How would you grow a chatbot or form builder?
I made Formito.com a few months ago. I thought I could get a network effect from my “Made by Formito” link at the bottom of chatbots. But it wasn’t much successful as I just passed 400 users after 8 months. One issue is that my users don’t have high traffic websites, so I don’t get much out of the branding link.
I did the regular free stuff like submitting my product to BetaList, IH, Reddit, etc. I published my WordPress plugin yesterday to probably get some leads from this channel. Writing is very time consuming for me, that’s why I’m not willing to try content marketing (blogging, guest posts) at this point. Obviously not ready for paid advertisement too.
So what could be my next step? How would you grow a chatbot or form builder?
Hossein,
Looks cool. I run a similar company (we make real time survey tools). I wrote about the specifics of how we grew that here (published yesterday 🎉).
Your point about the backlinks. My experience is that when you have a referral link on someone's website, it generally doesn't matter too much if it happens at volume as long as the sites your product's embedded on are genuine.
I took a quick look at Ahrefs data for your domain and it looks like you actually only have 12 dofollow links. The majority of your links come from indiehackers which adds nofollow to links (and rightly so).
What isn't clear is how many people have actually embedded your widget onto their site. Definitely something to look at as it's free referral traffic.
The other part of this is that the backlinks from a widget approach works best when you then write content on your website that supports bottom of funnel problems your target customers are having. e.g. Look at what pain points your customers are experiencing and write some content around that. Once you get a lot of backlinks, you'll likely see that page rise up Google's rankings.
The beauty of the pain point approach is that you don't need high volumes to make an impact. More on that in this brilliant article by Benji Hyam.
One thing to consider is whether cold outreach will work for you. I just came across this article by Nathan Barry in another indiehackers post and thought it was super useful. We built our business primarily on direct sales – more or less the cold outreach approach.
Thank you so much for the link to those articles. I'd definitely read them today to plan my marketing efforts.
Regards backlinks, the point is my branding link is inside an iframe. That's why I don't get a backlink from those websites. But I receive referrals almost every day, but the best one had 9 referrals in past 7 days. Most other users are around 3-5 per week. So I'm going to find users who have high traffic which potentially increases referrals.
What about creating a sub-brand for a business niche and then have a relevant subject matter expert partner be the face and run the sales for it?
I'll give you an example, my friend Tom Martin is a lawyer that got onboard with chatbots a few years ago and introduced a product specifically for law firms: https://lawdroid.com/bot-automation-service-for-lawyers/
But, he had to have others build the product for him, which could have been you ;-)
That's a good idea, but I need to spend more time on development and support which I'm not ready to provide that at this point. This could be a long-term vision by introducing an agency package where they can build and sell their chatbots with their own branding.
I will do direct sales to website owner, and targeting to one niche, like ecommerce, law or saas. Convertkit founder do direct sales in early day, and now have million MRR.
You can build side project marketing for blogging alternative. for example, bot directory.
I'm not good with direct sales and even cold emails. I tried them several times and it was waste on time.
Yeah, very small side-projects would work. I'm trying to find a few useable and small tools to build and share it on Hacker News and ProductHunt.
Launching a referral program could be an easy win.
I'd also recommend creating case studies of customer stories who have seen success using your product. Reviews & testimonials are a great way to let your users sell your product for you.
One of my customers asked for referral program. Do you know a good but cheap product for handling referrals? Maybe free for like 10 first referrals.
Yeah, I thought about that. I should reach out to my users for reviews, display them on my landing page, and provide a backlink to their website. That would be a win-win deal.