How would you grow this?
This is an opportunity to get and give help in growing (your) indie hacker products.
Here's what you need to do:
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Post a link to a project and provide a few words of what you have been doing to grow your product. It would be helpful to include challenges you've had and what has or hasn't worked.
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Because this community is about giving back too, please comment on someone else's post with support and ideas.
Over to you!
We built https://versoly.com/ a SaaS focused website builder.
We have got listed on Betalist and Product Hunt recently that gave us 100s of demos but no paying customers yet.
The main way we get traffic is lovely Indie Hackers, but I feel we have maxed it out I post many times a day here and I try not to spam my link.
Currently looking for new ways to boost revenue quickly.
Hi Volkan - Regarding new channels to gain visibility, I would suggest you start/continue blogging. If you can create consistent and high-quality posts over a period of time, you will get good traction and show up on the front page search engines. Targeted keywords specific to your industry are also very important.
Another way that works is to create goodies or freebies(resources) on your site. Very good examples include https://www.teamwork.com/resources and https://stripe.com/en-it/guides . People are kinda inclined to the word "Free".
Finally, I think if you have a good product, the growth would normally be linear at the beginning and then exponential (when your users do the marketing for you) at some point. I highly recommend this video:
All the best!
Thanks blogging wise from what i know you either go for keywords with high search, my target audience doesn't have any :)
Or you go for keywords with lower search and not competitive don't have that either.
I plan on going the freebies route we already built https://saaspages.xyz/ and that gets 4000+ visitors a month. Plan on getting more backlinks and adding extra resources to it.
People love free.
Just got a message from a fellow IH and he recommended referral marketing. So we may build something inside the app that makes it easy to recommend to a friend.
Awesome! I have https://saaspages.xyz/ saved already.
Referrals looks like a nice plan nice! Cheers!
Nice :)
Thanks.
To me, the messaging is a bit confusing. I'm not sure who this product is for. It says SAAS focused web site builder, but that could mean a lot of things. Does it mean it's a SAAS service that lets you build web pages, OR is it a web page builder specifically for SAAS companies? I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here, because I did get the sense that it's targeting SAAS companies, but to someone who just quickly browses, the message is unclear.
So, first question is: If I'm running a SAAS company, wouldn't I already know how to build web pages? Who is the target audience for this specifically? What made you target this audience in the first place?
Not knowing much about this, my advice would be to target a very specific non-technical niche, like let's say hair salons, or personal trainers, etc. People who are not technically savvy, but could use a SAAS-like web site.
Change all your copy to hyper-target this niche. If I'm a hair salon and all of your copy is hyper targeted to hair salons, I'm instantly going to be attracted to the message. It's much easier marketing to a specific niche, starting there, growing that niche, then expanding from there.
Thanks for the detailed response :)
Had this discussion many times with people who just looked at the site and had general thoughts, not in a bad way of course.
Companies like Drift.com use Wordpress even though they have some of the best developers in the world.
You don't want your developers working on problems that have already been solved. Developers cost $100+ an hour in the top SaaS companies and having them work on the landing pages is very silly. Especially when they will produce sub par results.
Our customers are usually non technical founders in a SaaS startup or backend developers who want a pretty site that converts. Ideally as we grow our feature set we will be able to target marketing teams in bigger SaaS companies. Ideally we would serve these companies and get paid similar rates as https://wpengine.co.uk/plans/ do.
We plan on adding more features for the SaaS niche that make it very easy to see why they would pick us over the competition. We also get to raise our monthly price so win/win for everyone :)
I'm creating 😍 cliply.co a library of animated gifs designed for commercial use. I've been targeting broad client segment: web designers, marketers, youtubers, ppl making presentations etc.
This way it's hard to get traction so I decided to laser focus on one group at the time. I'm considering targeting marketers (gifs for email marketing) or gifs for powerpoint presentation.
Which group would you choose and how would you reach them?
It was hard work finding examples of the gifs on the website...too many clicks to get a feel for what is on offer.
Also, showing some examples of them in use could be powerful to give people a better idea of how they could be used.
Marketeers feels like a natural choice. Can you comment usefully on people's threads (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit?) using the gifs?
Could you do what @harrydry wrote about - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/using-giphy-for-free-brand-awareness-8027ffbde1
Thanks for the feedback Rosie 🙏
I've applied for GIPHY brand acc literally 30 min ago :) Of course inspired by @harrydry
Commenting on marketing related threads sounds good. I'll definately give it a shot.
Haha! Nice stuff @Zdanovi Just to be sure you need 5 GIF'S already uploaded to get approval. I think it could work well there.
Another small thing is pushing your email list much more. I only noticed it mentioned once on your website. Some simple changes could easily 5x your conversion. Popup, adding to front page, changing language etc ... Perhaps give this article a read.
I'd also look to working towards a Product Hunt launch. That's not going to solve your problems but it might give you a little boost. But that takes a little preparation. Joining some Slack / Telegram groups etc. I wrote about some steps involved in a Product Hunt launch here.
Or also some fun side project to launch on Product Hunt etc .... Perhaps like a Christmas set of GIF's or something. Or something topical.
I'd also recommend perhaps writing about the power of GIFs in marketing, obviously mentioning your own product. As a blog on your own site and then sharing on Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter, Hacker News etc ... It's a long shot. But sometimes great articles can take off.
Not sure if these are good ideas. But good luck
B2B Marketers on LinkedIn need this. Find some hashtags, go find posts that a gif could help spruce up. Message them directly and say "hey, I noticed you could use a bit of pizzazz! or something interesting to get ppl's attention...."
I used your gif here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewkamphey_likes-are-gone-are-they-gone-for-you-yet-activity-6603406559601131520-rC7K
Awesome! I need to try out LinkedIn definately.
I would choose marketers— they tend to like shiny new things and have some discretionary spend— then would hit them with a targeted email campaign showing off some great gifs
Would go one step further and pick niches of marketers to start for extra personalization. Happy to chat strategy around this if you’re interested
I would agree on picking marketers because they are by default going to be good at spreading the word about things. Web designers... not so much! Perhaps design some custom gifs for some marketing gurus with lots of followers?
Thanks for great advice! I'll need to learn more about this community.
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I've built Jotty, a digital work journal for iOS.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/jotty-work-journal/id1487209299
Currently I'm only advertising on Reddit, Twitter and Instagram to get some early feedback from initial users. Once that is done, I'll post on IndieHackers and Product Hunt.
I was wondering on how I can continue to grow on those platforms to get some 25-50 early users (as of now I'm getting 1 user per day).
I just recently finished my saas app few days ago https://serpfresh.com a SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) tracker. You can track your keywords on google, you can customize your location as precise as specific street, you can even have a map view showing your ranking across the area, as you all know, making google search at different location even couple block away or a street away, you get different google results especially for local business. App has full of feature such as Keyword suggestion, white label reports, unlimited members, this will help SEO agency that need to report to client. I wouldn't say I am any different from other players in the market at the moment . But i see this market is an extremely fragmented market, there is no single player who dominate 90% of the market like how Google Amazon Facebook in their own space. I don't need to capture 50%, i just need to capture 1-2% of the market so i can start living my digital nomad life as this is my first saas app. Recently i've added telegram bot for scheduled report, that is the current most unique feature of my app at the moment. But i know it's gonna be a long road, it's an uphill battle against Goliath of the known name such as SEMrush, ahref, and more. But i been trying to think of different creative approach, hopefully the god of ideas shall grant me something soon, so i can be the David of this industry.
At the moment, i have 0 paid users, only have my own friends and some indiehackers who found my app while i was posting here. Few of my plans in my mind at the moment, planning to build some free chrome extension that can solve some SEO problem. within the chrome extension will try to promote my app. Other than that, i plan to cold email outreach some blogs that review rank tracker tools to be listed there. My app has been launched only a few days, but I've been started to feel worry that i might not get a single paid subscription :/
Hey everyone, I'm working on https://pivalink.com, a tool that turns your single bio link into unlimited links and helps increase engagement.
The main sources of traffic so far have been Reddit and various startup directories. Ive also been trying to grow my Instagram brand page since the tool is definitely focused towards instagram users (although it can be used pretty much anywhere). I'll be launching it on ProductHunt in the next little while, but other than that I'm sort of running out of ideas that would help me get consistent traffic.
Id love any feedback or suggestions on some other channels or methods I could use to help grow it.
How is this different than http://linkin.bio/
Good question! Linkinbio, although a microlanding page of sorts as well, tackles a completely different problem and focuses on a different segment of users. A more accurate comparison would be LinkTree and where Pivalink differentiates there is in number of features and level of customization available, especially in the free tiers.
Hi there, how would you grow https://devspectrum.io/ an online company that develops custom software and websites for customers.
I'm a one man army at the moment so looking to focus on the main priorities to get the business moving in the right direction. PS: My side salary isn't a lot so having to purchase services would be difficult at the time.
I have a feeling that page by itself doesn't get much business, it's fairly generic in a competitive niche.. For some reason the main page looks dated while the rest of the pages look more sleek, I can critic the site, but I don't think that would help with business..
Also
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amultiscreensite.com
GL.
Thank you for your response, could you please critic it?
You link to https, which doesn't work, only http works, at least on my end.
The contrast to the text is very low, need to work hard to read, the sections like "Appealing To The Eye".
So who is your customer? what's your USP (unique selling proposition)? what makes you different?
"Change The World, By Changing Yourself." that's so out of context, are you a coche? am I buying a book/training?.. "Get started"? with changing myself?..
"Read About Our Services" in https://www.devspectrum.io/what-we-develop is something more interesting to put in the main page IMHO.
What the story between
"Lets chat" https://www.devspectrum.io/software-choice
"We'll answer" https://www.devspectrum.io/lets-connect
While I don't think the website by itself would get you work.. do you get much traffic to it?..
Ive updated the website, any thoughts? I actually like the way it is now compared to the first
Looks way better.
"We Do Solutions So You Don't Have To Do Problems"
Is not correct English I think.
Can replace "do" in both sentences to "have"
Or iterate to a better idea
Only noticed that now, thanks for letting me know and thank you for all the help.
I built https://colorways.club/, a cheatsheet that helps guys who want to dress well but don’t want to spend time shopping.
I sent the link to 8 friends and 6 of them signed up and started paying. This gave me a better idea of what type of users to go after.
Basically I’m looking for men between 22-30 that want to dress well to work (business casual) but hate shopping.
Things I’ve tried
Things I’m thinking about trying
-Printing out flyers and putting them up on cars in our parking garage
-Maybe ads. I really want to get to 100 paying users organically though before I try this channel.
Get some guys "dressed" using the app, take some nice quality pictures, and open a pinterest account.
I would not have this costing 4$ maybe a free tier / online app with the daily recommendation with a paying tier for customers that really find it useful. good luck it looks promising :)
Kudos for the simplicity.
My mind goes like:
I just release Solfej, the best new way to learn music theory. I’ve got over 350 beta sign ups for the iOS version.
Would love to know how I can make the most out of this situation.
https://www.solfej.io/
What kind of things have you tried so far to get those initial beta sign ups?
https://www.getretire.com/
Retire is a website to help people track and monitor their 401(k) and retirement savings. Users connect their accounts (for free) and see how their 401(k) is invested and get alerts when updates occur.
We just launched on Product Hunt last week and are testing channels within our networks and with employees of companies where our friends work.
Love any feedback or ideas from this group!
Hey, really neat product! I'm not sure if you have tried it yet, but Reddit may be a decent traffic source for this kind of thing if you find the right subreddits. I mention this because there are a number of great finance-related subreddits that are very active that could probably benefit from the tool. One of the bigger and more well known ones being r/personalfinance, although there are a lot more out there.
Agreed. I follow r/personalfinance (almost 14m members) on Reddit, and I can see a post about this getting good feedback.
Just post something similar to what you have here: "Hey all, we just launched this and would love any feedback or ideas from this group! https://getretire.com"
Appreciate the feedback @rfizzy and @kirkatzomia ! I have definitely had Reddit on my mind, although I was waiting a bit just knowing Reddit doesnt like a lot of self promotion and product placement. And wanted to put Retire out to other groups first.
Was going to put up some posts next week with a similar message to what I have here. Goal is to get some feedback from that group and see what they think.
Thanks again!
Divjoy.com, a React web app builder. I get a couple hundred visitors a day via word of mouth and various sites that have linked to me. I’ve been heads down improving the product and should probably be splitting my time working on growth. Would love your ideas!
Have you tried looking on GitHub? Lots of people are creating repos these days that compile lists of tools and they always tend to do well traffic-wise. If you could track down a couple that have both free and paid product lists that relate to your tool, you might be able to submit it and get some easy traffic.
Yeah, good call! I've done this a bit, but should be more methodical about trying to get on as many as I can.
It's a really interesting implementation.. Are you not pushing to get some contact / account as a decision? Even the "saved" would be here when you come back, could have let me link an account so I know for sure long term it's there...
While the main page is very aesthetic, I needed to stare and look around quite a while to try to get what's going on..
The "choose template" section is not distinct much from the "Showcase" section for example..
The "Choose your stack", well IDK who you target, I'm not front end, website builder by a long shot... Be nice for more hints upfront to people that know less, if that makes sense... For example Authentication/Firebase... IDK firebase, like I want to have auth for fb/gmail only on the more section are the details that it's what I'm looking for... UI Kit is like a term IDK, while I know CSS etc..
What server side does it even generate?..
The editor colour pallet is a bit hard on my eyes with all the neon colours..
Also the colour emphasis seems a bit on the wrong thing? like it reads "page, page, page, page" in different colours, while I more care to focus on which page it is..
The fade in on scroll while nice looking, it's not something I personally want on a work tool, it's a slow down / non productive.
The deeper I look, I know I'm a bit fish out of water, not being front end focused, due I'm recently getting into some of
I really appreciate the feedback! This is helpful. Definitely planning to get an accounts system in there soon. Will work on better explaining the stack options and improving the editor UI.
I've built and launched https://zlappo.com recently, a Twitter automation and productivity tool to help bloggers recycle their best content with zero effort. The idea is to fill up their scheduling queue with past and also future evergreen posts so as to get continual traffic and also reengage new followers with old "greatest hits" content with ZERO effort. Like literally plop in your blog RSS feed, and we'll take it from there, let the robots do the work, don't even need to log into Zlappo again. It also does everything Buffer can do, and then some, e.g. scheduling Twitter threads, scheduling retweets, repeats, etc.
I've started engaging potential users from my target market and signed up some beta users, no paid users yet. All these were acquired from Twitter, and occasionally, Reddit. I'm fortunate that these users are willing to share ideas for improvement. However, I've yet to sign any paid users yet. I can certainly cut down on the "free" portion of freemium to expand the "mium" option, but I feel like learning should be the opportunity now, not charging (yet).
How do I get more users so I can learn more?
Those I know who are active on Social Media, writers and business folks, love writing. So they aren't really looking for automated tools to broadcast more. Where as Social Media Managers of companies need all the tools they can get to be more productive. Your landing page is rather geared towards sales. Which is fine.
I don't see you have a blog or a newsletter. start one. and just send 1 great example of a tweet a day. Help people write better, evergreen, tweets and you'll get people using zlappo.
If you don't want to do a newsletter or blog, perhaps putting together a list of 100 easy to replicate tweet formats. That, as a lead magnet, might get people who need the help and then they can just copy and paste and rewrite to use your product.
I built Metadigest, a weekly tech newsletter you can customize.
I launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News at an early stage when my product wasn't as well defined and although I got some users I still have very little.
I would really like to grow this side project but don't know how to attract new users.
The newsletter is still a beta project I'm actively working on and changing.
Get listsed on Letterlist.com InboxStash.com
Join Newsletter Creators on Facebook (a group) to ask questions.
Join IndieMailer to get inspiration and help
Write short compilations of 3-4 posts and post that on here.. IndieHackers and reddit. Summarize and give a little teaser that people can get it in their inbox. make sure your name is the same as the product. MetaDigest so its easy for people to recognize what you're doing.
Email every writer of any articles you feature. They love the exposure and some will sign up themselves.
This looks at a glance like it might be a chicken/egg issue. The site looks like a great alpha/beta to me. Time to test it out with a few avid tech readers and see what they think before starting to grow? What about going to those who signed up after you posted on PH and HN? What's missing? What would they want to see before they start sharing it with their friends?
I created InfluencersGuideToBali.com a downloadable travel guide and growth guide for influencers. It's Hyper-Targeted to creators and social media influencers who are going to Bali, or want to go to Bali.
I've sent out 100 free review version copies and gotten feedback. Had a few people post about it on social. To date only 1 sale. Yes influencer marketing is failing a guide for influencers.
thought someone here might have a creative idea on how to get this in front of influencers, creators, etc.
You've probably already done it but I would create an instagram account and follow all the influencers. Message them directly. Even consider instagram ads.
Yes, I have done this a bit. Totally open to doing more. But I've found that Instagrammers A) Respond to their audience (yes through DMs) and B) Respond to brand deals. I'm the spammy one trying to sell them something.
But your suggestion gave me a thought that they would be searching through #Bali... and I know about 50 more hashtags they could potentially be searching though for inspiration. May be worth a weekend to create some content around those hashtags. Basically SEO on Instagram hashtags.
Would it be possible to find a couple of influencers who are coming to Bali and giving them a guided tour of all the best spots in return for them talking about your guide?
Great idea! Got someone this weekend I'm doing just that with. I'll reach out to more!
Only thing I can think of now is to create some free blog posts: "best places to visit in Bali", "best time to visit Bali" and try to sell the full guide linking it at the end. Alternatively YT videos or both video + blog post.
Yep, great idea. I'll start putting out some writing and seeing if I can get it land in the right hands. Free info, in the form of blog posts, should work well to drive this niche traffic. Even if a potential buyer won't read it right away, their friends and colleagues might know they are going to Bali or want to go to Bali so they'll forward it on.
Cool concept. Think you need a little more temptation on the landing page, maybe even giving away 3-10 of the hotels etc for free to get people more interested. Also a drip campaign where they give you an email on the website for some freebies and then you can sell them over time. Would build a quick form — how many followers do you have? When is your trip? Have you been before? And then could target drip campaigns from there or even sell influencer lists direct to the hotels as a broker
Thanks yeah, I agree more temptation and enticing information would work better. I'll put together a free email course on how to contact hotels. in general. even if they don't want to go to Bali, most people want to know how to get free hotel rooms.
Rosie, I love the idea of this post. So, to kick things off – my name is Alex Panagis. I run an SEO & marketing agency called ScaleMath (https://scalemath.com). Since we're an agency I think growth has to be sustainable for us as well as our clients so I wouldn't want to grow at a rate that could in any way put the quality of the work that we do for clients at risk – inherently and deliberately meaning slower.
I am always open to other ideas though so I'd love to know what you think and what creative strategies some other members of IH can come up that I might not have thought of yet! 😅
Case Studies, Case Studies, Case Studies. Deep writing about what worked, how you helped someone. Detailed.com has done this so well. Deep dives into what actually worked and how you came up with it, also generates a great deal of press. Newsletters share, FB groups share. And it's only shared with people who are primed to get help from you.
Also, the best ones can be used over and over again. you can use case studies as ads in newsletters, as facebook ads if you want to scale your advertising later. You can compile 10 of your own case studies into an ebook.
You can revisit them each year and update them in a new blog post, or in a new ebook that tells folks what's new with SEO.
You can create them in a number of different formats. take the same case study, release it as a blog post, then as a YouTube Video. Then a podcast episode.
Figure out one "lesson" each one teaches you, then put it into a course using the case studies as lessons.
Check out NeoReach who has done excellent short, to the point, case studies. https://neoreach.com/case-studies
If you don't have case studies from clients, make them yourself. Figure out how to rank top for any damn keywords and then show people how you did it.
Be topical and stay on top of trends. Black Friday is coming up. Can you help me rank
NoCodeBlackFriday.com (I just made it) within 6 days?
Or start a "Christmas is Weird" blog and get it ranking for "Christmas is Kentucky" within 4 weeks.
can't do brand new sites? Pick an IndieHacker's blog post you actually like. Get it ranking for them and write how you did it. case study!
Andrew, thanks for this – this is really great advice! Case studies are definitely something that I've wanted to focus on and am planning to get started with in 2020 but you are very right, the potential goes a lot further with taking it to YouTube and potentially podcasts too.
Glen's work is really great. I hadn't come across NeoReach before though so thank you for sharing that, I will need to take time to go through that but there really are some interesting case studies in there plus the way they make use of an interesting layout/formatting is also a great example.
You're so welcome. There's so many mediums now. You can take advantage of any of them.
Create a 10 episode podcast that you make by recording your consultations with someone.
Create a popup newsletter that tracks how a project is going. Then send it as automated emails once it's finished so people can follow along in real time. Perhaps write it as if you're writing updates to a client, showing them progress. 10 emails over the course of 10 weeks, might do it.
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