How would you grow this? The coronavirus edition. 😷
This is an opportunity to get and give help in growing (your) indie hacker products.
This is open to everyone, but given the current coronavirus situation, we encourage everyone to use this as an opportunity to rethink your growth plans and get feedback from the community about how to move forward.
Here's what you need to do:
- 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.
- Because this community is about giving back too, please comment on someone else's post with support and ideas.
Over to you!
Hello! I launched my webshop https://kumaneko.fr in Jan-2020 (DIY kits to make your own skincare products). My biggest struggle has been generating traffic so I'll focus on that topic.
What hasn't worked:
What's worked:
Current mood of the day: switching off paid ads is very scary, since I've done that on Friday I get 2-digit unique visits per day. I want to stay optimistic though, I know this will take time! Feel free to share your thoughts/recommendations, and good luck with your own adventure :-)
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@unstoppable, thank you! :-) At the moment I am targeting the French market because that's the one I know best, but I am planning on translating it to English to broaden the market perimeter. There are a few direct competitors, although few of them. I've just signed up to Hypetrace. Beautiful plateform, thanks! :-)
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content marketing also helps with your SEO which may be what your website needs to get organic traffic. It's a long-term play but it's worked for me after about a year of constantly writing blog articles (I release about 5 a month at the start but reduced down to 2 a month).
Otherwise, could you do a b2b play and offer your kits to subscription boxes, physical stores nearby, or online stores?
@hackerland definitely! And thanks for validating that learning, it's somehow reassuring my decision to cut the ads short! What type of content marketing is the most efficient according to you?
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Haha, I had to think at whether I had written your last post because I'm exactly at the same stage as you on Insta. Thanks for the reco and wishing you all the best (you never know, maybe you'll suddenly go viral ;-)) Cheers.
Hi all, I've been working on a new app recently and have the homepage ready for people to sign up for the beta.
https://www.setsale.app
I haven't tried anything yet as far as growth is concerned because I'm not sure where to start. How have you had success in growing your early adopter lists?
www.stratascratch.com -- SQL and python interview questions from real companies.
Launched in 2017 and grew a user count of 3000 through blog posts on Medium (www.medium.com/@nathanrosidi). It's rather consistent to about $1.5K MRR but I feel like I have hit a ceiling with content marketing on Medium. My biggest challenge right now is finding additional sales channels that can move the needle.
I've also tried Google ads for "SQL interview questions" work but it's not as effective as content marketing. Reddit is a great source to learn from my users and mention my platform but it's also not as good as content marketing.
Right now, I'm experimenting with affiliate marketing partnerships with Youtube channels and data science bootcamp instructors in hopes to get subscriptions from their subscribers/viewers/students. But it's too early to provide any feedback.
In addition, I'm launching a new tool that allows users to instantly create database tables by uploading their own dataset and write SQL queries against it for practice (it's a common request from the Reddit community). I hope to use this tool to expand my user audience and provide a mechanism to for lead generation.
But I'm all out of ideas to find additional sales channels.
Typehut.com — Super simple publishing platform for blogs, newsletters, changelogs, etc
Launched in all the usual places (product hunt, indie hackers, etc). Started a blog. Got around 500 users.
Now I'm working on launching a separate open-source tool for publishing online: an even simpler version of Typehut, to try and bring some traffic to the platform. You can find a demo here
I guess at some point I'm gonna have to focus on a couple of use cases and try to do some marketing there, but any ideas are appreciated!
What's the audience and use case for both your products? I'm failing to see who you're focusing on in your product. To me, a blog is different than a newsletter, and is definitely different than a change log. For example, if I write a blog then I might want to send it off to my entire audience. But that might not be the case for a newsletter.
I think once you figure out the specific audience and use case you're trying to build for then content marketing will work. I had really good traction from my personal Medium account to promote my product. You can try that route to get some initial traction and learn from your user.
BTW -- I really like your "even simpler version of Typehut" tool. It seems like a platform I could use to keep online notes or share notes to others.
Hello, at the end of December I’ve released Book Track, an app for iOS and Mac to keep track of your books and wish list: https://simonemontalto.com/projects/book-track
Until now I’ve only ask to blogs to write a genuine review of the app (no paid reviews). In two months there have been more than 1000 purchase. Now I’d like to move Book Track to the next level. What do you suggest in order to improve visibility?
Like people's tweets from a BookTrack Twitter account every time someone tweets about a book, recommends a book, asks for suggestions about a book.
Good suggestion. I have a try! Thanks