Zero-dollar Marketing. Here is what I learned from Product Hunt, LinkedIn, X, Communities and Reddit.

I’ve designed social media and community marketing iterations based on some ‘playbooks’ I’ve bookmarked a while back and was looking forward to try: first100users.com, groundup.vc/resources.

For the first iteration I’ve chosen strategies that involves less visual resources such as videos and images. The goal was to not spend too much time creating visuals and more on writing. It was based on an advice I’ve got and I thought it would be a great exercise for “wording around the main problem to solve” and how “I communicate the solution”.

Here are the strategies I have chosen for the first iteration:

• Reply to X threads and X Ads campaign
• Post on Communities (Slack, Discord and Telegram)
• Write on subreddits
• ProductHunt Launch
• LinkedIn “Personal post”
• Invest some time in ‘good enough’ SEO
• Submit product to Uneed
• Add newsletters to awesome-newsletters github repository

Key takeaways

• The most fruitful one was Product Hunt: 24% conversion rate
• The most disappointing one was X Ads: long time spent setting up ads in a broken ‘Ads manager’. Also had to spent money signing up and in verifying my account (which took 3 days).
• The most surprisingly good one was Telegram’s levelsio community
• The most painful one were the posts in communities on Slack
• Bonus: how I got banned from some subreddits? (read in full here)

Product Hunt: will there be a next time?

Reached top #11 of the day 140 votes. 120 subscriptions out of 500 visitors.

Be ready for lots of incoming messages (spam) for people that would want to talk about your product on their linkedIn pages for a fee. I didn’t use that service, but I’m assuming some the top #5 products of they day could have used.

Important learning here: post as a coming soon product and connect to others on Product Hunt. Most people that see product hunt are people creating or heavily interested in new products, if you build connections increase your change of reaching a better spot.

For a next time I would also prepare a better video for the product page and be ready with a few templates in writing to ‘beg’ for votes across social media.

X Ads didn’t work and X search is not helpful

Wrote about 120 replies got 5 subscriptions. Spent $60 on Ads from credits (some of it accidentally) and got potentially 5 subscriptions. The results of my ads and my replies were the same from a similar effort.

The key tip from playbook was: “search for the pain you’re solving as keywords”. But have you tried to do any search on X? The search by keyword is really disappointing.

The top results for ‘what are the best tech newsletters are tweets from 2020 and 2021, while the ‘latest’ ones are really relevant threads.

I also invested some time in following thought leaders on tech for disseminating tech news and perhaps chatting about the problem. It got me some leads, but haven’t been able to engage any mid-sized influencer after 200 replies.

Important learning there: writing from my personal account gave better engagement than writing from techtoktoday’s account. That in a way makes sense to me I value more someone’s opinion than a ‘company/brand’ talking about themselves.

Communities: love and hate

I went around searching for product, tech and communities around the world (but mostly UK and US) to send a post about TechTok. I’ve sent it to 20 different communities including TechNY, ProductPints (London), Mind the product, levelsio on Telegram, ProductTank Tokyo, DC Tech. The best outcome came out of levelsio Telegram community, apparently I’ve got over 40 clicks and 10 sign ups. Not bad in comparison to other communities.

I was just banned from one group even though I posted on their ‘allowed’ spam channel.

Will it be a second iteration? I don’t think so. Sharing on communities is relatively high effort and low returns.

LinkedIn with a personal post

Some of my next iterations in marketing involve more time on LinkedIn, building up a page and maybe investing in some Ads. For this first one I’ve just written one post on my personal account and the results were as expected a 10% conversion rate and a few clicks to see TechTok.

Important learning here: my post was not being suggested by LinkedIn, one key observation was that I had too many links in a post and LinkedIn algorithm does not promote posts with too many external links.

What next?

A few of those deserve further iteration:

1. Building a more consistent social media presence on Instagram, Threads, X and LinkedIn is the next step. Regular posts, regular replies and quick iterations might have a better result. For that I need to automate some of the process, it takes to long to create and distribute content and currently is not scalable.
2. Release again on Product Hunt. If I can release a significant feature for Product Hunt to approve my post I would follow those suggestions from this Reddit post and Lenny’s newsletter.