3
8 Comments

Reached 700 email subscribers for our game's launch...what to do with them before we launch?

We reached 700 email subs for our digital board game app, to be released this winter!

We have a welcome email that gets a good open rate and responses, but I'm not sure what else we should be sending our subscribers before the actual launch.

We tweet some progress updates but they're usually super small. Maybe these are good for email too, or at least a summary of them?

Just wondering what would be best, since we haven't really made serious progress like new videos/trailers yet that would be good to share. And definitely we have a case of being a bit afraid to lose any subs before the launch.

Thanks in advance!

  1. 2

    @singlecolor can you share how you got the 700 email waitlist? What strategy you have used to find the user?

    1. 2

      For sure, these were our biggest 4 sources:

      1. One of the physical publishers involved in the game announced the game in their weekly newsletter (probably ~30,000-50,000 subs if I had to guess?). That gave us most of the traffic in the first week.

      2. We tweeted the announcement which got a good amount of engagement, but the game's designer + Board Game Geek also tweeted it for even more engagement + traffic. BGG is the biggest website in the board game world and we got a contact with them through the game's physical publisher to plan that announcement.

      3. Press + other articles drove maybe 20% of all traffic, especially after the first week. I reached out to someone who previously wrote about hexiconapp.com, and several board game bloggers wrote about it.

      4. Our own website/blog/games picked up the small remainder, just from regular SEO.

  2. 2

    Co-create your game with them. As for content, think about what they would love. Can you send emails that they would miss if you didn't send them? That puts you in the right state of mind.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the reply! I do like the idea of co-creating it and do want to include our fans. With this particular game though, I feel we're more restricted for two reasons: (1) it's a digital version of a board game, so the development/game design has been fully decided already, and (2) much of the app design is subject to approval by our client.

      Though I have not thought about emails they would miss...that seems like a good way to frame it! Maybe some combined progress updates until we get an actual trailer/announcement dates.

      1. 1

        As for the emails, can you pretend you're a consumer? Then be honest, the email you're planning to send, would you be bummed if you didn't get it? If the answer is nah then it isn't good enough. Updates might fall in the nah bucket.

        As for the development, are you allowed to do cust dev? If not, your hands are tied. Perhaps in the future, you can create a situation where you have more control such that you're not just implementing someone else's vision.

  3. 2

    Updates, but don't spam them. Out of curiosity, how did you initially reach out? Cold emails? LP sign-up?

    1. 2

      Primarily Twitter from our own and the designer's account got us the most signups, where we did the initially announcement. One of our partners also emailed their own list directing their subs to our game's website. We have a contact form there which collects all the subs we currently have.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments