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8 Comments

What’s the best thing you’ve done for growth?

I think this can be a great community to share some tips for growth. Well all need it and it's something I'm very focused on at the moment at https://www.bitcompare.net

I've been focusing a lot on SEO, but in retrospect, it's probably not the best place to start as it takes so long to kick in.

What have you been focusing on and what have you found is the best at different stages of your product?

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    SEO can be useful but mostly in the long term. That's not to say that people found success in the short term but most websites just take a while.

    In your case, I would add content promotion to your marketing arsenal. Meaning that, whenever you write an article, don't just wait until it ranks in Google but also share it on Reddit, Facebook groups, Quora, Twitter, just as many places as you can. That'll get you traffic in the short term as well and will help you avoid getting in that SEO trap of having to bridge a long period to fuel your user growth.

    For Early User Growth, the growth strategy looked like this:

    • First 10 users -> approaching people personally on Twitter through DMs, customer conversations, asking people if they knew others that might be interested

    • First 100 users -> Milestone posts on IndieHackers (huge boost), Twitter

    • First 1,000 users -> Side project with ProductHunt launch, viral loops

    • 2,000 users -> ProductHunt, IndieHacker, Going viral on Twitter, Media coverage (all related to the side project) and viral loops as well

    But, that's just one of the million ways to do it. It's not a blueprint. It definitely worked well for me.

    1. 1

      This is a great answer. Thank you!

  2. 2

    I have heard you should not even be thinking about growth until you have determined if you have product fit as measured by retention.

    Steps:

    1. identify a key niche and find a few beginning customers to test the product out. (Hard, but if you have good product fit, you just need to kickstart this with product hunt, indiehackers, or some other such media attention platform where you can directly target your market.)

    2. measure the retention rate of your existing customers. What is their % utilization as a function of time, the % that resubscribe, the amount of time they spend on or using your product. If this isn't a high number, there are some tweaks that need to be made in order to increase the retention rate and engage your customer better - without this all the growth in the world won't matter because your product is off. Sometimes this is as simple as bugs on your platform - If you annoy an early customer with buggy functionality, people have such a low tolerance for that shit you might lose them forever. The first impressions are underestimated imo, everyone expects early users to understand that its a new product, but I think they are not as forgiving as we would like them to be.

    3. once you have established product market fit, then you scale using SEO, paid advertisements, etc. etc. before that point imo your largely wasting time/money.

  3. 1

    Overall, it's following the process in the right order:

    Start at the top of the funnel and work your way down. Get some page views first. Then try to convert them to leads. Then try to sell products to those leads. Every time I go backwards, it doesn't work well.

    The easiest and single-biggest driver I did to accelerate growth was adding exit-intent popups via OptinMonster. That drove a lot of email signups and was easy to do.

  4. 0

    I optimized my website, added more pages with more keywords, made the SEO better, page speed, page usability and marketed it on social media.
    https://www.devspectrum.io

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