Marketing for Founders

Hey everyone!

I'm really happy to share that Marketing for Founders just crossed 2000 stars on GitHub.

Just wanted to say thank you all for the support!

If you’ve ever launched something and doubted yourself… keep going, keep building, keep showing up.

Best of luck with your project!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve shared this project, so I wanted to give you a little update.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working on adding more resources (more than 100 now) and better organizing the ones already there, plus I’ve created new sections like:

• Idea validation

• User Research

• Conversion Rate Optimization

• Free-Tool Marketing

• Affiliates and Referrals

• Other resources (for what doesn’t fit elsewhere)

If you’re interested you can check it out here: https://github.com/EdoStra/Marketing-for-Founders

P.S. If you want me to cover a specific topic or have a resource that should be listed let me know in the comments!

• TikTok: There was a secret in the App Store. You could make the application name really, really long. And the search engine on the App Store gives more weight to the application name rather than the keywords defined. So we put a really long application name, ‘make awesome music videos with all kinds of effects for Instagram, Facebook, Messenger.’ And then traffic came from the search engine.

• Strava: We started with friends and asked them to invite a few friends. We got to about 100 with direct friends, and then it spread to about 1,000 by the end of the first 12 months by word of mouth.

• Pinterest: I used to walk by the Apple Store on the way home. I’d go in and change all the computers to say Pinterest, then just kind of stand in the back and be like, ‘Wow, this Pinterest thing, it’s really blowing up.’

• Etsy: We got off the internet and there was a team out there across the U.S. and Canada attending art/craft shows nearly every weekend.

• Cameo: The founders hired $10/month interns to DM talent on Instagram and Twitter.

• Tinder: It all started at a launch party we threw with about 300 students from USC. In order to get in, you had to download Tinder.

• WhatsApp: To get the first users Jan Koum reached the Russian emigrant community in San Jose through his friend Alex Fishman. That community became WhatsApp early adopters.

• Udemy: After we manually created some successful courses, we had proven the value of teaching a course in the first place. We then went to some experts in programming, technology, and entrepreneurship and convinced them to teach courses

• DoorDash: In the beginning it was me going door to door to convince restaurants to join.

• Discord: The tipping point arrived via Reddit. The team was connected with a member of the Final Fantasy subreddit and asked them if they’d mention Discord.

• Behance: We got our first 100 users by contacting the 100 designers and artists we admired most and asked if we could interview them for a blog on productivity in the creative world. Nearly all of them said yes. After asking a series of questions over email, we offered to construct a portfolio on their behalf on Behance, alongside the blog post.

• Uber: There was a very significant use of street teams early on at Uber. They went to places like the Caltrain station and handed out referral codes.

• Netflix: We realized early on the only way to find DVD owners was in the fringe communities of the internet: user groups, bulletin boards, web forums, and all of the other digital watering holes where enthusiasts met up.

• Superhuman: PR was key for growth in the early days. We had pieces in Wired, TechCrunch, Cheddar, etc.

And if you find this too vague and want something more actionable, well, that’s why I’m collecting the best guides and tips to get your first users in a GitHub repo: https://github.com/EdoStra/Marketing-for-Founders

Hope it helps, and best of luck with your project!

It’s been a little over a month since I launched Marketing for Founders on GitHub, and it has already reached 600 stars!

I’m so happy and just wanted to say thank you all for the support!

If you’ve ever launched something and doubted yourself… keep going, keep building, keep showing up.

Best of luck with your project!

PS. Here’s the link if you want to check it out: https://github.com/EdoStra/Marketing-for-Founders

Hey everyone,

Long-time lurker finally giving back to this community here!

Long story short, I've been trying my luck on a few side projects and playing with SaaS marketing for the past few years.

After seeing so many fellow founders struggle to grow their projects, I’ve decided to collect the best marketing guides and examples in a GitHub repo.

You see, most of the products we all know and love (like Tally, Posthog, Simple Analytics) followed the same playbook. Start with $0 marketing (launches, cold outreach, SEO) and later scale with Ads, influencers and referrals.

In short, you don’t need to be a marketing genius, just a few directions and a ton of hard work and perseverance.

Yes, I know, there’s already a lot of advice out there, but most of the time it's about scaling some VC-funded startup with a big marketing budget to $1,000,000 ARR and 100,000 users.

Inspirational? Sure. Actionable? Not really.

That’s why I’m trying to keep Marketing for Founder as practical as it gets (spoiler: it’s hard since there’s no one-size-fits-all) and list everything in order so you can have a playbook to follow.

Here's the link to the repo: EdoStra/Marketing-for-Founders: A hyper-practical collection of marketing resources for founders looking to grow their startup

Enjoy and leave it a star ⭐ if you find it useful!