Absentia

There was no big bang or one simple trick that got me to here, it was continuous iteration over a few years.

My primary customer acquisition strategy currently is SEO. It's the best source of qualified traffic for B2B products in my opinion. Definitely worth focusing on if you sell to businesses.

My SEO effort could be described as a content marketing SEO strategy. I have focused on building small free tools which are useful to my target demographic.

These pages form the top of my funnel with adverts in the content helping promote my product. I receive a fairly high conversion rate of 4% from these pages. It has been quite successful for me.

Tried creating a few adverts to boost my exposure.

Google Ads

The keywords that I am trying to rank for are very expensive, a reconfiguration meant that I ended up buying one click for £20 which resulted in no conversion.
Thankfully I had a daily limit so this bill didn't grow out of control.

I found that the costs were unsustainable for the amount of revenue that I had at the time.

Youtube Ads

I made an advert myself to promote the basic features for Absentia. YouTube ads are cheap so it seems like something that could be sustainable but the conversion rates were low.

After iterating a few times but still resulting in low conversion rates I decided that the cost was a bit high for a bootstrapped business.

I may try again with a more unique concept if I come up with something.

Launched to a few sites including Product Hunt and Hacker news.

There was a small surge in signups but none of them ended up converting.

The bucket was too leaky.

From this point the signups continued to slowly trickle in from those sites and a tiny bit from search engines.

I continued to improve the product from this point by watching how potential customers use the product. Hotjar was a huge help with this, their free tier is generous.

Slowly I the bucket became less holey and I got my first conversions!

Surprisingly I received my first two conversions within 2 days when I had gotten none for around 2 months previous to that.