too. You don't need to share your code or anything and you decide the pricing.
Thanks! We'll consider it when we launch.
But from what I've seen, your platform is a only tool for building UI. Unless I got it wrong, are you also hosting other people's services?
Hey!
Firstly congrats on building a great product and being successful with the sign ups.
I have checked out the product and looks like a perfect alternative to bubble. However, do u guys have integration with figma yet? If not I think its a great option to consider, I am a potential user and this is the limiting feature. I am a coder and have my designs ready from my UI designers (there are many saas founders like me) if i convert the figma to react through tools like locofy, I might as well code out the entire app, but if I can integrate with your product, it'd make sense for me to be a user.
Thanks and all the best to u guys :)
Hey,
Appreciate the kind words and thanks for your valuable feedback!
We don't have an integration with Figma yet but it's on the roadmap for Q1 2023, so please keep an eye on it.
Thanks for sharing your experience
Congratulations. Although I am not sure how 1. could have contributed to your success. Can you elaborate more on that please?
Thanks!
As I mentioned in another answer, there are three reasons being an open-source product can boost its adoption by uses:
Thanks for sharing, Moshen!
I'm really interested because depending on the person you can get very different opinions, and i'm pretty sure that there should be common good practices around twitter.
Can you elaborate a bit more on why do you think that Twitter and build in public didn't work for you?
Do you know what kind of followers do you have in twitter?
How do you interact with them? Or you just post tweets?
Have an excellent day and christmas!
The main reason IMO is that there are some dominant accounts that create too much noise and Twitter's algorithm is not capable of creating good enough randomness in people's feeds.
For a small period of time, I tried some growth hack techniques on Twitter and immediately increased my followers by a few hundred in a very short period of time, but I quickly stopped it as they were really far from my target audience.
By the way, I still publicly talk about the progress of the project but it's more due to the open-source nature of the project than the build-in-public approach as we know it.
I usually tweet the plans, changes, and different related stuff and sometimes interact with the tweets I find interesting or relevant.
Thanks and have a great holiday!
this is great! do you want your tool to be featured in our website www.nocodejournal.com?
send me a message at sheilla@dshgsonic.com
Thanks! Definitely, will do.
Thanks for sharing this, @mohsenkamrani. I'm curious to know what all did you try on Twitter apart from tweeting? Any DMs, commenting, spaces?
Didn't try DMs tbh. I'll give it a go, but I'll make sure it doesn't look like spam at all.
I really dislike bulk DMs or the ones that don't provide any context and just randomly expect you to do something for them so I'll try to take a different approach.
Regarding the comments and spaces, haven't been too active there as well, as I previously tried them and they didn't help much.
yes, I agree on sending spam type DMs. But, if write some really thoughtful/useful message, I saw some good responses. However, my experiment is limited to getting to validate a problem. I have not tried this method for sales, which I think may not work that well, but not sure until I try it out.
I'm not necessarily after sales in DMs. I don't think it works at all. It's enough for me if I can convince them to take the app for a spin.
Thank you for sharing!
Though we don't have a lot of followers on twitter for our tool ruttl at the moment, it still works well if we continuously engage with the right people, who in our case our developers and designers.
Also on LinkedIn, it's advisable to use eye-catching visuals and graphics to grab attention and make your updates more engaging. This could include product screenshots, infographics, or other types of visual content.
Yup, definitely shiny product demos are helpful. Tried it a bit on TikTok and already got some good results.
The only problem is that if you want to create stuff dedicated to such posts they take a lot of your time so I'm planning to create content from the templates we add to the platform. Thanks for sharing your experience!
That's great, all the best!
Thanks!
Wonder whether I could make this web page https://www.skilledup.life/metrics/ (not updated for a long time) dynamic using your free plan. Just a thought.
Well done by the way @mohsenkamrani
By the way, you can use https://skilledup.life to build a user acquisition team fairly easily. Once subscribed, all our talent is free. SkilledUp Lifers will commit 1 to 3 hrs per day for 3 months under a Volunteer Agreement. Our own tech startup is run by them.
Thanks again and I think you already checked the product :)
Happy to see it's growing @mohsenkamrani 👋. I'm building an MVP on the platform and will share on Discord by this weekend.
Really appreciate it.
That's awesome! Let me know if you need any help, happy to jump on a zoom call or something like that. The documentation is still a WIP :)
Thanks for sharing! This would be helpful in where to put more effort into. Also didn't see much traction on Twitter.
Congrats!
First of all: 30 signups a day is great! (I'll be so psyched when Patron Hunt newsletter signups hit that velocity.)
In my experience working in developer tools for the last nine years, open source contributors are the gift that keeps on giving. When people contribute they feel a sense of ownership and a pride in that ownership. Additionally they of course have jobs! Sooner or later they take the opportunity to recommend to their employers the open source tools to which they contribute. And, as you note, it's one of the few ways to get regular feedback from developers.
In my experience, the other most powerful tool in the kit is documentation. Open-sourcing your docs can be another driver of adoption. Open-sourced docs are robust docs, and robust docs can be your #1 sales tool. Prioritize your docs right up there with your product.
Congrats on your traction and here's to your continued success :-)
Thanks for your kind support!
You describe it the best. I call these open-source platforms, rainforests of tech!
The number of opportunities that shape around them is insane.
You're right about the documentation too. The feedbacks that I receive across platforms is overwhelming, but one of a few things that everyone asks for is documentation and the other thing is that they want to see a few sample projects.
Will definitely push the documentation to an open-source repo today.
Thanks again and wish you the best.
I'm looking forward to following your progress :)
Docs are where devs go to decide whether or not to even try your product. Way more important than the marketing site at this stage.
Provide ways for devs to get a prototype up and running within a couple of hours. The faster you can get them to proof of concept for their use case, the sooner you close the deal.
Robust docs also provide assurance that if a team adopts a technology, they'll all be able to ramp up quickly on it without having to use their time teaching each other.
So to go on about it, ha! Developer tooling is my jam!
Thanks for your advice, it's very true, especially when I look at it as a user of any tool or platform.
I just published the documentation repository and will give it more priority.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I don't follow you completely, though.
How is making your product open source can affect the number of sign-ups?
And the second question which is more important, I think, is - what is the conversion from free to paid users now? Has your strategy improved it too?
Good question, and as much as I hate this answer, I have to say it depends (but I'll explain).
DoTenX is an open-source alternative to a bunch of products whose biggest challenge by far is that they lock the users in.
The very least that you lose in these platforms is that you won't be able to continue the development of your product without them.
This in my opinion is the first condition for expecting results from making the project open-source.
The other thing is that open-source projects show a level of benevolence and you clearly start by giving instead of starting with asking which helps people accept the product a lot more easily.
Imagine someone offering you a product in your DMs. How would your reaction be? Now does it change anything if they say btw it's open-source and you can experience it on your own machine too and for free?
Regarding the conversion, it's not high for now(I try to publish the results in a month or two). The easiest win for us has been the people who know us, so that impacts the data for now.
Our focus, for now, is to raise awareness, get feedback and address them at the fastest pace possible. Also, the pricing gives you an idea of what to expect.
Hi, thanks for your response.
This is an interesting and non-obvious side effect of being open-source.
I wish you the best.
Thanks and hope it helps.
Thanks for sharing.
Having this question recently, should we move our product to open source, and if it worth the efforts?
It's a very important question and only you can answer it.
However, there is a single question I'd say you should ask yourself and if the answer to that question is No, I wouldn't do it:
Does it make a difference to others if your project is open-source or not?
In our case, it clearly does. The other platforms lock you in with the product you're building but we don't. Even if you don't leave the platform you need that stability and peace of mind.
Second, others can build services around our platform with significantly more confidence so it makes a difference for it to be open-source.
I have been thinking about this for my SaaS https://usermaven.com but I am not sure how big commitment is it to manage open-source and cloud versions simultaneously.
Any ideas?
I've spent quite a lot of time on the open source question regarding product/web analytics (you and I were talking on your own post the other day, as I'm in the same space as you). I'm still on the fence, and I think the biggest issue is that Posthog and Matomo really dominate the market for open source analytics, and then you have a whole bunch of basic web analytics dashboard tools that are open source too, like Plausible etc.
Open source is a great distribution strategy and it's enabled most of those I've listed to achieve stellar growth, but I wonder if the opportunity has diminished somewhat now there are a lot of established players using the same method.
I think there is always space for new players in the market but it will obviously be more difficult to enter now than how it was a few years ago.
It's a tough choice to be honest..haha :)
It depends on how much of the project you want to make open-source.
We've had some experience with this model in the past and we realised that the more parts of the project you make open-source the easier it is to handle it. Especially the merge conflicts can be really annoying if you keep too much of the project in the private repo.
Also, I wouldn't do it without first making sure I'm ready for the cloud version (which is why it took us around 7 months to make the entire project open-source). But I think you've already sorted out that part so you should be fine.
By the way, your landing page is really nice!
Thats really interesting and shocking that making your code open to the public has actually produced results. I have done this with several of my projects (more hobby than anything) and never got the traffic. I do wonder how did you drive traffic to your Github repo?
Continuous improvement is a great system to integrate into your development, and getting feedback (and maybe even pull requests) are a great way to push your product into hyperspace!
Well, there are a few reasons why open-source projects attract people more easily. I mentioned this in my other replies so just briefly mention three key points IMO:
You give them peace of mind that they won't be locked in with your platform and they can freely outgrow it
Open-source projects at a larger scale like what we do, open a lot of opportunities for the entire community
You start by giving not by asking
I think these points have contributed the most to how or why we have generated this traffic. What I mentioned was on our cloud offering (dotenx.com) not even the repo. On Github we have around 600 visitors some days and I have to show some love to the README of the repo.
You're right. The feedback you get from people is the most heartwarming thing that has happened to me since the day we started this journey and that's what we rely on a lot.
I have the same experience, even seems to lose followers with every tweet 😂. I get close to zero traffic from Twitter.
Yea, something is not right on Twitter I guess.
Thanks for sharing this!
I thought twitter and LinkedIn should've been good platforms
I think LinkedIn is definitely a good platform for generating leads, but you have to really know what you're doing.
Twitter is a good one as well, but sometimes I think the noise from a few accounts is too much to the extent that it blocks others' voices.
congratulations ! I am somewhat conflicted with open sourcing the product unless its a infastructure product or your customers require auditing of the code. Its good that it is working in your case. Also how many of these signups are on paid plan?
Thanks! It's just the beginning and hopefully, I'll be able to report even more exciting news.
As I answered another comment, to me the main question that indicates if a project should be open-source or not is that does it make a difference for the end users if it's open-source.
As a major part of the paid users are the people we already knew, it's too early to talk about the impact. In one or two months we get a better idea about that.
Congrats Mohsen. How do you post about your product on Reddit as they're mostly sensitive to promotions?
Thanks! Yup they are and sometimes it's really annoying.
It's a bit tricky tbh and I've got banned from some sub-reddits despite trying not to spam at all and publish a valuable post, but I guess it all comes down to how closely the sub-reddit is related to your product and the moderators.
Thanks for the inputs, Mohsen. What are some subreddits that worked well for you?
Can you share the reddit groups that you joined to promote your product. :)
You need to do your homework ;)
Is this only 3 things that you did or there were other activities too?
I've tried quite a few things, but these are the things that actually have helped the most. It's very important to know what is helping and what is not so you don't waste your time in the areas that don't help.