What have you been doing this week to grow your product?
Weekly growth notes is the chance to share what you've been up to recently with a focus on growing your product.
- what have you been doing recently to grow your product?
- what has worked?
- what hasn't worked?
- what have you learned?
- AND what can indie hackers help you with?
By sharing openly we can not only support each other but we also have the opportunity to learn and be inspired by each others work.
Trending on Indie Hackers
So I must have spent about 2 weeks on this StartupGIFS side project and the return was awful. Although it did ok on Product Hunt I only got about 25 email addresses from it.
After this setback, I thought let's get back to basics. And remember why Marketing Examples grew so well in the first place: By writing high quality articles. And frequently.
So yesterday I wrote this new one about some marketing Volvo did at the Super Bowl. Took me just one day.
It was a much shorter, simpler piece. I shared it on r/Entrepreneur. It reached the top spot, got 600+ votes and, I was rewarded with 120 new email subscribers in just 8 hours.
I don't regret doing Startup Gifs. I wouldn't have known if I didn't try. I think the problem was although I had around 5000 people check out the website, they weren't all interested in marketing. And I had a tough time trying to get them to look at my main project. The lesson was keep it simple stupid. If something's working. Don't try and get clever. Just keep doing it.
O, and how can I help others. Hmm well I'm alright at marketing so if you need any help there just email / reply with a question. The more specific the better ;)
This is why I love your stuff, Harry. Even when things didn't work out the way you hoped, you're honest about it, show people what you've learned and immediately go on to do things better than you did before. Takes a lot of self-reflection to be able to do that, but takes guts to be open about it and share it with others.
Thanks man. Appreciate it. I try and forget my ego as much as possible.
I read that post on Reddit and it was fantastic! It was short and sweet
Cheers John! Glad you liked it.
I think the gifs were great and perhaps you are being too data-driven.
Pretty sure there is some slow-burning and less measurable brand building benefits with what you did.
You never know though, I wouldn't write it off as a failure, just at this stage it is something that hasn't had an immediate impact. You might find that it could provide a nice long term impact by just having it live there and occasionally updating it when you have an idea for new fun gifs.
In a way it does fit into your brand, saying things as they are as a gif. And there's no reason you can't use them in your own content/tweets/etc. Doing the consistent things will often mean people end up thinking of you when they think of startup gifs.
True. Thanks Rosie! Hopefully some backlinks also. And was featured in Product Hunt newsletter today (so not all lost)!
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
Cheers Alex. Glad you liked that one.
You can't go swimming and not get wet. I wouldn't have known the ROI if I didn't try. So I can't complain. Onwards and upwards.
Still working to get user and creating a new funnel to get the user to visit my page. I just started testing Pininterest to see if I can get some traffic from there to tradeplan.co
For my newsletter
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
That makes two of us.
Base line is 39 new subs from referrals and 100 from FB ads.
Actual success would be 200 from referrals and 1,000 from FB Ads.
Way more excited about the referral program.
This week have launched Google Ads (search) and LinkedIn sponsored content for https://pushreact.com/ Too early to measure, but it's been easy to burn money.
Learned that even if you specify a daily budget on Google they can and do go way over it (!).
So many variables with digital marketing - search terms, ad copy, bidding, landing page, pricing. All feedback on our landing page appreciated!
I've been focusing on writing up short articles on subreddits about my weekly updates. I set a goal of updating once a week about all the features/things I've deployed. This has gained me 10's of people to my site so far. Hopefully, as I write more, and gain more traction, this will result in more visits. My first post got ~220 users to my site, but my 2nd post only got me around ~15. I'm going to have to check on the date/time I posted and see if I can replicate the 1st post more.
I could you use some help with ideas to market http://www.forapiece.com/. It's jobs where companies are paying with equity as part of compensation.
Yesterday, we launched a new product on Album Daily, as outlined in this milestone https://www.indiehackers.com/product/album-daily/new-weekly-newsletter-launched--Lsw0x8dvpX_9dqDyx7a
I would love feedback on the weekly version of the product and re-designed site (https://albumdaily.com).
I've learned that you can never assume what your audience does/doesn't know. You must be explicit with your messaging, and get rid of assumptions, or else no one will understand your goals.
Yesterday I put out a blog post that got picked up and shared around organically! I’ve seen ~1500 visitors from this so far and many of them signed up for the mailing list. 👍🏼
I’m working on moving my email off of Mailchimp and over to Mailjet in order to send out an automated weekly digest email. Previously, I was sending a weekly email by hand but it got to be too much work. Automating this should get some old users back to the site on a regular basis!
Nice, do you know where it was shared?
I use Mailchimp to automate emails via RSS, have you tried that? I'm not really familiar with Mailjet, does it provide something better on the automation front?
Yeah someone shared it on hackers news, and then it showed up on a few subreddits and twitter/Facebook.
Mailjet provides everything Mailchimp but in my opinion it is designed better. You can send transactional emails on their infrastructure as well like password resets. And their email drag and drop builder is very powerful.
I think I have a funny story of how I accidentally started getting traffic.
In the old IH version the product updates were not displayed on the front page.
So yesterday, I decide to prepare my product page on IH to publish it later in the week.
Minutes after I publish I get a comment complaining that I did not put the link in the post description.
Thank you IH for making me do a soft launch without experiencing any anxiety :D
Also big thanks to this community for the valuable feedback I've been getting.
Cheers and good luck to all!
I launched an open page this weekend and while the main driver for doing that was transparency and sharing my maker journey, I would lie if I didn't say I also wanted a small marketing push. It has worked really well, getting 1.2k visits and a few sign ups. I'm also trying to build in the open, tweeting out new features as I build them but so far that hasn't given the results I expected (I'll still keep doing it because I enjoy it). Finally, the best thing other indiehackers can do to help me would be sharing Sitesauce around with their audience, see if it can make someone's life easier :D
We've switched on Google Adwords.
There hasn't been a lot of click-throughs so far, however, we're really happy with the brand exposure.
We've learned that we have a lot more to learn about Google Adwords.
Indie Hackers could help by providing some advice and insights around advertising for low-budget, indie products.
https://www.bitcompare.net
Do you think an IH 'advertising' group would be useful?
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
I very much like the idea behind this, wish I had a current use case for it!
Congrats! Upvoted 😁
Saw your project the other day on HN - great work Henry! Just upvoted on PH also!
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.