Marketing week #5 - the retrospective

Hello everyone, I'm checking in again with another marketing week update for my invoicing app Cakedesk!

Previous updates:

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4

Had another sale

Super happy to report that I had another organic sale last weekend! I don't see this user in my product analytics but I'll see if I can find a way to contact him.

Prepared the Product Hunt Launch

I took a bunch of screenshots and prepared the listing for my Product Hunt launch, which I'm scheduling for next week.

This is the preview of my listing:

If anybody has feedback on how I can make this look more interesting / attractive, I'm happy to hear it. :)

My current thinking is that I'll launch on the weekend, since there will be less competition from big brand names and people who are optimizing their launch very hard.

Continued posting shorts

This week, as well as the previous one, I continued posting shorts to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram every day. The views haven't been as great and I'm slowly running out of ideas of the "main stream" things to demo about my app.

Moving forward, I would need to create more generic content about freelancing. I have a lot of ideas for this but I'm not sure if it's worth it, since it will be tricky to sneak in a little bit of advertising for Cakedesk without it being annoying.

Dipped my toes into influencer marketing

I posted a campaign to Ainfluencer to see how the process works. Nobody sent any offers, so it looks like you need to invite influencers.

I might try this when I have a little bit of extra money to spend on advertising.

Submitted to a bunch of startup directories

I took the list of product directories from another thread here on Indiehackers. Since I'm having a hard time finding valuable resources on Google these days, I find myself searching "<something> indiehackers" a lot. :)

It took a lot of time to submit to all these directories. I also made sure to include unique descriptions for every one. ChatGPT helped a lot with this. I couldn't have imagined paraphrasing my product description 20 times myself!

Heard back from some bloggers

Some bloggers that I had reached out to last week got back to me about a review for Cakedesk.

Depending on the page, it seems to cost between 300€ and 5000€ to get reviewed or mentioned in a listicle on small-medium sized sites.

I find this a little bit frustrating, since I'm not ready to spend money on advertising yet. 300€ for some SEO juice might be a good deal though.

Conclusion

I've been doing more of the same this week. It looks like social media is driving most traffic and downloads for me at the moment.

Not sure how long I can keep this up because it takes up a lot of time creating on social media, so I'm thinking I should maybe refocus on longer-term items like SEO and higher-leverage opportunities, like reaching out to more bloggers and the Product Hunt launch.

There's also a bunch of helpful feedback I've been getting from fellow product builders on IndieHackers and elsewhere that I still need to try out.

If you have any more ideas or feedback, would love to hear from you! :)

Hope you all have a great weekend!