Cakedesk

Hey Macks,

Think I've commented on one of your marketing updates before so forgive me if I'm repeating myself to you here - but the issue you're running into is that very few freelancers are actively looking to buy invoicing software.

That's not a problem with your product, it's the same for any product and any market: only a tiny percentage of any business's target audience is actively looking to buy right now.

The vast majority of your marketing efforts are falling on the ears of those who aren't looking for what you are selling - which is why you're getting only a few sales.

Lots of people would tell you the solution is to find a way to get in front of freelancers that are actively looking to buy right now but that's super hard to do organically and super expensive to do with paid advertising.

The way forward is to adapt your marketing to speak to and persuade those freelancers not actively looking to buy a new invoicing solution.

There's two major advantages:

a) You're already reaching them - they make up 99% of freelancers out there
b) They're an unlimited resource that your competitors aren't reaching effectively

You just need to adapt your message to reach them as you can't pitch them your product.

I talk about this in more depth in a post I made the other day so instead of just repeating myself I'll link to it - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-mrr-are-you-stuck-at-853120cb28

Hope that helps, feel free to ask any questions

Best

Chris

Hi. I'm enjoying following your journey of marketing experiments – thanks for sharing. In terms of feedback, a couple of things jumped out about your front page:

1. TARGET AUDIENCE

"The simple invoicing app for freelancers"

So you're targeting freelancers, huh? That's a huuuuuge audience and I assume most other invoicing apps are targeting the same people. It might help to differentiate yourself for a few reasons:

• Less competition.
• Easier for you to identify potential customers and go where they hang out.
• Higher likelihood of people thinking your offering is relevant to them.

On the last point, a similar example might be somebody producing mugs with dog pictures on. They could advertise as "Love animals? You'll love our mugs." (too broad, easy to overlook), or "Love dogs? You'll love our mugs." (better but still bland) or "Love poodles and coffee? You'll love our mugs." The most specific one is more likely to get a "yes that's me!" reaction from a few people who'll want to keep reading. I think it's better to aim for a strong reaction from a small audience than a weak reaction from a large audience.

Is there a particular type of freelancer that you've seen the best reaction from so far? That could be a starting point. Once you have your target audience you can then tweak your headline, also removing unnecessary words to make it snappier, e.g.:

"Simple invoicing for photographers"

2. PRODUCT BENEFITS

Your top bullet points say "create", "write", "create" which implies work and may put people off. A quick fix is to just drop these verbs, e.g.

• Beautiful invoices in seconds
• Proposals that win deals

For the third point, "Create your own invoice designs with HTML & CSS", this implies a lot of work! The freelancers I know are usually busy with client work and don't want to spend time creating something if it's not making money, but they do like being in control. Here are some other possible phrasings (change to US spelling if necessary):

• Fully customisable with HTML & CSS
• Elegant designs, fully customisable
• Multiple customisable templates

I'd argue that "For Windows and macOS" is a feature, not a benefit, and doesn't deserve that prime position. In any case, when I clicked "Download now" it automatically gave me the macOS file, so I don't need to know which platforms are supported.

Speaking of "Download now", you could experiment with "Try it now", which implies less work and commitment.

3. PAIN POINT

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I'd make sure you fully understand the pain point of your target audience and highlight that you can solve their problem. Go to where your target audience hang out and look for terms like "I wish", "frustrating", etc. to see what annoys them. Then use that insight to craft your messaging.

Within those target communities, you might get better engagement and feedback if you ask questions rather than just tell people about your app, such as: How are they currently dealing with the problem? What workarounds do they have? Has it always been that bad? What would the ideal solution look like?

If you're lucky, you could get one or two people who can help you one-to-one by explaining their problem, testing your app as you tweak it, and then providing a testimonial or sharing it in their network.

Sorry that's a bit long but I hope it helps! Oh, and one more thing… personally I'd drop the "I hope I'm contacting you at the right email address." line from your cold email. Shorter is better. :-)

Congrats @macks!
You should definitely launch your product on PH just to review the impression and to get right feedbacks from the community.

Good luck on your journey. I love it!

Great post-series, I enjoy reading about marketing struggles that all of us have.

Anyways I wanted to tell you/ask you about the most critical feature that an invoicing app needs. Tax-related exports for government bodies! This is usually the reason why some local invoicing apps thrive, because global products don't care about country specifics... I saw that you are from Germany, does that mean you don't need anything like that? How easy it is to submit VAT-related reports every month/quarter to the government?

Is it your assumption that people use a separate app for creating invoices, while having another application to deal with taxes?

I just wanted to let you know, because I use a Czech invoicing app specifically for this reason, so I can export and sent my reports with one click.

Here are some steps you can take to review your 4th marketing week:

Review key metrics: Look at metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, lead generation, and customer acquisition to assess the success of your marketing efforts.

Analyze the results: Evaluate what worked well and what didn't, and make data-driven decisions to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Identify areas for improvement: Identify any areas where you can make changes to improve your marketing performance, such as optimizing your website, refining your messaging, or reaching out to a new target audience.

Collaborate with team members: Work with your marketing team to share insights and ideas, and to develop new strategies.

Set new goals: Based on your review, set new goals for the next week or month and develop a plan to achieve them.

Stay up to date: Keep learning about new marketing trends and best practices, and apply them to your strategy where relevant.

Really impressive review @macks

Great update - I wonder how the shorts & reels & tiktok game will play out over the long run. Do you think you'll focus in on one over the other?

Love the changes to the LP! I think you made a great decision with the new copy. The word "simple" is really eye catching and smart here.

I admire the hustle. Leaving no rock unturned. No excuses.

What tool are you using for the screenshots? The rounded borders, blurred background and drop shadow have a nice effect. I'd love to use that for my product screenshots.

lets goo

Title ideas:

• Beautiful Freelancer Invoices - Instantly!

• The Instant Invoice for Freelancers

• Freelancer Invoices That Convert more Buyers!

• Freelancer Invoices That Sell!

• Freelancer Invoices That Turn One-Off Customers into Regulars

• Turn Your Freelancer Invoices into Lead Generation Magnets!

• Lead Generation Invoices for Freelancers

It's good to see how you do week in and week out. Look forward to seeing how things continue in the coming weeks!

I think in the long term you should make this into something like spp.co or manyrequests.com than just a simple invoice designing tool. That would be very useful for freelancers and agencies.

Hi, do you have insights about what works well or not for shorts? I think they match my use case well, but so far I haven't gotten much traction.

Echoing what everyone else is saying — these updates are really great, keep it up!

Out of curiosity, where did you get your email pipeline CRM? I do a lot of outreach myself and something like that would be super helpful.

I had been patiently waiting for you to post week 4's marketing update 😹

Congratulations on your first sale!

Quick question, what was your process of finding leads of bloggers to contact and how you found their email addresses?

It's great to see how you're doing this week by week. Looking forward to seeing how things continue to grow in the coming weeks!

Great write-up Macks and keep going!! Did you reach out to the person who purchased? It would be really useful for you to find out why they purchased, who they are etc as it might give an indication of where you need to focus. One person is not enough to make any firm decisions of course, but I would definitely interview your early sales as they can help. You would do it under the guise of helping them to get set up and make the most of Cakedesk.

Man!! Shall I tell you something? You rock! I am learning a lot from your marketing week review posts. Thank you so much.

Suggestions : Have you tried cold emailing Freelancers? Maybe ask them to give it a try and give you a feedback on what they feel about your app. Ask them a few questions like what app they currently use and what features they miss in it, the facebook groups they participate in and so on. Hope this helps :)

These posts are really cool ! Would be curious to know what kind of breakdown you see between the different acquisition channels: video content vs search vs written content (IH, blog posts)...

Love reading these every week :) Re: not getting feedback from users. Have you thought about 1:1 onboarding? I read a couple of companies do this - if I recall correctly, Superhuman has a case study about it.

How it might work - set up a call with each user to get to know their interests, background, etc. Give a quick demo, and be around to answer questions. It might lower your download rate, but it might give you a better quality of early adopters.

Going to have to try next-sitemap. I've been managing mine manually and it's been a massive pain. Thanks for the tip! 🍻

Super interesting post, definitely going to try out some of these ideas for myself.

As for your cold tweeting experiment: I'd suggest using a social listening tool to find leads that way. Shameless plug: I built one myself and you can probably use the search query you already made in here as well. The major benefit being that it's totally passive, also includes Reddit and HN, and you won't have to spend 4 hours doing it manually again 😛

It's looking good. You can increase response if there is a call to action that is also tied to a specific date. Keep up the great work.

Great job! When posting on tiktok and instagram have you used your personal account or created a new account for your app?

Really liking these marketing focussed articles, keep it up!

It's really helpful and motivating to see everything you did while advertising your startup this week -- coming from someone who has been doing the same for the past 2 or 3 weeks :)

Out of curiosity, what CMS do you use for your blog posts? I use a pretty convoluted method of Wordpress -> Zapier -> Airtable haha

you should use a social listening tool for finding leads. All this idea is very fruitful i will definitely try them for myself on my https://decortrendy.com/
project The main benefit is that you have Reddit and HN for the working and communication Thanks very much.

Well , I should suggest that you can use social media tools and platforms to grow your network and markleting , Reddit is no doubt very useful for creation and generating the Leads but other platforms and tools can give you the major boost and can grow the network and sales and efforts.Have anice day and thanks me later.

I love your approach towards building in public. It's like we're all your boss here and you're reporting about your outputs. This is lovely!

Hi Macks, you really did a great job! Yes, it really inquire a lot of time while prospecting people manually, and socials are pretty crowded like in a real jungle :D. I always remember the one thought I learnt from my marketing proffesor: if you have limited budget, first you need to experiment with few channels to check the traction and than invest all your time in just one.

I'm curious to ask how can you submit new tool on AlternativeTo?

Smart, I like the idea of translating your post instead of writing a new one.

Am I the only one who cannot access this link in the post?
https://www.notion.so/Don-t-use-Word-to-write-invoices-for-your-freelance-business-834f4619f09b4af7ae6f6c6f2b69ed2e

I registered and tried again and got this message:
"You do not have access to Max' Workspace. Please contact an admin to add you as a member."'

Glad to hear that the Reddit posts are working!

AlternativeTo also works well for us. Curious if there is a list of similar directory sites somewhere.

You're an inspiration, man. Please keep posting!

I've also just entered my second marketing week and would love to trade notes at some point!

I’m in the same boat as you. Just finished week 1 of marketing - it’s a total grind.

I’m spending >4 hours a day trying to get the word out through social. But, I did generate 3 sales through Tik tok so totally worth it :)

Thanks for this documentation! Feeling a bit like you. Released my app and now I try every marketing channel to get users and a feedback!

You forgot to add some hashtags for your tiktok video, would've definitely helped. Right now, literally everyone sees your video. It may be someone that isn't interested in freelancing (95% of people). Use a hashtag like #freelance to get a better audience for your video.

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.

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):

1. Add some hashtags to your tweets that are relevant to your audience. e.g. #freelancing #smallbusiness or even #buildinpublic.

2. Add some colour into your product shots to make them stand out - almost everything is grey, with some occasional soft-pink.

3. 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.

4. Consider offering a discount to specific communities to help validate the idea and generate testimonials. Why not offer all IH'ers a discount?

5. Leverage sites like Product Hunt, Beta List etc... to get some early users

6. 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.

I admire what you did here. Keep trying more.

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.

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!

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.

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

Congrats on the Product Hunt launch! Trust it has been rewarding so far!?

Birthday Balloon Decoration, Images of balloon decorations can be found online. Want to recreate it? Or are you looking for home-based birthday balloon decoration ideas? Fear not; you can accomplish the same. Just fill two balloons with different colour combinations, leave them on the ground.

Do you want a refined appearance or a room full with balloons? Simply hang the frilly ribbon-adorned balloons from the ceiling and add some photographs. Put Happy Birthday foil, frill curtains, champagne foil, star foil, or any other foil to make your decorating seem complete on one of the walls.
Read More :- https://www.7eventzz.com/bangalore

Images of balloon decorations can be found online. Want to recreate it? Or are you looking for home-based birthday balloon decoration ideas? Fear not; you can accomplish the same. Just fill two balloons with different colour combinations, leave them on the ground.

Do you want a refined appearance or a room full with balloons? Simply hang the frilly ribbon-adorned balloons from the ceiling and add some photographs. Put Happy Birthday foil, frill curtains, champagne foil, star foil, or any other foil to make your decorating seem complete on one of the walls.
Read More :- https://www.7eventzz.com/Hyderabad

Mangal Dosh Shanti Puja Ujjain, Manglik status can lead to issues in marital relationships and marital life. You must carry out the extremely difficult yet highly efficient Mangal Dosh Nivaran Puja Ujjain ritual to make sure your Kundali is free of problems. The ceremony cannot be performed by anybody, just as the ship cannot sail without the captain.
Visit Website :- https://www.mangaldoshnivaranpujaujjain.com/what-is-mangal-dosh

To make an arch, all you need to do is blow up balloons and tie them together in knots. The balloons can be inflated with an air compressor or an electrical balloon pump, and then you can form them into an arch by tying them tightly together. It is simply a fantastic complement to a celebration or event that makes it appear elaborate and magnificent.
There are 3 distinct types of balloons. balloons made of chrome, metallic, and patele.
<a href="https://www.7eventzz.com/service/category/birthday/birthday-decorations">Birthday Decoration in Home</a>

The top tourist destinations in the USA will be discussed here. Because there is so much to see in this vast nation, it might be difficult to know where to start when planning a trip there.
<a href="https://www.thetripsuggest.com/5-best-places-to-visit-in-usa/">5 Best Places To Visit In The USA</a>

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.

I think you should try more on Reddit with different messages in different communities.

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!

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.

Thanks for the write-up, usually the first weeks are the slowest

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.

Keep trying the process, and adjust the tactics a little bit. and maybe you can use the paid promotion.

Good luck!

Keep on posting, it's great to learn how different experiments work/don't work.

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.

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!

Coupon Code Submission Sites
Coupon code submission sites are websites that allow consumers to submit promotional codes and discounts for products and services. These sites are typically used by consumers to save money on purchases, and by companies to drive traffic to their websites and increase sales. Coupon code submission sites often have searchable databases that allow users to quickly find and apply discounts for the products and services they are interested in. Additionally, many sites offer reviews, ratings, and other helpful information to help customers make informed decisions.
https://www.theshoppingfriendly.com/

Hi Macks,

Congratulations on your first sales! Well done for sticking with the hard work to reach this point.

I think the landing page of your site is fine, but it feels a bit dry. I appreciate you are working with an accounting application, and that is a dry area (I know because I used to work in it!). But, people like to see people, not invoices. So if it were my choice, I’d add some extra interest to the home page perhaps by using some relevant-looking images from Unsplash or iStock.

Better still, if you could create some case studies of how your early access users have benefitted from your product, featuring a photograph of their smiling faces, that would be a perfect persuader.

If the early users prefer not to provide a photograph, you could still do some case studies, with testimonials from them.

Good luck!

Congratulations on your sales! I like the landing page and the product, one thing that would help it pop even more would be to swap the static screenshots you have on the site with little repeating videos that show you the process. I understand you have the explanation video in the header (nicely done by the way) but like my father used to say: "Ain't nobody got time fo' dat".