My 7th week of marketing efforts

Hey everybody! It's been a week since my last update, so I'm here to tell you all what I've been doing to market my simple invoicing application Cakedesk this week and what kind of results I got.

2 bloggers reviewed Cakedesk

I've been reaching out to smaller bloggers the past weeks, asking them to review Cakedesk. I got a lot of positive responses and this week the first 2 reviews went live.

They're both very positive luckily and it seems like bloggers are happy to spread the word for a small dev! So far, I haven't gotten any traffic from these posts yet but who knows how they will pay off in the long term as these bloggers' sites become more popular!

Built my first comparison page

Following the recommendation of many of you guys here, I finally got around to building a simple comparison page (GrandTotal alternative).

I did my best to display a fair comparison, since I do think my competitor here is building a nice product that is serving a different kind of user.

There's a lot I can do still. Particularly the page doesn't have many CTAs right now but I wanted to get it out there so Google can start indexing the page.

Launched on Product Hunt

Last Sunday I launched Cakedesk on Product Hunt.

Something funny happened with the launch that gave Cakedesk a head-start in terms of upvotes:

While I was scheduling Cakedesk to launch 2 days earlier, I must have misclicked something and Cakedesk was launched early (Friday instead of Sunday). It picked up a few upvotes organically in the few hours the post was up before somebody from the PH staff was kind of enough to correct my mistakes and schedule the launch for Sunday again.

It seems like these early upvotes stayed around on launch day and gave Cakedesk a head-start! Maybe a nice little hack for anybody else launching on PH soon: "Accidentally" launch your product, get some upvotes and then ask PH staff to take it offline again! ;D

PH launch prep

I didn't make an elaborate launch preparation and simply used the "Coming Soon" page to tweet about my upcoming launch 2 days earlier.

I wish I had created the coming soon page at least a week earlier, it would have given my product some more time and exposure on the coming soon page, allowing it to get noticed and find more supporters.

PH launch results

Cakedesk was on place 4 for most of the launch on Sunday. However, it ended closing in 5th place.

In total, the PH launch got me around 1000 visitors and around 75 downloads. Nobody took advantage of the big PH discount (40% off), so I assume most of these downloads and visits were not from potential users, just other indie hackers or product people. :)

Conclusion

This week was a bit slow, despite the PH launch bringing me a lot of visitors. I didn't have too much time to spend on marketing my product but I'm glad I made a little bit of progress here and there. :)

My priorities are the same as last week. I will continue reaching out to bloggers and writing content on the Cakedesk website that will hopefully get indexed eventually :)

Thanks for reading! I hope you all have a nice weekend!

Previous updates:

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6