I created an AI-driven favorites app, PackPack .AI. Here’s how I cold-started the product and gained the first 1,000 users in just one week!

Hi, I'm Owen. I created an AI-driven bookmarking application called PackPack.AI.

I developed this app because I noticed that AI has a strong understanding of content. Personally, I have a strong need to bookmark useful information that I come across in my daily life. This information is spread across various social media, news sites, and shopping platforms, as well as offline sources like department stores, specialty shops, scenic views, and everyday notes.

To offer the best bookmarking experience, I created this application where AI can assist you. By using a Chrome extension and mobile app, you can save and bookmark all the wonderful things you encounter.

💯 Customized Support: Tailored saving experience for social media (e.g., Twitter, YouTube), lifestyle and shopping platforms (e.g., Amazon, Shein, Walmart), and news sites (e.g., TechCrunch, ProductHunt, Reddit, HackerNews), ensuring saved content is clean and visually appealing.

⚡ AI-Driven: Enhance content collection and retrieval with AI, making the experience seamless and efficient.

📱 Cross-Platform (Coming Soon): Available on Chrome, Android, and iOS, ensuring a unified experience across all devices, allowing you to save everything from the physical world using mobile devices!

🏖️ Selective Saving: Use the “select to save” feature of the Chrome extension to save specific items when browsing feeds or some social media.

First Growth Phase

I launched a test of my product around the end of June and started thinking about how to find seed users by mid-July.

First, I wanted to find people interested in AI tools. I listed the app on various AI aggregation websites such as Toolify, There is an AI for That, and Futurepiedia. These sites can drive traffic, but some others only provide backlinks without much traffic. This is something to keep in mind.

Before listing on AI aggregation sites, you need to clarify whether you want backlinks or traffic. This effort brought me just under 200 users in about two days. The cost-effectiveness was average, but it was a good start.

Second Growth Phase

I realized that Reddit community users have different attributes in different channels, making Reddit a massive source of traffic. So, I carefully analyzed the Reddit communities and started running Reddit ads.

There are two issues here:

How to Set Up an Ad:

Initially, I carefully configured Reddit's Pixel SDK, used “Lead” as the campaign objective, and set the target cost to $0.1. This proved very effective, allowing me to get hundreds of clicks daily at a cost of $10 - $20, which brought me the rest of my users over the following days.
Choosing the Right Reddit Channels:

I had read a news article stating that OpenAI had used Reddit data for model training. I shared my product details with ChatGPT and was amazed to find that ChatGPT could recommend useful Reddit channels. This greatly helped me in selecting the right channels for advertising. Through multiple attempts, I found ChatGPT’s recommendations to be very accurate!

Currently, I am attempting low-cost Twitter ads and will update you all with good news soon!