Marketing and growth strategies for a product still in development!
Marketing and growth are essential for the success of any business, including those run by indie hackers. As an indie hacker, you need to be strategic about how you promote your product and acquire customers. Here are some marketing and growth strategies that we have applied (some planned for beta) to our product UpEmbed.com that can help you grow from day one:
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Content marketing: Create valuable content that your target audience will find useful or entertaining. This can be blog posts, videos, podcasts, or social media posts. Share your content on relevant platforms and engage with your audience to build a community around your brand.
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Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimize your website for search engines by using relevant keywords, creating high-quality content, and building backlinks from other reputable websites. This can help you rank higher in search results and attract organic traffic to your website.
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Product-led growth: Focus on creating a product that is so valuable and intuitive that it sells itself. Encourage your users to invite their friends and colleagues to try your product and offer incentives for successful referrals.
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Email marketing: Build an email list of subscribers who are interested in your product. Use email marketing to send them targeted messages and promotions that encourage them to make a purchase.
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Influencer marketing: Partner with influencers in your niche to promote your product to their followers. This can help you reach a wider audience and build trust with potential customers.
It's important to experiment with different tactics and measure the results to determine what works best for your product and audience.
We were able to utilize the first three and have been able to achieve these stats:
-> 266 unique visitors
-> 11 signups
-> visitors from all over the globe
All this and we are still in development phase, with only three people having access to the platform :D I believe this is a direct result of us starting early in building a community around our product.
We are planning our beta launch in March, and will actively start implementing our Email and Influencer marketing strategies. I'll be able to share better stats when we actively start our marketing phase.
I believe that in the early stage it's mostly about doing a lot of growth stuff which won't scale that well.
Commenting on relevant posts on IH, PH, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Getting these sign ups 1 by 1 with pure grind.
Especially Reddit is amazing for this if you're able to find the relevant conversations, Surfkey.io is awesome for this use-case.
In all honestly, I am not going close to Reddit right now :D super intimidating and getting canceled without any clear-cut reason seem like a too daunting task at the moment :D
The focus is more on IH, FB, Twitter, and Linkedin.
But yes you are absolutely right! Staying relevant and popping up on all socials has helped us reach users we would have never been able to connect with.
Yeah it can be a bit intimidating but once you get the hang of it it's golden.
As long as you always provide value first before plugging your tool you should be fine. It's been working for me for years.
Just avoid massive subreddits like r/startups or r/entrepeneur where the mods are on a complete power trip. There are good alternatives.
OOH .. I think that was my mistake :D I went for all of the top 1% sub reddits!
Haha, amateur mistake I guess xD will give it another try
very informative thanks for sharing. 👌
Thank you @Rahulsharma :)
Ugh, growing a social media presence is so difficult. I think the best tips are to just keep posting, hoping that something will catch on. I think with social media it's part strategy, and part luck, because you never know what might catch someone's eye and potentially go viral (that would be the dream)
Hahaha, yes you are absolutely right @ChrisIsYoung! :D
You don't know which content will go viral.
Also, I think it is not just about posting regularly if you are not interacting with the people in the comments or on other threads/posts. This helped us get traction as well :D
Content marketing is a MUST, especially in the begining
Hey @yasss, do share how it benefitted you.
Sharing content about the topic my "hopefully" futur SaaS is going to help resolve got me my first interactions with potential testers.
That's a win for me haha
Hahaha, that really is an epic win! :D
Which platform is your go-to for posting content? Medium?
Influencer marketing seems to be the new trend but I'm always wary of putting my company in the hands of someone else, too many horror stories of brands being damaged because of their brand ambassadors! But the results are definitely there, so you can't deny it's a good idea
That is correct! @MarkTerault! :D
I have shortlisted some influencers who seem interested from the pitch, but like you said :D too risky initially :D so let's see when we go ahead with them.
If you have good documentation about your product, use a bot like https://lovi.ai/en/
This is an amazing solution for your support team.
Oh ok, that's cool! I understand the need for a chatbot to better manage customer queries. I'll give it a shot!
Thanks for sharing this info!
No problem @Quincy_
This and the comments pushed me to start the content creation and improve the texts in the landing. I'll put priority into that, thank you!
That is good to hear @garciasole! :D it is good that we've realised the power of good content creation :)
If you are working worldwide, use WhatsApp for support.
Here you can find some cool tips about WhatsApp for ecommerce / online shops:
https://business.whatsapp.com/blog/ecommerce-business-messaging-automation
Thank you @Link2Whatsapp for sharing! .. do you think WhatsApp would be better than Slack for this purpose?
IMHO >
Slack for internal use is good.
WhatsApp for B2C or Small B2B is better.
You are right! That does make sense :D
Not all pre-growth strategies work for all tools! However, for some tools, they work very well.
For our tool, pre-launch did not yield good results, but after a successful launch, it gave us excellent results!
Here's a short story about Churnfree, a customer retention tool.
Churnfree is a tool that helps businesses reduce their high customer churn rate. High customer churn is a problem for every business, and most people do not care, but as a result, they lose a lot of revenue and clients who believed in their product and subscribed to their services.
Since our tool is mostly for B2B, people want to see a demo of how it worked for others and how they can benefit from it.
After a successful launch, our tool's user engagement increased to 70%, but pre-launch strategies were very low.
I just want to say that pre-launch strategies work well for some tools and not for others. However, making the right strategy for your business is crucial, no matter how you acquire clients, whether it's through SEO, paid advertising, influencer marketing, directory websites, or promotional sites. I wish you the best of luck for your future success.
Thank you so much for sharing @buckyjames!
Love the website and I've booked marked it, we'll integrate it into our platform as well. I would love to be a success case study for Churnfree as well :D
Can you please share what you think went wrong with the initial strategy? I would like to learn more.
Great, we hope to see your product in our case study list...
Most people do marketing only to attract the user, awareness:
In the past we do but our product was in the development process every user want to see how it works.
We worked on:
Creating initial hype with content
relied too heavily on word-of-mouth referrals
Not delivering the product on time
failed to reach our target audience
Thats cool atleast you got to learn and improve right! :) so a win at the end :D
I think content is the best one for yet not existing product.
Yup @Shnai that's exactly it.
Since the product isn't available yet to see, all we can do at the moment is to tell them what it is about and what they can accomplish with it!
We also created content related to our niche and then pitched the up-and-coming product UpEmbed! :D
Thanks for sharing! Any social media presence?
Hey @MehdiRifai,
Yes, we have the following socials:
But most of our traffic is coming in from Indie Hackers.
It's a useful info to know about.
Keep going, guys!
Thank you @basharath!! :D