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What are you doing to market your product?

I am forcing myself not to write any more code until I’ve got at least a few thousand people to look at my product (https://idbloc.co) and ideally a few hundred paying users. It is HARD, way harder than I thought it would be.

How are you doing it and how do you stay motivated?

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    I believe the best thing you can do is content marketing. I spent a lot of my time writing articles, mostly helping people with similar problems around my product, and every once in a while, explaining how my product can help.

    I know it's cliche, but I believe a great 3:1 ratio (Give:Ask) is the key. Give your readers value, add more value, add some more, then ask for a signup.

    In your product space, you could easily talk about all the ways they can stay private outside of email. What Facebook settings to turn off. How to collect your Google data. What is the best ad blocker to use. How to keep your email private (then ask for the signup).

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    Staying motivated is a big topic and it sometimes is really hard to do so. Especially when you are a solo maker it's quite frustrating sometimes.

    Because of that I've just started the tractioncorner.com Slack Community (shameless plug), so that we can push trough together.

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      I liked your landing page -- signed up :)

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    First of all, congrats on the new product! Getting it off the ground is always a tough first step, so you should feel very proud. With marketing, I think coming here to Indie Hackers is a good first step. Here are some other methods you can use to help gain some traction:

    1. More community forums: Quora, Reddit, Hackernews, Etc. (you'll have to do some of your own research see which forums work best.
    2. Launch your product on Product Hunt.
    3. If you don't have an email list, start building one. If you do, start emailing your contact list with quality content and engaging links.
    4. Network! Go to conferences or meetups that revolve around the theme of your product.
    5. Social Media advertising. Also difficult, but it works if done with some effort.

    Best of luck!

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    Nice man, this is like Privacy.com, but for web identity (which is 99.9% email-based).

    Early product marketing is 100% of the work involved. And building the product was 100%. It's tough! You have to push through the troughs, invest in long-term gains and partnerships.

    The product I'm currently working on is a referral SaaS (growsurf.com), and it's a heavily saturated space. But we're starting to see steady growth on the SEO front though (took a year and a half).

    I don't think anyone can give you specific advice, but follow your instinct. Read/consume what other businesses have done and their stories. Keep talking to your users -- figure out where they hang out, how they find products like yours, etc.

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      this is like Privacy.com, but for web identity (which is 99.9% email-based).

      Yes exactly :-)

      On growsurf.com, who are your target users?

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        It's a wide-range, but it's mostly eCommerce, startups, and service businesses who are looking to get more users or customers through refer-a-friend campaigns

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    I don't have marketing tips but I have feedback.

    1. When I looked at your website I immediately understood what it does, which is good, but so far I did not understand why I would need it. I might actually not be on your niche, or maybe I am but I don't know. In such case maybe if your landing page can explain to me why it would be interesting.

    2. Your freeplan is too generous. I don't think I use 50 websites that require signing up.

    Keep up man. I know how hard it is to release products as an indiehacker. I wish you all the luck

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      Thanks! Ok maybe I’ll take my free tier down to 10 or 20... my thinking was to get people used to using the service, so they remember everytime they are asked for an email that they should use IdBloc

      Thanks for the feedback on the landing page, I’ll give it some thought and adjust

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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      Not sure if you replied to the wrong thread, but I haven’t implemented payment processing yet, I won’t until I’ve got some users above the threshold for my paid for plan

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        Wrong thread indeed, sorry :)

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