Planning on Launching next week, any tips?
I'm quiet new to the space and my studying app, Improvr has already grown to about 300 early sign-ups. I've validated the idea but I don't have much experience with marketing, any tips on marketing to college students and high school students?
For my feedback tool ruttl the most traffic we received was from Product Hunt and Indie Hackers (you can read about the launch here)
My advice would be to launch on Product Hunt and leverage other social media platforms to drive traffic, try to be very active on twitter and use targeted tweets to get relevant engagements.
All the best!
I'd suggest try the new SaaSHub Experts section https://www.saashub.com.
Once you nominate your product, it will be offered to be selected for product of the day. Then, if it reaches Top 3 => Product of the week => Product of the month. i.e. If you product seems good, it may collect some good views there too. Good luck.
Product hunt is probably the best launch channel but you should post on twitter and reddit as well.
That's what I did to promote Evoke and it's worked pretty well.
I also have a post here for promoting on reddit: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-my-discord-to-1000-members-in-under-a-month-using-reddit-comments-e71eabab7e
I always, ALWAYS go to Reddit because it's where I've had the best feedback and most people engaging with the product that I'm building.
For example, I recently posted my recent project FormFlow - Create surveys in seconds with AI on to the ChatGPT subreddits and got my first two users!
Once you get feedback, DM the users and ask them for their time in exchange for a free version of your app.
I see, I think Reddit is definetly gonna be my main target and twitter of course
I've just signed up to Twitter to promote my new product. What strategy are you going to employ on Twitter to get followers / likes?
me too, I need to get a feel for Twitter I I but for now my strategy is probably gonna be to dev log, wanna swap user names and help each other out?
Well, the best channel to lauch is where your audience is, so others experience can't be of a great help really. For your audience TikTok may be a winning one, depending on a niche really
Most uni societies have emails and facebook pages. I ran quite a few societies before and cold messages were quite common. We ended up featuring some of them in our newsletters for example.
Hey, I'm a student at Imperial College London and I'm a co-founder of an ed-tech start-up platform and we have multiple roadmaps to upskill for Web Development, SEO, Consulting, Finance and UI/UX design. We are releasing new roadmaps each week. Do check it out if it interests you. I definitely think it would be super useful to upskill or even learn something new.
We are currently in talks with Amazon, Google and various other platforms to incorporate our idea. Do let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas about the page.
www.thepathfinderproject.co.uk
300 sign ups is great, I found Twitter and LinkedIn the best routes to add sign ups, as that’s where my professional network are based, good luck with the launch!
How many sign ups is considered good for idea validation?
We aimed for 100 when we launched a free product just to confirm it was worth building. We got closer to 1000 by the time we launched. I’m not sure there is a magic number but I’d be happy with 100+ good qualified emails on the list.
TikTok, see how much success that Excel formula girl had with her courses and tutorials - https://www.theverge.com/22807858/tiktok-influencer-microsoft-excel-instagram-decoder-podcast
I'll check this out bro thanks a lot!
Most of my friends at founders cafe prefer on product hunt and reddit. they get more signups
But I do think that it really depends on your target customers. :D
I think reddit is really a way to go for me, as I can find students easier that way!
Hey, I'm a co-founder of an ed-tech start-up platform and we have multiple roadmaps to upskill for Web Development, SEO, Consulting, Finance and UI/UX design. We are releasing new roadmaps each week. Do check it out if it interests you. I definitely think it would be super useful to upskill or even learn something new.
We are currently in talks with Amazon, Google and various other platforms to incorporate our idea. Do let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas about the page.
www.thepathfinderproject.co.uk
300 early sign-ups - is a really cool result! What was your strategy for getting them? (If it's not a secret)))
My strategy was primarily reaching out to students in my network at school and family members who were still studying, but in order to get organic sign ups I used Instagram as my funnel, by making reels that were chill, relatable and captured that 'aesthetic' studying vibe many people enjoy in the studytok communities.
Thank you for the detailed answer. Good luck with the further promotion!
Agree with you : ) do you mind if we connect, I am looking for co-founders in my team
My recommendation would be to reach out on facebook . Unsure where your based but I found either location or campus specific facebook group chats had high engagement and organic reach. At the time, It seem a lot of students were open and willing to participate as productivity seems to be a massive issue.
Attached a link here: https://www.liamleighton.com/google-extension As I did a case study on this, hopefully may provide some additional insights for you. I'm also in a similar boat @ simpliux.com where were assisting founders with research and validation. We too don't have much marketing experience and trying to drive traffic to our landing page. It's definitely a learning curve
Ohhh I haven't considered facebook, but I guess I'll give it a go. Thanks for this too!
Would you say that Facebook groups actually ended up converting into users?or was it mainly a good way to get eyes on the product? I've collected a list of university subreddits as well do you think that'd be efficient?
I'd say it drove traffic to the landing page, validated whether or not people found the product valuable. Id offer a free trial or some sort of incentive to drive early adopters to use your product. Track how many bounce/don’t sign up to use your product. Main goal is to experiment with the messaging, you may find certain Call to actions work better and some don’t convert at all with you target market. Could you attach the Link to your landing page?
University subreddits would be an awesome place to start, I can also recommend you some facebook groups in AU that have active communities if you like (:
Also if you don’t mind me asking, how did you find your experience of validating your idea? What was difficult?
I'd really appreciate a list of active communities to send out too, it'd speed up my growth process a lot!
In terms of validating the idea I wouldn't say it was particularly difficult, as I ran tests with friends, family and other early users wayyyy before I did any real development, at the beginning all I had was a timer and I used a figma design to show what id look like in the future. I was able to validate really easily this way. The main difficulty I think was that in the beginning I was focused on social media, a pretty unforgiving way to grow and so early growth could've definitely been better but overall validating was quiet easy as I pushed it out to people i knew.
Seems like the main challenge your having right now is driving traffic and early growth? Happy to send some links over, I'll share later this week once I'm freed up of work. have you previously build a product, how did you know how to validate your idea?
I haven't previously built a project so I'm very much new to this space. I had a feeling that validating would make more sense than to keep building something nobody wants. Of course bro send it whenever your free 👍
I had good results with Reddit, try to find a sub related to your product!
It actually depends. For product launch personally I will go for product hunt, to make some noise of the newly launch you can choose for Reddit. If you are looking for more exposure and opportunity can go for LinkedIn. Instagram/Facebook/TikTok is to promote something that you can't do it in Reddit directly.
Hey, I'm a co-founder of an ed-tech start-up platform and we have multiple roadmaps to upskill for Web Development, SEO, Consulting, Finance and UI/UX design. We are releasing new roadmaps each week. Do check it out if it interests you. I definitely think it would be super useful to upskill or even learn something new.
We are currently in talks with Amazon, Google and various other platforms to incorporate our idea. Do let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas about the page.
www.thepathfinderproject.co.uk
I'm not sure how you got 300 sign-ups, but just wanted to make sure if you've done enough price validation as well? I feel like getting sign-ups is relatively easy because HS/college students have "nothing to lose" persay and aren't as time-constrained as an adult with a job.
The app is going to be free at first however I have done price validation and landed at a subscription of around $5/m for a pro mode with extra features
Engaging in PH, Twitter is effective so far
How do you recommend growing through twitter? I don't use twitter personally so I don't really understand the landscape
I would suggest that you try playing as you did in Indie Hacker.
Share your experiences and your progress publicly, providing some value to your audience. Follow other Indie Hackers and engage with their content.
Starting this journey may seem doubtful at first, but with consistent effort, it can prove to be very effective.
Test and readapt quickly, keep focused and positive, any negatives are part of the process, all the best!