Your Top 3 Traction Channels?
What are your top 3 traction channels right now?
For me:
-
Product Hunt - we launched semi-successfully, got 3 paying users. We can't repeat this unfortunately
-
FB Groups - had some success, but seems we need to work with admins to post there consistently
-
SEO - is slowly starting to pick up
Here are the top 3 traction channels I found from from analyzing all Indie Hackers interviews and my Zero to Users research:
1. SEO (with a twist)
84 founders mentioned this worked for them. The twist is that many founders succeeded with SEO after validating their product with another, faster channel. Some slowly realized that SEO was working for them as they went along. Take Snipcart ($100k/mo):
2. App Marketplaces
I was surprised how many founders (78) mentioned getting users from app exchanges (like the Shopify app store, the Slack app store and so on). For example, Tettra ($70k/mo):
Another massive source of trials was the Slack App Directory. After our experience, I highly recommend launching on a platform like Slack, WordPress, or Shopify. There's a whole chunk of functionality that you can essentially "outsource"to the platform. For us, that was authentication, user management, and access to the "work graph". You also get free distribution from the parent platform and a clear target persona you can attract. (source)
3. Product Hunt
There's probably some bias here, many IH interviews are with B2B founders who serve SMBs. But still, there seems to be a certain % of the population that are early adopters and want to try new stuff in general and PH is a great place to try and test the waters. For eg, EpicPxls ($500/m) used it to get their first users:
Hope you found this useful!
Very insightful. Thanks for taking the time to explain and give concrete examples.
We definitely found a lot of success with #2 in Google Workspace Marketplace, I think it's about the most passive marketing we've ever done vs the number of users generated
Wow, thank you! Any tips on FB groups?
Every group seems to be its own story. Just spend some time analyzing the group. See which people (if any) promote themselves there and see how they do it.
I recently wrote a bot to automatically scan certain subreddit and automatically answer questions to promote my product, worked well so far.
That is a business in itself @LEONWEI, kudos!
Haha, already on my to-do list. Thanks @SantiagoM
Organic and inorganic. Referrals.
P.S. That name, tho. 😂🇨🇴
I like Twitter, low time commitment and huge business potential.
Also the content can easily be reused to other channels like SEO.
But it's also depending on the audience of your product.
For me a close second is partnerships, which could be included as affiliate marketing. Not as scalable, but even more powerful when connecting with the right people.
** Self-promotion:** If you are a strategic, data-driven person that believes in the power of compound actions take a look at my SaaS. I designed purposefully to grow organically in Twitter sustainably.
Reddit communities using GummySearch to find posts related to your product/pain-points/content.
Twitter, Twitter, and Twitter.
Thats about it right now.
Working on some more.
Most new customers have been coming from paid ads on Google and a product listing on Capterra. Haven't had much luck with Bing Ads, Product Hunt, a LinkedIn company page or cold outreach.
Now I'm trying Reddit Ads to procrastinate from what I really should be focusing on, SEO.
I'm curious about your experience with Reddit Ads. I'm doing it myself, and am pretty pessimistic -- the toxic culture at reddit towards anything even remotely seen as 'promotion' is beyond horrible.
Just checked my numbers. I'm on day 4 and have 1,200 impressions and 1 click at a total cost of $0.95.
I totally get your comment about the toxic culture. That was a big part of my hesitation with Reddit Ads but I thought why not throw $20 at it and see if I learn anything along the way about ad copy or A/B testing.
The other problem is that my target audience isn't very active on Reddit. On the plus side that keeps costs low.
Right, good luck! I'm at $0.15/click at roughly 1000 impression/click. I was also looking at "votes" on my ad, and sometimes it's simply beyond dissapointing.
You too! Thanks for sharing your stats, they inspired me look into dropping my bid from the default rate.
Not sure how to see downvotes or comments, but will try not to get discouraged when they pop up.
Never take the reddit's defaults! They're outrageously huge!
In time, I'll even try to lower these rates, once I have more upvotes.
To see your downvotes/comments/whatever --> go to your campain, and click its link. It will take you to Ad Groups. Click on the Ad Group as well. It will take you to the actual Ad. Click on the "..." and click "Preview Ad" - this is what the users see -- votes, comments and all.
I think by default ads don't allow comments but you can enable them at creation. Or, when you're in the Ad, you can click "...", and choose "Edit Ad". Note that any change you do will mean re-approving your ad, and it will take a few hours. You would need to go to "Edit Ad", then choose your add and choose "Duplicate Post", enable comments, and at that point, a new Ad will be created (thus, you'll lose any votes or whatever history you had on that ad).
Thank you so much for the help, I really appreciate it. Bids are updated and I checked out the Preview Ad/Edit Ad area.
It was a good reminder to double check things. When creating the first ad the thumbnail was truncating the image from 'Hiring Assessments' to 'Hiring Asses,' oops. Good thing I caught that before it went live.
Cool, good thing you checked the thumbnails!
How much does Capterra cost these days? Heard it’s getting more and more expensive.
I'm no expert but I think a Capterra listing page is free, though I use PPC and pay them $2 per click.
They have a cool service where they'll give a $20 Amazon gift card (that they foot the bill for) to any customer that submits a review. You can either send them a list of customers to email or get a link and do it yourself.
The $20 gift card thing is really interesting to hear, thanks.
Useful information .
I don't have any paying users yet, but I've gotten the majority of my existing users from twitter while doing BIP.
I'd say my newsletter, reddit subs and FB groups. I also have a free app with a newsletter form and I'm adding a CTA that will lead users to my paid product. Also, a reddit sub added my free app to the subs links.
correct
From my experience, I've been testing to see which channels are the best to build conscious and subconscious rapport with potential users. IE. Instagram, Pinterest, FB groups etc. Moreover, I think the more successful channels vary depending on your industry. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of reddit as a growth channel, but there are a lot of interesting and open people that will give your product a shot. The key, however to not be spammy or forceful with your approach and to genuinely integrate into the community (this goes for any community based app)
+1 to Reddit, there's definitely a way to add value to the community while still plugging your product/service.
Forums, Quora and private communities like you mentioned (Fb groups) are great for specific targets I confirmed ✅
Thanks @jamesjamesz
For us, we've been successful only with AdWords so far, because we're bidding in a local market with not so many competitors.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago