Had my first "marketing week" – here's what I did and what happened
by MacksI launched the paid version of Cakedesk (an invoicing app for freelancers) about three weeks ago and I've been having a hard time getting traffic from prospective users/customers. It's also not surprising because I've been doing a little bit of building in public on Twitter, but not much else.
This week I had some extra time on my hands and decided to try a few things to get the word out for Cakedesk.
Monday, Jan 2
I noticed that a lot of people share really beautiful invoice templates on Figma and so I decided to port some of those templates so they can be used with my app.
The first template I ported was called Ira. I put in a lot of effort, making sure that all the details in spacing and font sizes are converted accurately.
I then uploaded the template for download and left a comment on the Figma community file:
I also posted the template on Twitter, where it didn't get much attention.
Tuesday, Jan 3
I converted another Figma invoice template to Cakedesk and in the process built a little web app for converting pixels to centimeters.
This tool could long term maybe be a useful SEO piece and at the very least it will help users who are building their own invoice templates for Cakedesk.
The template I converted that day seemed to come from a designer with a fairly large Twitter following. So I posted it on Twitter and mentioned him, hoping to get his attention and maybe a retweet or something.
Nothing happened though :D
Wednesday, Jan 4
On Wednesday, I wanted to try posting about my app on Reddit. I know that most communities there don't like self-promotion, so I thought about another way:
I would ask users from relevant communities to share their custom invoice designs. My plan was to learn more about their process, what tools they use, what their invoices look like and then maybe reach out to them to ask for feedback about my app.
I had some good experiences marketing things to Reddit in the past, but this attempt failed completely.
One community spent their energy telling me how bad my own invoice template is instead of posting their own.
In another community it was speculated that my attempt to see their invoice designs could be some kind of a scam.
Although I was sad that in total only 1 person actually posted an invoice design, it was pretty funny to see the reaction on Reddit. I think next time I'll try to be more straight with them and ask directly for feedback on my product.
What I did learn though, is that there doesn't seem to be many people who have custom invoice designs because I also wasn't able to find posts of people showing them off on Reddit in general (as opposed to, say, portfolio websites).
Thursday, Jan 5
I posted a design for a potentially upcoming feature on Twitter, an overview screen:
The tweet didn't get much attention. I think I will still build the feature, because it's something truly useful and it will also look good on my landing page.
This day, the first visitor from Figma showed up on Cakedesk's website analytics, so I also posted a comment on the Rejiggle Figma community file that I had ported on Tuesday.
If the creator didn't see my tweet on Twitter, maybe some other people will at least find it on Figma. :)
Week in review
Overall, none of my marketing efforts this week did much.
I think this is part of the journey. I'm just going to keep trying things until I find a marketing channel where I can reliably get new users for my product.
For the future, I think the following things could help:
- Directly reaching out to Twitter users who post about freelancing
- Posting in Facebook groups (maybe even offering discount codes there or something)
- Building features that make Cakedesk more marketable. E.g. building nicer-looking invoice templates that are bundled with the app and making it easy to customize those without having to use HTML/CSS
If anybody has some ideas on how I could improve my marketing efforts, I'd be happy to read from you in the comments!
Hope all you indie hackers have a great weekend!
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Concluding that, after one week, your efforts didn't get you anything, is a bit premature. Depending on the industry, your efforts might take months to see any result. Yes, there might be that one person who went viral on some social network, but I would never bet on that.
Invoice generation is also a highly saturated market, so it might even take more time.The “trick” is—and where many people quit—to push through.
Find the things people are searching for when in need of a product like Cakedesk. Can you create comparison pages with similar products (great for BoFu)? Are they looking for tips on how to get paid quicker? Do they want to know the most common mistakes for invoices (in country X)? Are there things they need to know before freelancing for companies in other countries than theirs?
I could go on…
If you create these (short), but highly informative, articles, it's easy to point people to this article (instead of just pushing your product). And with a bit of patience, search engines might start picking it up.
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Thanks for the encouraging words and the content suggestions. It's a good point that writing more content will allow me to directly link it to people instead of just waiting for search engines to pick it up. I have a long list of content ideas, I need to get started on that!
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Firstly, thanks for sharing. It's helpful for the community to see their own mistakes in someone else's efforts. I can see things that I've done in what you've done, but for some reason, it's harder to see it in your own work. Maybe that's just me.
Here's some suggestions (not in any order):
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Add some hashtags to your tweets that are relevant to your audience. e.g. #freelancing #smallbusiness or even #buildinpublic.
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Add some colour into your product shots to make them stand out - almost everything is grey, with some occasional soft-pink.
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You need to talk about Benefits, not just the features. How much time will this save a freelancer? How much are they currently spending using other tools? How are your customers using your app? Convince your audience that they need your app.
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Consider offering a discount to specific communities to help validate the idea and generate testimonials. Why not offer all IH'ers a discount?
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Leverage sites like Product Hunt, Beta List etc... to get some early users
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Don't build any new features until you've nailed the marketing. Sell what you've got and let your customers help drive new feature development.
Lastly, don't give up! You're doing a great job posting regularly. Keep trying different channels like Facebook (as you mentioned) but also try answering questions on Quora.
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Thank you, those are helpful suggestions! I'd be happy to give indie hackers a discount but I don't think my target customer is here, so I rather not be promoting here. (If anybody reads this and would like a discount, feel free to reach out though)
I need to get better at talking about the benefits, I will work on that. I'll try some more hashtags and you're probably right that I should lean into the marketing more before adding new features. Quora is also an interesting suggestion, I'll need to look into that :)
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I admire what you did here. Keep trying more.
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Thank you!
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Thank you, a very interesting write-up!
I must say that Reddit users can be weird that way. You will need to fund the right combination of a friendlier subreddit and the message itself. It will take some time.
Also on Twitter, you need a more significant following to get immediate results. If you have under 1K followers do not expect more than just a few engagements.
Marketing is a process, it is a good start, and do not give up, the results will accumulate.
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Thanks phprunner, I appreciate the encouragement and I'm glad you found the post interesting!
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Thinking about freelancers, I assume you can find your audience through LinkedIn as well. There are many ways for experiments. Watch this video by Judi Fox from Social Examiner channel, she's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnmA3tWKlaA
And yes, please keep regularly posting. It's great to learn from your experience!
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Wow, what a great video, thanks for linking this! I'll definitely explore LinkedIn!
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Some people might not be happy about you taking their designs and monetising them, especially without some kind of attribution. I'd be a bit careful about doing that and maybe ask for permission before doing so.
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You're right, I took care to attribute the original creation everywhere where I linked the ported templates and they are not bundled with the app. The license under which the designs are published on Figma allows me to use them for commercial purposes so I think I'm in the green 🤔
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Hey Macks,
Unfortunately, as you've noticed, marketing isn't quite the same as building.
It's not do X and Y will be guaranteed to happen. You're dealing with human beings and we're a notoriously difficult thing to understand and manage ;-)
You've just got to keep on plugging forward.
However, that being said, there are plenty of things you can do to increase the chances of your marketing working.
I've just posted an article today about a strategy that worked for me on Twitter for example - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/steal-the-tweet-that-made-me-4-figures-in-revenue-with-less-than-100-followers-on-twitter-cd1b6afe0b
Read it and apply it to your business - it won't guarantee success as I mentioned but it dramatically increases your chances.
Hope that helps
Best
Chris
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Hi Chris, interesting article. Actually a good idea to reply to tweets more influential people, I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
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No problem, you're very welcome :-)
Could I ask you post that reply under the article itself and give the article a like? It'll help get it more visibility and help others on this forum as well
Best
Chris
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Congrats on the Product Hunt launch! Trust it has been rewarding so far!?
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Thanks! It's been alright, not too exciting actually. I'll write up what happened on my weekly post on Friday :)
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Thanks for sharing this. It’s really helpful for expectation management.
Regarding your thought about “Building features that make Cakedesk more marketable. E.g. building nicer-looking invoice templates that…” I think that this is focused on the wrong part of the funnel. This might help a customer that’s already spent a lot of time learning about your project, but your deficiency right now is much higher up in your funnel. Focusing on adding yet-another feature will just slow you down and distract you from generating more traffic.
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Hi ChessSpyder, I think you're right. It's easy for me to deceive myself that "I just need this one more feature". I need to focus on getting the traffic!
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I think you should try more on Reddit with different messages in different communities.
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Yeah, I'll keep exploring Reddit for sure, has helped me get users for other projects in the past. Where are you guys promoting Saga btw?
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It started with Reddit and Twitter, then we shifted to a private community on Discord and growing the email list. Now we are focusing more on SEO, it's completely untapped for us.
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That's exciting! You're also in a tough market it seems, with so many large competitors like Notion and Obsidian. Would you mind sharing what kind of posts/comments you were making on Reddit?
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It's competitive but I think the whole market for collaborative software is heading in that direction (vs the current status quo of sharepoint or google workspace in larger orgs).
Here are some examples. I think it's important to think about the use case of the product for the particular community and if the community can benefit from it. Having a video also helps.
- Post in a UX / user researcher community about creating a user research repository faster - https://www.reddit.com/r/userexperience/comments/mdyqzt/i_made_an_editor_that_creates_smart_links_inside/ Later we created a dedicated use case page for this and started sharing it instead - https://saga.so/use-cases/user-research
- Post in a product management community about helping PMs connect their feature writeups with user feedback and interviews better - https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/m32flz/an_editor_that_connects_features_to_user/
- Post in a DnD dungeon master community that went viral about helping DMs building their stories and worlds faster - https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/m6n3vb/i_made_an_editor_that_creates_smart_links_between/
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Thanks for sharing, that's really helpful. Interesting how your post in 3 other DND communities didn't get much love and it blew up in one of them, that's awesome and encouraging.
Probably I can go into various types of communities and post how my app can help them create proposals. For example, how photographers create proposals in Cakedesk. Same for writers, designers, developers.
For Saga, I think you could have a use case for game developers writing game design documents as well. I posted a markdown-based note taking app on /r/gamedev a long time ago and it was pretty well received at the time.
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Thanks for the suggestion! I'll try it out this week! Game developers could also benefit from connected ideas/topics in their docs.
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Thanks for sharing. It's nice to see that someone else is struggling with marketing too! Seems like marketing is something that you've got to keep at, and eventually you get some results!
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Market it to marketers who sell courses about side business and offer a promotion to their following. They have students that are starting and who have not invoicing in place yet. They have podcasts where they interview people. I'm thinking about Amy Porterfield and her peers. She has a book that will be launched soon. What is the usp of Cakedesk ? Why would people switch ? Is it effortless ? Maybe join this kind of course, they usually come with a community. I would also create an entry in alternativeto.net . It's a software directory where people who know one software can find alternatives.
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Also you say that your tool is using html and css. Did you thought about svg ? This may help designer do more interesting layout where everything is not square. I would also think about an invoice template marketplace or an offer specific to designers to put your tool in their hand. If I had a business that need invoicing tool, I would like beautifull templates ready to use. I wouldn't have time to come up with my own design. I may have a need for customisation but not start from scratch.
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Thanks for the great suggestions Roland! I never considered adding my own product to alternativeto.net, I don't know why!
Cakedesk actually has all the capabilities to support user-generated templates. I think it would be really cool if design agencies created awesome-looking invoice templates for their clients and got them to use Cakedesk. This is something that I've had in mind for a while but I need to find agencies that create invoice designs for clients. Thanks for bringing this back to my attention, should explore that soon! :)
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Thanks for the write-up, usually the first weeks are the slowest
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Thanks, that's good to know! PixCap looks awesome btw!
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It is not that the efforts were for nothing, the efforts are for figuring out how to improve the next effort and where to put the focus.
The strategy looks good, you can continue in this way and maybe keep looking carefully for more specific forums or sites for creating invoice templates.
However, I think it is more important how you communicate your service than the service itself, let me explain...
It is true that the service you are going to offer must stand out from the crowd, so if you have at least one aspect that allows you to stand out...fine, otherwise I would advise you to think about how you could make your service better than others.
After that the important thing is communication, I would say be more direct in asking for feedback openly.
My comments are only advice and I cannot assure you of their effectiveness and usefulness for your specific case, but they are more or less general advice.
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Thanks for your thoughts!
I would love to get more feedback from (prospective) users.
- I can find a way to ask for feedback inside the app without it being annoying
- For prospective users, I should ask directly for feedback when posting the app somewhere or when reaching out to potential users directly
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Keep trying the process, and adjust the tactics a little bit. and maybe you can use the paid promotion.
Good luck!
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Keep on posting, it's great to learn how different experiments work/don't work.
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Thanks, I hope to post more in the future!
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I liked your site and intro video just wanted to suggest you if you can implement or provide a free invoice generator similar to wise.com. Which might help you in acquiring some users.
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Thanks! You're right, an online invoice generator could be a good way to get some relevant traffic!
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Hey, around a month ago I created a web app that allows people to make map charts. I'd like to give you a little bit of advice. I was able to spread my app and now get around 300 users per day, and I think you can too.
The only social media I posted about my app on was TikTok. Not Twitter, not Reddit, only TikTok. The thing is that TikTok is the easiest platform to get viral on. To make it easier for beginners, the algorithm pushes out your first videos on the fyp (for you page, like feed in Twitter). That's why one of my videos got 239k views, which is a lot. The sad part is that the videos you make around 3 weeks after the beginning of your account will only be getting around 2500 views. It's still a lot, but not as good as when you beginned.
I have to say that I got rather lucky that there was a whole community on TikTok that made maps and posted them on the platform. Most of my users/viewers are them. Hopefully there's a community of freelancers on TikTok that will need an app like Cakedesk, but even if there isn't, I think you should still try. Good luck!
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Wow that's amazing! I also had a friend who had great success on TikTok, I should really consider it. Any chance I could see the videos you've created for your app? Thanks for the suggestion!
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Yes, my username is @periphern, should come up if you just google it. The videos aren't at all professional yet they received a lot of attention anyway. It's very easy.
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Awesome, thanks for sharing. It really is very interesting, I'll be studying your TikTok channel a bit 🤓
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Thanks, I'll keep at it! 💪
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