Safety Knights

About a year and a half after launching Safety Knights finally surpassed 2500 users. A lot of this came from organic marketing, primarily on LinkedIn with a little some paid marketing mixed in. Right now we're averaging about 130 new users per month.

A little over six months after launching, we were able to reach the thousand user mark. Our marketing was completely organic, mainly through linkedin. Our approach was to connect with and message people if they were in our field, along with frequently sharing posts from our forum. About 1 in 10 people we reached out to signed up.

Doesn't seem like much, but we were able to secure sponsorship money in excess of $100 over the course of a month. It won't feed a family, but hey, at least it's covering our operating expenses. At this time Safety Knight had 3 people working on it part time, with everyone chipping in to help write the newsletter and participate on the forum.

Ended up coding Safety Knights again from scratch. It took about two months to re-code it, but luckily the site is pretty simple. The initial version of the site was not pretty, however enough people were using it that I was encouraged to keep developing. Got about 400 page hits the day of the relaunch which is about 3x more than the previous record.

Our small team started reaching out to sponsors and actually got some decent interest. The site was still ugly at this time, so I'm honestly surprised we got any interest at all. We had about 600 users at this time, and about 100-200 page visits per day.

With an online community it's essential that you find a way to consistently post interesting and relevant topics. It's tough to do that as a solo founder, and also find time to develop and promote, so I decided to bring in a few people to help grow the community, and offer feedback on the features of the new site.

It quickly became apparent that I would need to add more features to the community in order to give Safety Knights an edge over other platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, reddit), which offer a similar service. So I decided to rewrite the codebase from scratch.

Safety Knights finally hit 100 users about one month after launch. I learned that LinkedIn was by far the best way to promote the community. Since the community is so niche, I had to find a way to target people by their job title. LinkedIn made that super easy.

On March 9th Safety Knights had our "soft launch" on reddit and a couple other social media platforms. To be honest, I didn't really know how to market, so we only ended up getting a handful of users the first week.

I probably released the site too quickly - should have spent more time in development to generate more interest.

At this point I was a super novice programmer, and most of the code came from either a youtube video, stackoverflow post, or blog post. I used React on the front end, and node/express on the backend. It ended up taking 5 months to get something functional, but I learned so much about programming in that time.