What have you been doing this week to grow your product?

Last week on Thursday, I launched https://read15minsaday.com. 🎆😍

So far, below is what I have done for growth and user acquisition:

• Launched on hackernews (twice, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535547 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21553264)

• Launched on indiehackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/read15minsaday)

• Launched on sideprojects.net (https://sideprojects.net/posts/tciBKaiS5FmpYzHbL/read15minsaday)

• Launched on Maker's Kitchen (Slack Channel)

• Product twitter (https://twitter.com/read15minsaday) account is tweeting once a day, also engaged with about 10 people's tweets.

• Submitted and waiting for approval: betapage.co, betalist.com, startup88, 10words.io.

Results:

• HN brings in a lot of traffic for that 30 minutes of time window you are on first page. ❤️❤️
• Sideprojects.net brought in 5-10 visitors 🤔🐌🐌
• Maker's Kitchen is very silent, no outcome... 😔
• Twitter brought about 4-5 visitors 🐌🐌
• IH brings in steady visitors, even when I am not active for 48 hours!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥

I have 27 users signed up within 4 days. 🎈🎉

And I haven't brought out the big guns yet, both feature and marketing-wise!

We're getting ready to go to open beta this week, so I wanted to get some traffic started. My friends' site ranks 1-2 consistently for the term "brand guidelines". It just so happens my product, 1Brand, is a SaaS that makes it easy to build brand guidelines in minutes, for free. He posted a nice editorial and link, which has been getting me 3-5 beta signups per day. https://www.contentharmony.com/blog/great-brand-guidelines/

Yesterday I launched the early access for https://www.solfej.io/ ❤️

Here's everything I've done today and yesterday to grow my user base/email list:

• Launched on ProductHunt. Missed the front page by a couple of upvotes 😢(https://www.solfej.io/?ref=producthunt)
• Launched on sideprojects. Got to top 2 for the day 🏆(https://sideprojects.net/posts/mKDqsjC47nSNXcMEP/the-best-new-way-to-learn-music-theory)
• Launched on Hackernews. Didn't get much engagement from that.
• Created content for Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/solfej.app/?hl=en)
• Submitted to betapage.co, betalist.com, 10words.io, startup88.com
• Started list of relevant bloggers in my niche to send the app to in exchange for a review post.

I have 53 people signed up for early access so far!!!

I've had Mixpanel on my app for ages, but only recently realized how powerful that data can be. I started digging through stats and realized that after a user completes a day, they really stick with the app (retention UP)

So I've been running some experiments to increase the number of people who complete their first day:

• Improving information on the welcome page to increase clicks to "sign up"
• Experimenting with the text on "sign up"
• Improving the look of the signup page, button sizes, colors, icons
• Adding/removing/changing the order of various steps a new user takes to finish a day

Some of these having improved the flow by 5-10% which means a 5-10% overall improvement to my retention!

Any IndieHacker could try this same exact approach. What is the action that turns a customer into a high-value customer? What steps do they need to take to get there? What are your biggest points of friction? A 10% increase in one of those could be much more effective than adding some random new feature for your power users.

• Launched on Betalist. We also removed the need to sign up to try the builder. Instead of 7% using the web app 20% did.

• Betalist was good got lots of demos, no paying customers from it yet. Usually take a few weeks to upgrade as they need to schedule time to complete their landing page.

• Betalist was much better than expected, but i'm 99% sure it was because I linked to it from IHs otherwise the results wouldn't have been as good. I'm trying to confirm the results by connecting with someone else who was on there at the same time.

• I'm launching on PH this Wednesday so please leave feedback if you see Versoly on it :)

Every business is different. You must find three channels that show some promise. Test, test , test until something starts to work. Think narrow persona not broad. Write a marketing plan like it was your term paper, don't cheat. Gather baseline data, try to find KPI's to plan with. Valildate. Rinse and repeat. Every business has paid and free traffic, and you must find your mix. What is your CAC? - Without this you are flying blind. Don't launch, build flywheels.

I've been reaching out to influencers, big and small on Instagram - that are in the Social media manager / Instagram marketer niche to try and get some collaborations going for my service https://sharemyinsights.com.

We have managed to get 1 done so far, and we got 8 new signups in the first hour - so that was pretty great, and it only cost $50!

• What have you been doing recently to grow your product?

We started a pretty decent sized email outreach campaign for https://audiostaq.com and we have so many demos booked. Pretty exciting. My first milestone is 20 paying customers. Right now we're at 17.

Currently, email is our only channel and I'm looking to expand on the next few weeks.

• What has worked?
  We did a lot of prospecting and identify podcasters that we think will resonate based on the competitor they are using, and A/B Testings emails.

• What hasn't worked?
  Bigger customers drag their feet. Wish we could close faster.

• What have you learned?
  That, you should never consider a deal closed until they pay you!!!

• AND what can indie hackers help you with?
  We're looking for early beta customers/podcasters and early support/ideas on having a successful launch.

On Thursday the 21st, we relaunch the rebuilt platform which is better faster stronger.

We've really been focusing on building tools that solve part of our market's problem, but not all of it. It's something that prospects can engage with over and over, but it also gives us the chance to "launch" things and take advantage of that traffic.

For example, we launched ESP Finder (https://sendview.io/esp) that helps marketers figure out which ESP was used to send the campaigns in their inbox. It's worked really, really well. We got a good launch on PH, some great coverage in email marketing circles, and are seeing a few dozen users a day of the tool. Trickling down, we've been able to trace a few new paid users of our core product as well.

Traditional PR didn't work for it, so the splash we made wasn't quite as big as we hoped.

But it's done a great job of, a) getting us really high quality traffic and b) driving paid users, that we're launching another tool this week that's a real-time dashboard of each presidential candidate's email strategy:
https://sendview.io/presidential-senders

Hopeful that this one will give us a stronger angle to get better coverage in marketing media outlets and blogs (and we're offering writers exclusive data if they need it) and is something we can push and promote for the next year to ride the wave of public interest in this election cycle.

Any other tool ideas folks can think of using the https://sendview.io data set would be great!

I talked to a few influencers. I have someone who is interested in working with me and using the product exclusively for his clients initially. We talked about making https://storycreatorapp.com/ a B2B application. Then eventually going the B2C route. This made sense.

I have also been conducting user interviews. I found a product that focuses on one of the features Story Creator has (one-click subtitles). Then I looked at who was following that app and sent them a personalized video DM. From there I just set up some time to have a quick chat so I can gain product insights.

Aside from that just talking as much about the product as I can. Mainly focused on the product itself so it amazes people when I eventually double down on marketing.

I think when the product is in a place (pretty much there) to offer a shit ton of value that is when I'll have the leverage to talk to more influencers and position myself as the easy to use video editor for digital agencies.